I'm gonna make my own instance with karma...once you hit a set limit your account is locked forever and your ip blocked for 30days...
Soon: "Karma's getting too high. Time to go a'trolling!"
You're banned after you get 300 positive votes, irrespective of how many negatives you have. Easy.
That's a great idea.
I’m a Reddit mod. I absolutely needed to filter users by karma AND account age. The amount of bot posts is exhausting and impossible to keep up with without a filtering method. If the fediverse continues to grow, something will need to be implemented here too.
Have you ever thought that perhaps the reason that that there are so many bots posts on reddit is because of karma?
What exactly makes account with high karma trustworthy when we all know it can be easily botted and then sold?
That could have been the reason there were so many bots though, every new bot account needed to karma farm in order to become useful.
Why? You should let each post stand on it's own merit.
First, account age is silly for Lemmy, as almost 100% of people on here will have an account creation date in June 2023 or later because this place was a ghost town before Reddit decided to kill the APIs. A month from now, is someone with an August 2023 join date automatically presumed to be a troll, or are they just someone making the switch from Reddit a month later than everyone else?
As for karma, neither negative karma nor positive karma really tell you anything about the poster:
For instance, people can make good faith arguments advocating for conservative political opinions, but because the user base skews pretty far left here, those arguments will be downvoted. A discussion forum that bans opposing viewpoints is useless, and the echo chambers on Reddit are something I'd love to avoid here.
Similarly, it's also possible to effortlessly build positive karma. Simply copy/paste highly rated comments from the last time a common repost appeared on the feed, and chances are, your copy/pasted comments will get upvoted too. You can even automate it with a bot.
Karma meant nothing at Reddit, and moderators shouldn't be using it for decisionmaking purposes. It's useful for ranking posts and comments, but anything beyond that isn't helpful.
Karma is largely useless. As others have said. Let an accounts posts stand for themselves. Not their general popularity. Just because someone is downvoted on the whole doesn't mean they're a troll. It just means their ideas are unpopular. But not necessarily wrong.
Kbin already counts upvotes and boosts, similar to reddit karma.
But it could perhaps be something that stays hidden for everyone but yourself and moderators (provided you are participating in their magazine, otherwise anyone could open a magazine to see everyone elses karma)
Can’t say I agree. I miss karma. Not because I want it, because I don’t care. But that imaginary internet point sure drives a lot of content - and even repeat content has a purpose to drive platform growth. I had like 1,000 subs and FREQUENTLY saw something for the first time that the tHiS iS a RePoSt people came out of the woodwork for.
Don’t worry, reposting will happen with or without karma! 😜
Not a bad thing imo. Not everyone spends all day on the internet. I probably spend more time than most people and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a meme that’s new to me and half the comments are bitching about it being a repost.
You know something? Until you mentioned it with this thread, I hadn't even noticed that karma wasn't a thing here. That is how useless the karma system is.
I say let the community mostly manage itself through the voting, so the mods can only step in for the really bad stuff.
Maybe I'm missing something, but what was Karma more than upvotes minus downvotes?
The votes were not equal to karma. Karma wasn't just subtracting downvotes from upvotes. They made a function that not every up- and downvote changed karma. It was a weird mathematical function. Karma was also used to limit you from posting on some subreddits. That's the reason why I heavily dislike karma.
Karma was originally visible raw upvote / downvote tally. Reddit just obscured the upvote and downvote numbers to discourage manipulation for karma.
Limiting participation based on karma didn’t happen for a long time. By the time some huge subreddits took that step, it (or some other gatekeeping) was necessary to filter a lot of malicious users.
It prevent things like mass-downvoting from counting much towards karma AFAIK, but that's more/less the idea of karma. The exact way it was calculated had nothing to do with people trying to game it. Minimums to post in communities did mean spamming elsewhere just to be able to post where you wanted though and the economic worth of "trustworthy accounts" made karma a karma an issue. Upvotes - downvotes still functions for the latter purpose. If people decide the fediverse is worth scamming, then farming will be a thing. Right now, its a fairly small niche space with an average user who is more internet-savvy than most mainstream social media users, so its probably not worth the effort of trying to scam here yet...
I think that karma is an obstacle to free thought. People prefer to remain silent instead of expressing their opposing opinions while declaring ideas that are more in line with the prevailing opinion of the community than their own in order to gain karma.
Yup this is exactly why people like it. Nobody disagrees and when they do, you just downvote them to hell.
I think it's primitive.
I think it's a very bad idea to have karma as well. It shaped reddits entire conversation structure to be all about karma farming, since people think a high karma number means higher status in the community.
I don't see any positives with it. Let people's comments stand on their own for what they say, not because they have high karma.
If someone wants karma they could host a modified instance where every post gets thousands of upvotes for free. Other instances can't really verify whether that's accurate.
Make a meme instance. Where every downvote AND upvote adds points whether its good or bad. Simply have the points called "sandwiches." Don't release it until next year on April fools.
I'm sorry to tell you that an equivalent of Karma existed from the very beginning (though rather than being Upvotes minus Downvotes, it was Boosts minus Downvotes until a few days ago due to a bug). It's called Reputation and you can see it by viewing someone's profile in kbin. At the time of writing this, your Reputation points seem to be at 443. Reputation isn't being used for anything though, and while it can technically be tracked by anyone, lemmy hides that information so far.
[In fact, you can see who gave up- or downvotes to something and you can also see what someone up- or downvoted (or boosted, but that's a given, since boosting is equivalent to retweeting). This information is out there for anyone to access who spins up their own instance due to how federation works, so the developer of kbin decided to make it public so people are at least aware of this fact.]
Reputation is a kbin specific thing
I'm sorry to tell you that an equivalent of Karma existed from the very beginning (though rather than being Upvotes minus Downvotes, it was Boosts minus Downvotes until a few days ago due to a bug). It's called Reputation and you can see it by viewing someone's profile in kbin.
kbin is rather new to the scene afaik, so I wouldn't say reputation has been a part of it since the beginning, but the upvote/downvote records have probably been public since the beginning (idk), so calculating some karma equivalent with whatever preferred metric you wanted was always technically possible, but not socially relevant since average people wouldn't do such.
Wasn't the minimal karma requirement so someone couldn't just make a new account and immediately hop back into a subreddit they were banned from to cause more issues? New accounts should only see that issue one time.....
Anyway, that whole thing isn't really useful here anyway, because i'm pretty sure if you host your own server you could just manipulate it to whatever you want it to be.
I've already seen people crying about their posts not getting upvotes or whatever. People will do the stupidest things for magic Internet points.
tbf it's still important because it what decides if and how long you show up under Hot, which means more eyes and discussion on your post
I have never been sure what the point of caring about karma is. Pretty much it only gives a rough idea of how long an account has been open and how active it's been. 5, 50,000, 500,000? 5 Million? Who cares. It's not like you can do anything with it besides see the number change. I never have really seen anyone comparing karma or caring about other people's scores.
The only real thing it did was set a way for subs to disallow posting by new/troll accounts. There could easily be a way for lemmy to calculate a sum of votes on someone's most recent posts if people thought that was a useful or desired feature.
It was a way for people to visibly see some kind of validation. Whether it was validation that their ideas were appreciated, or validation that their trolling was successfully pissing people off, validation that someone simply saw and acknowledged their thoughts, or something else...I believe people intrinsically like assigning a visible numeric score to their efforts.
I'm not arguing for karma, and certainly not arguing for it here. But I understand why people like it.
Lmao... The TOTAL karma one had was never important. They will still look at how many upvotes is next to their comment, because that's a measure of attention. They still want attention.
It won't make a difference if you can see your total karma or not, ppl will farm upvotes.
I also hope awards are never added. Reddit had sooooo many and it was really annoying in the end with all the flashy, distracting “awards” on the comment sections.
I like karma - gamification is fun, humans like watching number go up
I think the answer is to localize it. Maybe community/server based, maybe make it bleed off with time, maybe do all of these and use statistics to come up with a way to make the metric useful somehow
What we don't need is karma done badly, and there's a lot of far more important things to worry about first - I think we should put it way on the back burner and wait for an elegant proposal for how to handle it
I'm fine with the count as it is now
Amen. There is not a single purpose for a "karma counter" to exist other than to promote toxic behavior between other users.
"But what about griefers?!"
Report button exists for a reason -- you don't need to bust a griefer twice.
Karma/reputation is currently a thing here, it just isn't rendered in Lenny's UI. Memmy and Mlem for iOS both show totals on the user profile page. 
I am very much against the karma system. However, I respect others' desires to have it. The fortunate thing about the fediverse is that if we don't want karma we can use an instance that doesn't use karma, and vice versa.
Agree. Useless feature and promotes trash content.
I think the fact you said you don't care about moderation issues kind of shows the disconnect. On reddit, karma was a crucial way to moderate. I think something similar is a good idea for federated replacements.
Lemmy actually tracks karma. It just doesn't show it anywhere.
But as an admin I can dig in the database and see people's karma if I felt like it
The Reddthat instance that I'm on also has disabled down voting which I'm also all for. On Reddit, down voting very often became a tool for vocalizing what you disagreed with rather than a low effort or inappropriate post.
I am MAJORLY against disabling downvoting. This results in VERY toxic comments and content being pushed to the front and click bating content, which is what was witnessed on YouTube and Facebook, and is still a major problem. This is because youtube and other sites measure popularity of content not just by upvotes but by interaction. If you click on and/or comment on something, that's interaction. Youtube does not care about the quality of content and comments, so long as it is interacted with and shared. This means that inflammatory comments and content and click bate get lots of angry comments and rage clicks and click bait gets clicked because it's click bait and it registers and popular content that will generate lots of interaction so it gets pushed to the forefront. On reddit this kind of content gets largely weeded out by a quality check, downvotes. While no system is perfect, this allows the community to say "no, ok, just because I clicked on this and maybe even left a comment, this is NOT good content, and should not be shared with others." It also is a natural scam and spam filter that allows the community to quickly shoot down anything that is obviously spam.
Youtube comments were extremely toxic for this exact reason for a long time after the change. They had to implement a lot of changes to help reduce that toxicity, and probably went back to considering the downvotes despite not showing the count.
Hear hear 👏 Don’t post for the glory.
The content you’re putting into the fediverse should be for everyone. You no longer own it.
I'll play devil's advocate: one benefit I could see to Reddit's karma system is that it can quickly filter out spam or alt accounts from more serious communities.
The first thing all spambots on reddit does now is repost comments in sports subreddits to build up karma, so it really doesn't help much.
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