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if you put any association between upvotes and self worth, on any platform, thats on you (in general, not @ you op). i still thought karma was a fun measurement though, i see no problem it.
reddit hasn't "failed" yet, probably wont, ever. if it ever does, i promise you that karma wasnt the reason.
I obviously don't, but everyone else does, and it's not even something most people can really help. Fucking social media corporations had their marketing departments come up with the stupid idea knowing that people would be addicted to the dopamine hit from being upvoted.
At least on the OG Lemmy site, being upvoted or downvoted doesn't actually affect you. But an app purposefully bringing back something the devs did not implement in the first place for good reasons, is deeply problematic and people need to speak out against the practice.
We have a chance to break the cycles of the past and we ought to take it.
There are other apps.
This has very little do to with wefwef and all with the Lemmy backend. The API simply gives out the total post and comment scores of a user. Nothing is done client side here. And I can promise you, that most apps will display these scores on a user’s profile page sooner or later, simply because it’s easy to do. So if you really want to abolish karma, then you should argue your case for Lemmy overall and not for a single app.
Apps need to be pressured not to do that, but I agree with you that we need to speak to the Lemmy devs about the situation too. I'll do that too, for now, we must address the fact that Wefwef, the most popular Lemmy app, is displaying karma scores when it really should not be.
I fully disagree.
I think it’s like a popular gauge of reliability. It reflects how other users have reacted to particular interactions.
It’s an interesting discussion to have, but I don’t see it as something intrinsically bad.
No one who has been on Reddit for a long time believes that. It doesn't represent anything but someone's skill at gaming a broken system, and people sacrifice what actually matters: well thought out social discourse for its own sake, because of it. It's how people actually respond to it in the real world. It's what we all saw with our own eyes.
Evil political groups exploit karma systems to cause destabilization in countries and game political systems; it happened here in the U.S. We remember that shit and we don't want it repeated.
If there is no karma, that won't happen, and we can enjoy what makes Lemmy shine: positive, meaningful conversation for nothing but its own sake.
Karma always seemed like the silent nod or head shake from the community. I never understood building up karma as an objective, but think that having a way to understand if your views are considered positively or negatively by the community seems useful. An alternative with no system of feedback might be something like 4chan.
It's not actually a true representation of the community's opinion of you though. And that's kind of the problem. People and companies can and will rig those votes in their favor, distorting important political debates and wreaking all kinds of havoc.
That seems like a fair point. I've never looked into how easy or difficult it would be to manipulate a person's own karma, but I imagine it takes quite a few accounts.
I'm still not quite convinced that the karma system itself leads to toxic disourse though, and think that there are a decent number of examples on the internet of toxic discourse without a karma system. I'll cite 4chan here again since it's one that I'm a little familiar with. I was curious if removing karma for political communities might support more positive sharing of viewpoints without the brigading of some of the old Reddit communities, but I just took a quick peek back at /pol/ and it made me skeptical.
After you hit 10K karma you stop giving a fuck, and so should you.
That's the kind of toxic mindset that killed Reddit.
My main issue with karma and post scores was that it increased social conformity. People became more and more hesitant to voice opinions that went against the Reddit users mainstream, because saying something people disagreed with got immediately “punished” with downvotes.
The downvotes then made the comment less and less visible, which further contributed to the silencing of discussions. I think (polite) discussion is an important part of a platform such as this one. It’s a pity that Reddit’s system discouraged discussion and became more and more a click factory. I hope that we can avoid that here. I agree that it would be a good step to remove the visible upvote/downvote system (or at least the downvotes).
This web app (wefwef) has nothing to do with this. Take this argument to a Lemmy community about Lemmy.
The OG Lemmy site doesn't keep post and comment vote totals, only Wefwef does, hence the thread.
this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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