I had almost 40k comment karma and a couple hundred post karma on Reddit...
It never mattered to me.
My policy is this:
My policy is: Relevant to conversation = upvote.
Not Relevant or misinformation = downvote.
I upvote plenty of stuff that I disagree with because I think it will further engagement about an important topic.
I always upvote people I disagree with. Society is nothing without debate.
This was how reddit was meant to be. Now every opinion the hive mind disagrees with gets downvoted to hell.
My way:
Upvote: neutral / friendly contributions related to the topic, regardless of whether or not I personally agree (Exception; hate speech wrapped in nice words. I don't care how "friendly" the sentence seems, if the message itself is hate speech of any kind then downvote and/or report)
Nothing: Contributions that are friendly but off-topic, accidental duplicate posts, and stuff I don't understand.
Downvote: Spam, scams, troll posts and hate speech of any kind.
I never downvote people just because I disagree. On the contrary - different opinions but discussed in a civilized manner, that's an upvote from me.
I follow this policy as well.
If I like something, I give an upvote. Haven't thought about it so much.
Upvoted because I do the same.
I have added a bean to your current beans count
I liked your comment so I clicked the "up" arrow.
To me it’s supposed to be a system of recommendation. Quality comments or posts get upvoted so they can be recommended to other people (appearing higher up on a page, or in the Hot/Active section) and low quality (abusive, bad attitude, incorrect) comments or posts, the opposite. Sometimes upvoted are also a “thank you!”. Downvotes can be a general expression of disapproval but i try to do that sparingly… really only if someone is being jerky, or posted something so incorrect that someone could be misled in a meaningful way.
This
“Lemmy uses a voting system to sort post listings. - - You can upvote posts that you like so that more users will see them. Or downvote posts so that they are less likely to be seen. Each post receives a score which is the number of upvotes minus number of downvotes.
Hot sounds a lot like what Reddit uses. They use some secret algorithm where each upvote is like a balloon that lifts the post up and as the post ages, more and more weights are added to it over time so that it sinks down and gives more space for newer posts.
Reading the documentation can be a bit boring, but you can always use Bing to summarize the main points and even ask specific questions about the text.
I wish it is only used for post sorting. This whole Reddit karma being used as a trophy made it a reposting mess to begin with.
So it call it larma. It is karma but less important.
It’s odd to me how focused some people are on the total. My reddit karma count means absolutely nothing to me, except I’d watch it to see how very recent posts or comments had been received.
I think a good system for Lemmy would be to display “karma for the past 3 days” or week.
Yeah the Karma gamified this in a weird way.
The idea of up and downvotes has another pro tho: you can see if what you think resonates with other ppl and get better feedback. That one is really underrated imo.
Karma was the useless metric, not a post's score. When you upvote something, others are more likely to see it. Simple as that. As far as I know no algorithm is being trained to show you similar content, it's just a question of you wanting to give visibility to a post for any reason you might have.
This is a good question, because it never gets a proper answer.
I think most people consider it a way to approve or disapprove an OP or comment, but it's completely unclear why.
Let's say you post an OP about basketballs in the community!basketballsarecool@someinstance. If your OP describes all the cool things about basketballs, you'll receive upvotes. If your OP describes basketballs are useless, you'll receive downvotes. And it probably will be the reverse in the community!basketballsareuseless@someinstance.
Lemmy could at least stand out if the development community would remove downvotes. It's an unnecessary polarizing passive aggressive way to disagree with somebody, that leads to all kinds if unnecessary negative emotions.
But it would be even better if the whole upvote / downvote system can be disabled. You don't know who is upvoting / downvoting and what does it say?
some instances do remove down votes, for that reason :)
Really? Didn't know that was possible but it's great to hear that.
its a bellwether to see how many people you engaged with (IMO). I'm under the impression its just for your information, no karma removed is a good thing (keeps All interesting instead of high karma reposted Twitter screenshots)
You can track a user's "karma" ie. total upvotes on posts or comments using the API but I don't think there's anything that allows threshold outside of creating your own modbot that would delete all new user's posts if they don't meet the requirement.
As for the purpose of the upvote I think it just functions as a 'I want to give this post/comment a boost' whether that be because you found informative, it's something that already agree with or is just a good contribution to the discussion.
The karma tracking in the API is completely broken though. I made a script that actually counts all your comment/post scores and adds them up, and it's wildly different from the total score of a user that the API shows. I honestly don't understand how Lemmy comes up with the total scores.
Kbin labels it as "Reputation points", and your profile shows up with 1815 points to me. Not sure what that tells you as far as the numbers you've been tracking so far.
From my script I get 3399 as the sum of all scores, but the API reports 7 points for my posts and 574 for my comments. But these values jump around quite a bit. Had much more and much less before too.
If I run my script for my user on a different instance, all of the values are quite randomly different as well. But then again, if I view the same posts/comments from a different instance, I will also get different results, because sync is currently not working correctly.
Lemmy doesn't have guaranteed eventual consistency, so events like up/downvotes, comments, edits, posts all can randomly get lost due to network/server problems. If a server isn't reachable in time, it will just not get the event.
And I'm on connect and their points are 260
My script, that sums up all posts/comments, reports my score as 3399. The API on my server reports a post score of 7 and a comment score of 574.
But I had much higher and lower scores reported by the API before.
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