Why doesn't Lemmy have a system like Reddit's Karma?

Comments

• hendrik@palaver.p3x.de ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  By choice. The main developers don't like that kind of gamification, karma farming and the negative aspects that come with such things.

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  • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    But it has other negative side effects if we scaled Lemmy up in scale.

    For example, it doesn’t matter if you downvote me if I called you a big stinky poo poo face. Because without a larger pool of karma to detract from, it doesn’t matter HOW unpopular any singular post is.

    …you big stinky poo poo face!

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    • deranger@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Because without a larger pool of karma to detract from, it doesn’t matter HOW unpopular any singular post is.

      Voting is there to sort posts and comments, not to rate a user. Having a larger pool of karma serves no purpose.

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    • EveryMuffinIsNowEncrypted@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      …you big stinky poo poo face!

      Well then damn it all; what more evidence do you need?!

      The poo-pooing alone is a court-martial offence!

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    • UpperBroccoli@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Personally, I’d just shrug and then block you. Case closed :)

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    • PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Uı mın Reddit hæz ė mækſ impækt ðæt enı ƿu̇n poſt oṙ kȯment kæn hæv.

      spoiler

      I mean Reddit has a mac impact that any one post or comment can have.

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• Crumbgrabber@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Sorry you got jumped on as a new user a bit.

  The karma system on reddit encourages posting and reposting stuff that everyone has seen before to get fake internet points, and maybe what you win is a “more powerful account” for the algorithm instead of everyone getting a more or less equal voice.

  You can still get people to follow you and build a tribe if you want without that, and you are also free to start any community you like, so a few mods don’t end up controlling all the online real estate and steer the conversation unfairly.

  Plus its simpler. Sometimes simple is good.

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• potentiallynotfelix@lemmy.fish ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  It would motivate more low quality post spam like we see on reddit.

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• ekZepp@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Because lemmy is all about sharing and discussing contents.

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• halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Why should it?

  We can see all the negatives every day with reddit.

  What positive does a Karma system bring to the platform and discussions?

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  • accarezzu@lemmy.ml ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    [deleted]

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    • swordgeek@lemmy.ca ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Honestly, a person’s actual post history should be more relevant and indicative to whether they’renworth engaging with tham a single number.

      Furthermore, aside from deliberate trolls, most comments or posts should be assessed on their own merits, irrespective of the poster’s history.

      People are complex, and it’s possible that raving political idiots might have thoughtful opinions on their favourite video game or the aspects that make a perfect butt.

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    • ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Many years ago on reddit, you could get given gold. It gave you paid benefits. My comments earned me literally years worth of gold, and my karma was similarly increasing.

      Then I came out as trans. Suddenly the gold stopped and my karma stagnated

      That kind of bias is built in to the karma system. It doesn’t just punish shit takes, it also sidelines visible minorities

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• ma1w4re@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  So that you can ask stupid questions and not have repercussions hunt you til the days your account is deleted

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• Tattorack@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I don’t actually understand the purpose of karma on Reddit, beyond some sort of metric to feel good about yourself. It’s literally just a number and nothing else.

  I’ve seen some people try to devalue what someone said because of “low karma”, so I’d say it’s a good thing Lemmy doesn’t have a karma system.

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  • HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Karma has become a part of a measure to determine if an account is a human non-troll.

    The first step in ban evasion is to create a new account and continue doing what you’ve done before. By requiring an account to be a certain age along with a certain amount of karma, it makes sure the account is less likely to be a ban evader.

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    • T156@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      That was the original intent. That it became a measuring contest is separate.

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• HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  A raw number across the whole federation would be useless. Different instances have their own cultures, making a unified number worthless. People could also goose their numbers by creating an instance that gives their account unlimited karma.

  Instance karma could be useful, but it is a design decision not to show it. I suspect that will continue until there is a need to use karma for moderation, but I suspect that defederation would be the lower lying fruit for now.

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• lvxferre@mander.xyz ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  As others said it was a conscious decision of the developers, as it’s gamification of the system and they aren’t big fans of that.

  I agree with this decision.

  The Fluff Principle* makes easy-to-judge content get higher scores, and we do see it Lemmy. It isn’t a big deal because fluff ends on its own specific comms, but once you gamify the aggregation of score points, the picture changes - now you’re encouraging people to share content that they believe to score high over content that they believe to be contributive.

  Additionally a publicly visible karma enables a bunch of poorly thought mod practices, like karma gating (“you need +500 karma to post here lol”) or automatically banning people with low karma (even if it might come from a single post/comment).

  *“Hence what I call the Fluff Principle: on a user-voted news site, the links that are easiest to judge will take over unless you take specific measures to prevent it.” (Source)

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• Drusenija@aussie.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  It used to in the past. It was removed in the 0.19.0 release. This is the pull request that took it out (I think).

  This thread has some of the reasoning for it, but at a high level the Lemmy devs made a call that the benefits a karma system provide didn’t outweigh the problems a karma system can cause.

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• LavenderDay3544@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Because it’s stupid and Lemmy is decentralized unlike Reddit so it wouldn’t make sense anyway.

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• WrenFeathers@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Because karma ruins actual discussion.

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• fubarx@lemmy.ml ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  There’s no real value to any of it.

  Attach free beer to point levels and watch this thing explode.

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• Nemo@slrpnk.net ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  It… does, though? I always go to my profile and check how my comments are doing before I sign off. Numbers go bigger make dopamine go brrrr.

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  • Nighed@feddit.uk ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    But it doesn’t have an account total karma tracker (it did, but was removed).

    I like it this way, you get approval on your comments/posts, but don’t have a public ‘worth’ value to increase - that can cause problems.

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• vortexal@sopuli.xyz ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  It does, it’s just disabled by default. Some third party clients, like Boost for Lemmy, have it enabled (or at least it did, it’s been a while since I’ve used it).

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  • BlindFrog@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Chiming in with Boost, and I can’t find karma-like counts. Maybe a different app?

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    • vortexal@sopuli.xyz ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Just looked into it, according to this post account scores were removed from Lemmy. I’ll have to edit my comment.

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    • vortexal@sopuli.xyz ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      They must have changed it because Boost was the only app I ever used.

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• mayo@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Because it’s not fun

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  • accarezzu@lemmy.ml ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    It is fun when I see a big number and it fuels my ego, though!

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    • ultrahamster64@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      If you’re craving some gamefication we have posts/comments numbers

      The more you contribute, the bigger the number gets!

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• hoshikarakitaridia@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  It is by choice.

  Now I don’t agree with that choice, but many others here do. Maybe it would be great if this is still an option you could turn on / off per instance or something.

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• zecg@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Because it’s shit made to drive engagement, not worth anything. Unlike reddit which views you as assets to make it money and incentivises use, lemmy owners pay for the bandwidth, don’t get anything from out shitposts and if anything it would be in their interest to disincentivise use.

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• TheRealCharlesEames@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I do miss the special updoots like gold and stuff. It was fun

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• taiyang@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  You know, we kind of do have it and some apps will even let you know. But it’s got a lot of flaws as everyone else has pointed out.

  You know what I kind of want is a way to see karma by instance. What you’re going to learn is that certain instances have rather extreme views (including the default lemmy.ml) and seeing how unpopular you are there while being popular elsewhere might actually make that feature more interesting.

  Like, sure he’s a -100 on LemmyGrad but he’s a 200 on Sh.itjust.works; take that as you will. Lol

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