I didn't hate the system but how it encouraged mindless reposting. I kinda liked seeing big number go up, yanno? Kinda miss that but also glad that we don't have it here.
Yep. I think it’s nice we don’t have it here, so you can easily change instances to get a better instance for your account without worrying about loosing your “karma points”
I think that karma is an extremely poorly thought system, because it worsens every single issue with content voting system, such as:
fluff principle - content that is the easiest to judge takes over, unless you take specific measures to prevent it
subjectivity - what's "good" for a user might be rubbish for another, and vice versa, so the content surfacing will be the lowest common denominator
undue reposting - since content already highly upvoted will be likely highly upvoted in the future
demographic concentration - people hang around larger communities because they post more in those, since those will yield more upvotes
hivemind - more popular opinions are made even more visible than less popular ones, discouraging people from speaking their minds; etc.
because, even if the karma score means jack shit, people will feel encouraged to hoard karma instead of posting what would be more to the spirit of the relevant communities that they participate on.
Another issue of a karma system is that it enables that idiotic mod practice of gatekeeping communities behind karma points. I could go on a full rant about this, but let me not.
Do you mean the concept of up- / downvoting posts and comments in order to determine a suitable order, or do you mean the tally of all your up- / downvotes being displayed as a number on your profile.
As for the up- / downvoting, while it isn't perfect, and it sometimes encourages people to only upvote things they agree with rather than being accurate, it is a pretty good metric to get relevant posts and comments to the top.
And as for the numerical tally.. It's easily ignored. I didn't particularly mind it on Reddit, but I also don't mind its absence on Lemmy. Seeing the number go up on my individual posts gives my monkey brain enough of a dopamine boost
You're going to get a lot of agreement here: Lemmy decided not to implement it for users. We still use votes on posts and comments, and you can sort by them, but no one gets scored by his many they have, and I think that's a good thing. Lots of folks on Reddit modify their behavior specifically to generate karma, and often not in good ways.
This isn’t universal, and any client can implement it if they really wanted to.
The one good thing about karma was the ability to quickly tell who was likely around just to fuck with people. If you peek at their profile and see -100 karma, you know they are just a troll and can be ignored.
Other than that, yeah the system was pointless beyond “look at me my number is bigger”
It was also annoying how much it drove some people to make one line jokes or recycled copypasta in every single thread, looking for the quick upvotes. It made some threads unreadable.
I enjoyed the concept, but then it turned into just reposting and trash posts for karma mining. then I switched to Lemmy and ditched Reddit completely and no longer care about anything Reddit does