Should Lemmy have Karma?
Should Lemmy have Karma?
Another Reddit refugee here,
I think we're all familiar with the Karma system on Reddit. Do you think Lemmy should have something similar? Because I can see cases for and against it.
For: a way to tracking quality contributions by a user, quantifying reputation. Useful to keep new accounts from spamming communities.
Against: Often not a useful metric, can be botted or otherwise unearned (see u/spez), maybe we should have something else?
What do you all think?
That's a hard no from me too.
Upvotes and downvotes exist to filter bad content. Anything that tracks points per user will just lead to toxic karma whoring and bots, as demonstrated by Reddit.
In my opinion, Lemmy shouldn't turn into a Reddit clone, it should learn from Reddit's plethora of mistakes.
Not just no, but heck no, and no algorithm either. Karma at a glance doesn't tell you anything about quality. High karma users can be anything from insightful posters to inflammatory shitstains to literally not even human. It's not useful for keeping new accounts from spamming - new accounts are created every single day en masse for the sole purpose of accruing karma by any means for the distinct purpose of being sold to spammers.
Karma also tanks discussions - every slightly big Reddit post is flooded with people repeating the same stupid "in"-jokes and puns that were funny 7 years ago by people and bots trying to boost their karma. The first few comment threads in every post become absolutely useless at best, and at worst, bots and bad faith actors clog up the pipes with ongoing spam efforts and purposely deceitful and manipulative misinformation campaigns that are demonstrably harmful to society.
Fake internet points is an outdated idea that imho, has shown itself to ultimately be bad for communities. I personally think that while Lemmy acts as a great alternative to Reddit there's no compelling argument for trying to make Lemmy an exact copy of Reddit. Lemmy doesn't need to be a one-to-one mirror image of a website that we're all literally fleeing because it's a giant shit pile. IMHO.
Definitely no. In addition to the downsides you mentioned, I feel like the redditor's desire for karma is what causes these hiveminds/echo chambers and cliché comments that are so typical of many subreddits.
Edit: Thank you so much for the gold kind stranger!
Personally, I like that the individual posts and comments have up/down votes. That allows the community to self moderate to some extent. That lightens the load on moderators to police bad content, while simultaneously promoting good content. It also means that the community rules do not need to be so heavy handed as to suppress dialog - take /r/conservative as an example.
But I do not believe that those votes should carry over to any kind of metric that affects users or communities in other ways. Perhaps a hidden metric available for moderators is useful for identifying problematic posters. But any kind of publicly visible metrics turn into some obnoxious internet point scoring game that invites shitposters and spammers and bot farmers.
I like the current system, you upvote/downvote posts and comments and that should be enough. No points attached to a user only to what they post.
Karma made Reddit toxic and limited the amount of conversing people did on the site. Here we can have conversations without worrying about down votes and Karma.
No thank you.
Karma ends up being the reason people post content - just look at Reddit and you see it; repost bots, people karma-whoring in comments, posting the same tired shit over and over just because it gets upvotes, etc.
We shouldn't need gamification to drive engagement. We're not a single corporate entity trying to drive profits. Early internet forums managed for a long time to get people participating because they wanted to participate, not because they felt the need to make an ultimately meaningless number go up.
Personally, my favorite thing about Lemmy (vs. Kbin specifically) is that there's no account-level karma equivalent. I would be very disappointed if it was ever added.
Why? They are useless and some people go crazy about them.
Why should we copy the bad if we are trying to build something better
No. We don't need to make Reddit again. Let's do something else.
Problem with a karma system, especially as it is handled over on Reddit, is that it will stifle dissent and promote circle jerking. You can vote controversial opinions out of sight even if they are totally valid but simply run contrary to popular opinions. If Lemmy got a karma system, it would have to work differently and allow for a healthy discourse.
I'd say no, I think adding a incentive metric will just cause posted to be reposted and beat to death. Original and thoughtful discussion is better without it IMO
I sure hope not. It makes people just say whatever is performative or popular instead of anything insightful.
Yes, because it can be an indicator of reputation of someone.
No, because of the ease of getting it, as well as it can be a basis of someone's ego.
Actually, any number that is attached to person has the same set of pros and cons, except of the ease, persumably. This includes SO's rep system, Reddit's karma system, YouTube subscriber/view/video count, Twitter followers/post count, etc. Adding karma system to Lemmy may have its side effects, but even there isn't one, it may not matter since Lemmy has post and comments counts.
EDIT: In the end, when I'm reading Reddit or Lemmy, I gave no attention to the karma, and instead the vote count of the post/comment itself. Call me ignorant, but whatevs.
A karma metric would just hasten the decline that happened to Reddit. People liked OG Reddit as a forum to connect with like minded people. The karma situation lead to karma farm tactics with the goal of selling accounts or promoting commercial or political content. The lack of karma will remove a reason for bad actors to do the same here. It also removes the karma motivation for low effort reposts.
Comments should be voted on based on their contribution to the discussion. That's a natural way to guide the conversation in a productive direction.
I would prefer Lemmy et al to stay away from broad appeal BS like celebrity AMAs, and karma thirsty low effort people pleasers. It shouldn't be a place for special events, it should be a place for productive community conversation.
No. Karma leads to all sorts of dumb behavior like reposting the same 5 videos every day, bots farming karma, hivemind because people are afraid to be downvoted into the negative, etc.. I've actually been thinking about creating a Reddit alternative that doesn't have voting at all, or at least not visible voting.
Nah, karma isn't important. If we want an indicator of reputation I'd lean more towards a flair that the community can award.
No
No
I don't think we need it.
You can already see which posts are up/down voted. You can already check a user accounts age and post history.
I don't need more than that.
Absolutely not, karma was one of the worst parts of reddit
I never saw the point, all it ever did was make people karma farm.
Site-wide karma is easy to game and not particularly informative. Community karma can be a good measure of how involved an account is in a specific community
No Karmq ＝ No Karma farming...
I worked for a couple of years in the Tech Startup space not long ago and in little companies like that everybody does kinda work with everybody else, so I did work together with the Digital Marketing side too.
Anchored in what I learned there I have a feeling that Karma is often used as a sort of buy-in and gamification strategy.
On the first part (not sure if buy-in is the right expression but stay with me here), it gives people something that feels like a personal asset: you've put time into making posts and you got this "stuff" from it, which intellectually is just a number by emotionally is something that is "yours" and you got by putting time and work into it, and this "stuff" is non-transferable so you're less likely to leave because you don't want to loose it.
On the second part it's all part of a game loop to incentivise posting: you post, people read it, they like it, so you get karma, which feels good so you post some more to get more karma in turn resulting in more of the pleasure of recognition and that "score" going up. Whilst it's really up-votes that do most of the "pleasure of social recognition" side, karma amps that by adding a score and all the game-like elements of it, such as competitiveness between "players". (Also note that this whole game-loop is why many social media sites don't have or removed down-votes - with only up-votes pretty much everybody no matter how shitty their content gets at least some of that sweet positive social-feedback, which feels good so they'll make more posts so there's more content on the site which attracts more people spending more time there, yielding more eyeball-hours for advertisers hence more $$$).
Karma does make sense in a purelly expert context to allow people to recognize those with somewhat more expertise (though it really doesn't measure that with a correlation of 1, as people get karma for sounding right, which is not the same as knowing what they're talking about), but in a system like in Reddit it doesn't work like that because one can gain far more karma from just saying something which is "popular" and "aligns with the groupthink" in some political-heavy sub or making interesting posts in the "relax" subs (say, posting jokes, memes, cat-pics) that you can by providing genuinelly knowledgeable expert advice on expert subs, as do it with a lot less effort, so people's karma doesn't really work well at showing expertise, unless, maybe, if karma was per-sub.
for what purpose?
i genuinly cant think of any reason other than encourage reposting bots
personally i dont care at all about karma.
so long as the upvote/downvote system works, regarding post (and comment) visibility etc.
NO.
I couldn't really see the point at Reddit (seemed like an idea someone has once early on that got stuck) and I don't think it'd be that helpful here. If we are looking for ways to differentiate ourselves from Reddit, then that'd be one.
Let the quality of someone's account be measured by the quality of the posts they make.
It leads to garbage tier repost trash.
Been on Reddit for years, honestly never cared for karma. It's just there for me. I barely look at my own or other people's profile page anyway.
No. There would be so many reposts and low effort posts and those annoying ''funny'' comments.
No. This isn't reddit. Want Karma? Go to reddit.
NO
No, because karma's a bitch.
Hard no on karma.
No, absolutely not. It's too easily abused for people who cares about it, doesn't add any value to people who don't.
I had an 8 year old account on reddit (deleted today) and had accumulated a decent amount of karma. that being said I didn't even notice there wasn't any karma here. the voting system is nice to see which comments are popular but there's no need for it sitewide.
I don't think it would serve any purpose
Nope, no need for karma whores.
Edit to explain: The karma system reddit has, is obviously detrimental to the quality of content. Some people see it as a game, and play for karma, rather than actually posting something that is meaningful to them.
Others put to much significance into it, and get bummed if they are not upvoted, because they think karma equals popular.
Glad to see how many folks are against it. Karma would not bring any value to Lemmy.
Anyone here old enough to remember slashdot? I liked their karma system. The maximum a post could get was +5, and I think the minimum was -1. I don't quite recall the details, but it was pretty effective. People didn't shamelessly karma farm because there wasn't any point. If you are at +5 there's nowhere else to go.
No internet points, please!
We don't need that trash
No
I think post karma and comment karma are very different things. Post karma is not as meaningful to me, because all it's really telling you is how badly someone wants to be a karma hog. But comment karma shows a little about someone's engagement and longevity. Only a little though. You can learn a lot more by interacting with users than by looking at their profiles.
No karma!
I don't think so. I never payed attention to karma or gold or gifts at all. Tbh I never understood them and personally don't feel a need for any of it.
I don’t think it necessarily needs karma like Reddit, but I think a reputation system of some sort is going to be required for open federation to remain viable as federated systems grow. Just looking at account age and post history isn’t good enough if the bad actor owns a server and wants to put some effort into spamming or harassing people.
Please, don't
ABSOLUTELY NO!!!
Other websites with karma are full of bots who repost, a few year later, the content that was popular in the past, in order to mine reputation.
Karma also creates an echo chamber with self censorship where people won't post anything unpopular out of fear of loosing karma.
I like diversity of opinion. I don't want facebook, I don't want to read my opinion with a different phrasing.
Karma ruined Reddit. Let's not repeat the same mistake here.
We absolutely need a trust system. I don't know if it should be a Karma system.
Spam-bots are taking up hundreds-of-thousands of usernames across the federation. It is clear that they cannot be trusted.
ChatGPT and GPT4 has made it easier for bots to automatically write comments as well, a few groups with money can make realistic-looking accounts with different posting patterns / writing styles automatically.
The problem of spam and automated-comments will only get harder moving forward. I don't know if Karma is a good enough system for us, but its better than nothing.
I say don't bother - if it can be gamed by bots, it will. Even Slashdot's mod/meta-mod system could be gamed by the current generation of bots, because a lot of comments / reposts look fine out of context.
If you don't have karma there's nothing to farm, and that means fewer karma farming bots and better overall quality of content.
Nah, we don't need that here. Karma has always been senseless IMO. I always hated when I wanted to post, or even comment on a certain sub and I couldn't because I DiDn'T hAvE eNoUgH kArMa.
Yes.
What differentiates these systems from more conventional forums is the karma and voting system. Imaginary internet points give people something to chase, and is no different from people playing Donkey Kong or pinball machines for high scores. It's the same basic principle.
The function it ends up serving though, is to incentivize people to participate in whatever culture exists in that particular community. While not a strong incentive at all, even a small one is enough to push people to be more informative in educational communities, funnier in comedy communities, more understanding and empathic in support group communities etc etc.
By combining this basic high-score incentive with the standard voting-pushes-shit-to-the-top, you can create a system that naturally pushes communities to better and better content. This was a key to reddits success in eventually becoming a body of preserved information, not too dissimilar to wikipedia or quora. But funnier. And with more porn.
No, and I believe to encourage free expression of opinion, negative score on comments/posts should be hidden. minimum displayed score should be 1. internally it should have impact. Too negative comments/posts should be auto reported to mods to check if they break rules.
I don't want Karma, but I'd really like to get notifications when a post or comment of mine hits certain vote thresholds, e.g. 5/10/50/100/... upvotes/downvotes. I think this would help me get a feel of how my posts are received. Currently, if a post of mine gets 50 upvotes, I most likely won't ever notice unless I actively monitor all of my posts.
But with the notification I'd get a nice dopamine rush as reward for posting good content ;)
I have over 350k karma on reddit. They are magic internet points worth exactly nothing, we don't need that here. Though I wouldn't mind being able to award people if they say something super cool. Maybe an award a day or a week to give away might be fun. They're still worth nothing, but sometimes a post deserves a little bit more than just an upvote and a little internet sticker on the post is just the thing.
I'd rather not. You'll have people farming the garbage and selling accounts a la gallowshill.
I feel like karma is a bad metric to track quality contributions, especially if it is global to all communities. It's far too easy to farm. People that make useful contributions in specific communities will be known over time by other members of said community anyway.
No, it's not necessary. Who cares who contributes a lot? If a user cares about karma, then they should just stay at Reddit. We don't need this to be a Reddit clone.
I think Karma was responsible for people always trying to make a witty comment and made them way to attached to their account. I don't think that it's a healthy system an can live good without it.
No.
I pay attention to individual comments, as feedback from people. Bathe karma total, though, I never think about it at all. I started just deleting my reddit accounts every 2-4 months anyway. Pretty meaningless to me. We could have it on Lemmy or not. I’d be just as interested in all-time word count.
I'd rather not have karma at all; or at the very least they should try something different instead of just copying what reddit did.
Some servers already decided to disable either the system completely or just the downvotes.
I think it should, but perhaps it shouldn't be as prominent as on Reddit, and maybe it should be called something more boring, like "post vote sum" or something, to make people place less importance on it.
Edit: would love some input as to why this suggestion is being downvoted. ^Or is this just an example of the circleherky behavior you were all convinced was because of karma...?^
Id say no. Karma leads to gamification and gamification leads to enshittification.
I’d rather have lower traffic and higher quality. Karma is of real benefit only to commercial owners, not users.
Nah I dont even like visible upvotes/downvotes. Just incentives the complementary wrong mindset for healthy discussions.
Your reputation should be what people know of you not points.
Upvotes and downvotes are nice in that they suggest that I'm not posting or commenting into the void.
I'm not overly interested in my grand total.
I personally feel like community karma is a useful metric for quickly evaluating someone's presence in a specific community. Site-wide karma is far too easily-gamble to be a useful metric, though, and whether you had a post go crazy on a big sub means nothing in evaluating whether you're a good contributor to a small sub
No, karma is a big contributer to the lesser experience that Reddit offers, while giving nothing useful in return
How would this even be implemented? What's to prevent one user from generating massive amounts of karma on their own instance?
No.
But if it did I'd prefer if it was divided into categories of some kind. Like, people often downvote content when they disagree, even if the content itself is good quality, or they might be posting legitimately funny/topical meme/jokes in a community where joking is discouraged.
It might be interesting to have a few options for votes, like agree/disagree, high-quality/low-quality, appropriate-forum/inappropriate-forum, or something to that effect.
So I could vote a post that is well-written and on-topic but that I disagree with as disagree, high-quality, appropriate. Or I could vote a joke reply that is on-topic and funny, but in a serious-only community as no-vote, high-quality, inappropriate.
Honestly, that would probably be a disaster in practice, but it might at least be a fun disaster!
In any case, I agree with others who suggest that vote tallies should be attached to posts, not users, at least publicly. There might be some utility to allowing mods or admins to see tallies for users.
Oh, and it seems to me that whatever system is used Lemmy-wide should provide some freedom for instances to handle user/post karma in the ways that they prefer and in a way that works well with federation. Like if my 'FunDisasterLemmy' instance allows voting like the above, when that data is federated if it isn't relevant to another instance it should be handled gracefully.
Is there a way to track it, but not show it? Does that makes sense?
To keep people from farming etc, but to also keep the discussion meaningful?
Tbh I'm also indifferent but I see where your coming from.
I'd like to foster a community where this isn't needed, but people are people.
No
Nope, it's fine the way it is right now. if its on the front page good. if not people gotta earn there upvotes. Karma whoreing makes it a competion for everyone. Everyone will be out for themselves and it will turn into reddit.
The only use for karma is filtering trolls
Lemmy hasn't gotten a large enough population to need that kind of filter yet, and it would require an automod capability to use anyway.
So, no, fuck the entire idea of it otherwise. Fuck the algorithm behind it, fuck the hidden nature of it.
No.
Karma was always so irrelevant for me, I won't miss it.
I Gota downvote this idea. Karma was my least favorite part about Reddit
We don't need people Karma Whoring.
Karma is a great indicator of the popularity of what you're posting to help you post more excepted things. There's no reason for us to bring the reddit pissing contest here.
I think instead of karma we should have an activity and age metric, a badge or something showing how many months/years your account has existed, and an activity metric like posts&comments/day so that it's easy to tell an old, regularly active account from a young account that is spamming a a bunch of comments per day.
No need. New users can be kept in check simply by being new, as in age of account. Active users can determined by their history.
Adding a point system inherently makes it a game.
Unless its like Whose Line is it Anyway, where the "karma" points shown are random for each user, each day. That could be funny.
The only instance I can think of Karma being beneficial is in highly specific forums where user reputation could be an important metric for new users, or those seeking info. Very limited.
When it gets to something as general as this it just becomes popularity/feel-good points. Not necessarily evil, but no real benefit. Upvotes are still a thing for that social media dopamine hit.
I don't think karma was ever particularly useful on Reddit. You can't really differentiate between someone with a lot of karma from a whole lot of low-effort posts and someone who has made fewer but higher-quality contributions just from karma scores. For that you really need to look through their comment and post histories
I like numbers and statistics so I'd be interested in seeing them here, but it's just a curiosity and not in any particular way actually useful.
I always liked having karma around as a personal metric, but I never actually looked at anyone else's or went farming for it. So I think it should be added but not made a determining factor by default. If someone wants to look at someone else's karma as an evaluation, that's their choice.
Probably more important than Karma, Lemmy needs flair or tagging for posts to help with categorization and searching.
In addition to that, Lemmy (and Mastodon) eventually needs algorithmic choice. This is one place where the Fediverse falls short compared to BlueSky. A chronological feed of everything is a good place to start but let me decide what I want to view and how I want to view it. For example, if I am person that cares about karma, let me weight that so people with higher karma show up higher on my feed.
I say no, it was ripe for abuse, with karma farming bots which get sold to entities looking to influence and astroturf a platform.
No. There should be no fake internet points at all.
How would it track positive contributions by a user? You can do that by seeing their comments and the individual upvote/downvote.
Karma is just going to ruin this place.
Karma is just a drug for Reddit addicts. Just let each post stand on its own regardless of who posts it. We don't need that extra layer of crap. I always disliked that.
Karma isn't a bad idea in theory. But it gets abused and promotes farming bots. I dunno, it's a double edged sword
Mfers arguing whether reddits equivalent of a captcha will affect social interaction.
No. I'd rather no up voting/downvoting on comments at all. It discourages discussion.
I don't care either way. I can live without it.
I would say something akin to what the name "karma" implies, but not something that can be farmed or botted. Almost like a rating that could factor in multiple different stats; like age of account, posts and/or comments per day, the overall positive/negative rating of said comments, post size, etc... And, it could all be consolidated into some sort of percentage and history graph or something. It would have to be actively developed and debated on to what works and doesn't work.
There's already "Reputation Points" so don't we already have that, but by another name? I like this name much better than "karma" by the way. I'm kinda good with what we have. It feels like an echo of some things from Reddit are here without being a total clone. Hopefully it won't influence people toward bad/annoying behavior like on Reddit.