Oh dear

If we keep it without karma, bagdes and other reward crap then the only reward is the information of the post itself, the plus that ir brings to the people involved. As a forum should be.

Man so far i am loving lemmy and the fediverse. Clunky? Yes. But i love this real sense of community that was lost at reddit. Losing RIF was truly a blessing in disguise. I hope more people will move here but even if they don't, I am ok. I am sick and tired of my data being something that goes to feed the pockets of some corporation. Fuck it.
- Clunky is good, as my dad says: "imperfection adds character, a sort of rustic appeal"
- I'm hoping I can get a feed from as many communities as I did subreddits. one thing I've noticed so far is not as much content is posted here, but I guess for obvious reasons.
+1 lemmy gold to you stranger!
- Take this SiLvEr. It's all I can afford.
Totally agree. I don't want karma. It was useless anyways.
- For the most part. The reality is upvotes for people serve as dopamine boosts and they crave it. It helps drive engagement, and of course addiction.
I noticed that I don't have a karma or upvote counter for my account, and I felt free. Let's keep it that way. It just encourages more ego and skin in the discussion ahead of focusing on the content and further penalizes users who sometimes have an unpopular, but still civil and constructive, opinion. I don't want an echo chamber effect.

I imagine that implementing such a metric could become quite confusing if it turned out that not all instances permitted all communities in the future. If this is already the case, please excuse me. I've been on Lemmy for one hour total. Solving that consistency problem couldn't be easier than just not solving it.
- Hate to break it to ya but that’s just your UI from whatever app you’re using; you definitely have a “karma” score / upvote score, currently at 47 comment upvotes total.

As someone who used reddit when Dig was still big; let Karma die, it's so stupid.

100% agree! It's so nice right now to not see dumb posts when users trying to karma farm. I have been loving Lemmy so far. I just hope we get more users so we can get more engagement from the smaller communities.
Agree with this too, we don't need that sh*t here.
Yeah agreed. It's one thing to implement it years ago before seeing how it would shape the users behaviour. But now we know let's just let it be reddit nostalgia
Yeah agreed. It's one thing to implement it years ago before seeing how it would shape the users behaviour. But now we know let's just let it be reddit nostalgia
Yeah agreed. It's one thing to implement years ago before seeing how it would shape the users behaviour. But now we know let's just let it be reddit nostalgia

Upvoting posts is fine, but Karma I can do without. Back on Reddit sometimes I help somebody with something and I get maybe 3 or 4 Karma. Make a stupid joke in a popular Thread and get that hundred fold. Karma is useless.

I wouldn't mind some sort of rating scale at least, but nothing infinitely growing like reddit karma.

I found the karma useful to see if someone had a relatively well used account, was a karma farming bot, a shit poster, a lurker, or an asshole.

Maybe just a scale to determine an accounts total relative ratio of upvotes to down votes?

Honestly I don't mind the upvote and downvote system but i don't want reddit replicated.

At this point, I reckon no one on Lemmy wants Reddit replicated in any shape or form…
- As a recent refugee, if there was a carbon copy of reddit owned by some sort of non profit organization or funded by public money I would most definitely use that. Provided of course the monetization crap and ads were removed and I can have my Apollo app back.
  
  Nothing wrong with this new federated direction we are taking now, but what made reddit shitty is corporate greed and an infantile moron as decisionmaker, not that it was centralized.

Lemmy is a classless, stateless, and karmaless society

classless

Lol
- You are now expelled from our anarcho-communist utopia

Good. Karma just incentivizes the monetization of accounts. Without karma there is less incentive for bots and grifters since visibility/prominence/influence can no longer be bought and sold.

Technically, Lemmy does keep track of your total post/comment votes. It's just not visible from the current client. Hopefully it stays that way.

I hope so too, I tried the wefwef app (pwa) for lemmy and it should 'points', I assume upvotes, really annoying.

I really hope that Lemmy will never have it. Karma destroyed Reddit.

it kinda did yeah...awards were fun though
- Awards on lemmy would be a great way to subsidize server costs.
- Honestly not to me. They've always felt like...
- awards = cool
  
  awards that increase visibility, comment rank, other pay2influence = no likee
- I once got Inciteful Post of the Day.
  
  No, that's not a typo.
- We[^1] have custom emojis[^2] instead .
  
  [^1]: Those of us on Lemmy 0.18.0 [^2]: Easier to type inline images, really. There isn't anything emoji about them
Did it? I never got the point.
- I remember Reddit in its early days (it was founded in 2005). The conversations were intelligent and I participated in a lot of them. When they introduced karma, I noticed that people were using it as a badge of honor. People started posting shitty one-liners to get upvotes, but those posts had no meaning.
  
  So I started posting less and less. Lemmy/Kbin reminds me of the early days of Reddit, and I hope it stays that way.

If there was one change on Reddit to make it'd be to get rid of karma. Upvotes and such show support and disapproval, but karma just pushes people into shitty social media actions.

I amassed a huge amount of karma and I have no idea what that meant? The truth was "I posted a lot" that's all.

Hard no

What was the point of karma? I never understood the value in having it.

It started as an incentive for positive interaction.

It turned into something to be gamed by doing the worst sort of intraction (reposting).
I think it showed whether or not you posted quality content/comments? not really sure
- But it also led to lazy or downright fraudulent reposts from users and bots alike.
- My most popular post was a terrible Skyrim meme and my top comment was... Another meme. I guess that was good enough :D

If any devs ever implement karma into Lemmy, I will shut down my subs and leave.

I mean that with 100% seriousness. Karma is one of the most evil concepts ever conceived in the history of the internet. It brings out the darkness in a motherfucker.

Excuse me if I’m just dense, but when I look at peoples profiles in wefwef, it shows me their comment score and post score.

Is that somehow different from what Karma was?
- That's probably a good reason not to use Wefwef 🤦
  
  Here, your comments can be upvoted and downvoted, but it's purposefully not totaled and kept separate from your profile. I don't know why the devs of that app decided to total them all together -- that total is your karma and people did tie their self-worth and their social standing to their karma. It's what made Reddit so toxic
  
  We all better go say something to the Wefwef devs and make them take that shit off
I always thought there was some merit to it, like, indicative of someone's history in engagement on a platform, no?

I get that it becomes less and less meaningful as people farm it, but there is there no balancing point?
- I think people grossely overestimate what people did "for karma".
  
  Bots farm karma to seem like legitimate users and bypass min-karma rules.
  
  Real users didn't give a shit about the little karma number aside from the fact it told them their stuff got a lot of attention. It could have been a circle with a color gradient and people would have used it as a measure of success anyway.
  
  People are still going to farm here because they want the attention, it doesn't matter what the measure is (comment count, updoots wtv)
Hard agree, I'm here for information, not to see how much karma a user has, plus I feel karma systems encourage bots. If a karma system is introduced, I will leave for a platform that doesn't have that kind of karma thing
I think kbin has a form of karma. If they do implement it it would be on a per-instance basis. Meaning it probably won't matter for appealing to the greater fediverse.

To anyone suggesting karma is a good anti bot tool, remember there is karma removed. Nothing is stopping a bot from spamming useless things, and interacting with other bot posts to build karma. This is already happening on reddit when you navigate to weird subs where all the content is coming from one account posting links to the same shitty tabloid site. Yet this content is getting upvotes from something.

Karma is security theater, I think the mods were the true anti-bot force.

not to play devil's advocate here, but for the average interwebs John Q. Public user isn't a karma "fence" that has to at least be climbed, better than nothing at all? but yeah of course its a false sense of security.

I like that it doesn't have karma. reddit has been deteriorating since 2016 2017. karma farming bots have increased in size so much. quality had dropped too much. I have been discussing about this with many friends since long and was trying to find alternative. I love that this decision has given enough momentum to federated spaces. now we will have some quality content and discussion without platform owner's vested interests

This is something I had neglected to think of. A reward/points system leads to bots farming for points, then selling the account. On the other hand, karma can be a good indicator to community moderators of weather that user isn’t just a spam account.

Edit: To clarify comment karma is a good metric for mods, not post karma. Its much harder to gain karma via comments because you can’t just repost r/oddlysatisfying shit, but that could change with GPT and open source LLMs.
- What if there was shadow karma, that you can only see if you are a mod, and the user cannot?
- Spam/bot accounts easily gained more karma than average users. User history has always been the best identifier that an account is genuine.

I say stay strong and refuse. I can't see a single benefit outweighing the disadvantages and in particular botting to game that flawed system.

Wait what? There’s no karma here?

How will I be a gazillionaire?

No karma, no karma farming.

Inb4 ex redditors want to migrate karma of their former accounts on the Fediverse ☠️
- Last I checked I had like 400,000 and I don't give a shit. I'm glad to see it go.

It would be interesting to have a poll on how many people really would want reddit-style karma on lemmy. I suspect it wouldn't be that high

Yeah but it's fun to feel superior by inventing a strawman.
- I always found it cool to see my karma increase over the years from mostly commenting. I think I ended up with over 100k comment karma, but frankly I couldn't give a shit about it here
I mean... Since we can upvote posts and comments here, is it really that bad to tally up how many upvotes we've gathered over time? I don't hate getting upvotes.
- Yeah id imagine once you get to hundreds of comments it can be hard to count. But, for example, Wefwef (https://wefwef.app/) will count up the "comment score" on someones profile and show it. Id imagine others might do the same.

For the love of God, keep karma off this platform. Let upvoting and downvoting function purely as a way to prioritise posts.

The advertisers end up monetizing karma. Screw that noise!

Yeah kinda. In the beginning it really was a way to be rewarded for good content while checking if accounts are good creators/participators. But it got worse over time
- honestly, for me, it's enough to be rewarded in single posts. The whole running tally it's just mental masturbation. Fake internet points for me to know my worth. I've only been off reddit for 20 some days and it's already netting positive life changes.

This comment constitutes my first real interaction with a Lemmy instance, and this post is how I'm learning that Lemmy doesn't have reddit-style karma.

Suffice to say I'm very happy to learn this. +1 point in favor of higher quality, organic content generation.

Reddit Karma really just incentives unhelpful but funny/highly agreeable post. Upvotes are fine as a per-thread moderation system, but when you have a total of all up votes it opens the door to circlejerks and discriminating against users with low karma score (which also incentives circlejerks as a quick way to earn enough karma to be a valid user, enables paid shills and enables account selling).

Karma totals is more or less one of the biggest flaws with reddit.

I think we should have karma totals to serve the same purpose as it did on reddit, to keep bots, spam and throwaway accounts out of communities.
- Karma totals as an anti-spam mechanic are easily subvertable if you just get bots to upvote each others posts, and because it creates the appearance of a legitimate user it'll enviably create a account selling industry where spammers and corporate/political shills can just buy a "legitimate" accounts to just bypass karma restrictions.
  
  Right now it might seem strange to buy a lemmy/fediverse account, but if the site ever gets big, then buying accounts would be a good investment for the wrong people.
  
  In the end it just puts up a barrier for new users with an legitimate interest in sharing with the community.
I think we should have karma totals to serve the same purpose as it did on reddit, to keep bots, spam and throwaway accounts out of communities.
I think we should have karma totals to serve the same purpose as it did on reddit, to keep bots, spam and throwaway accounts out of communities.
I think we should have karma totals to serve the same purpose as it did on reddit, to keep bots, spam and throwaway accounts out of communities.
I think we should have karma totals to serve the same purpose as it did on reddit, to keep bots, spam and throwaway accounts out of communities.
I think we should have karma totals to serve the same purpose as it did on reddit, to keep bots, spam and throwaway accounts out of communities.
I think we should have karma totals to serve the same purpose as it did on reddit, to keep bots, spam and throwaway accounts out of communities.

Go touch grass and do good deeds then

But my fake internet points, what will i do without them!
The fuck do I need grass for? Can I just do good deeds and severe attachments without the grass?
- Point on the diagram where the grass touched you in a bad way.

Karma wouldn't work on Lemmy. I could just make an instance and run a script to give myself as much upvotes as I wanted.

Well it was technically the same on reddit. Didn't work there too
I imagine you could have some sort of distributed karma system --- e.g., each instance has its own notion of your karma. Calculating karma would then involve querying all federated instances and summing up the value. So now you'd need two instances, both federated with others, in order to karma hack. Not impossible, but more annoying. Alternately, you could only sum up the karma on particular instances, rather than all federated instances.
- You just know some nerds would fucking love finding karma exchange rates and keeping tables. The same people who play eve in excel

Wouldn't that be old redditors and new lemmy users?

Oh Dear.

Leave it as it is.

If we keep it without karma, bagdes and other reward crap then the only reward is the information of the post itself, the plus that ir brings to the people involved. As a forum should be.

Let's not, we're all better off without imaginary internet points.

On Twitter, it can lead to audience capture. People will be chasing that high of going viral. It's not a great place for nuance. It becomes a competition of who can be the most hyperbolic
I'm curious as to where OP has seen people complaining that karma doesn't exist here. I've been here a couple days now and have seen nothing but support from other Reddit refugees with how Lemmy is organized. I guess it's anecdotal on my part, but I would assume that anyone leaving Reddit right now has been frustrated and fed up with most of not all the platform's features, including the karma system, for a long time, and that the lack of karma here is an enormous selling point.

Good! The only role of good 'karma' should only have ever been about content quality and therefore content visibility. Content of bad quality can be reported or blocked.

Ranking a user's value based essentially 'how long they've been here' isn't meaningful. Even giving users a score based on their average votes would still prioritise groupthink and homogeny.

I never really got the appeal of having a lot of total karma. I guess it was "neat" having over 100,000 comment karma, but really I care more about how well received an individual post or comment is, which lemmy still largely retains.

Yeah same, I had minim submission karma, just comments from the handful of small subs I frequented.

Stuff like karma directly contributes to an environment where things are said and done for approval instead of genuine expression. I hope the new platforms don't include anything like it.

I roll my eyes pretty hard when I see someone with hundreds of thousands of karma on reddit.

Like, I get it, you’re a removed who just posts whatever everyone wants to hear. You’re a puppet under control of the upvote button
- Hang on now, some of us just have that because we're old as fuck and comment too much.
  
  Under 4 years and a hundred thousand though? Absolutely what you said.

Karma is the most stripper name I’ve ever heard.

Someone's gonna have an unexpected pornstar find tonight. Just dare to type RX after it.

I hope that this will never be a thing lol. Most annoying "feature" of reddit

I'm so much happier without it. Having a big number next to your name is such a tired little ego trip

No.

Can’t wait for Lemmy to take off and then have people forever being “ omg I was here before the Reddit lot hipsters” but they got here 10 mins ago like me.

But.. But you posted this 32 minutes ago... I'm confused.
- Time travel is possible if you only believe
I’m first generation and whoever comes after July is third rate haha
- To be honest, I was on Reddit for 8-9 years and never really felt part of anything I just lurked a lot. So maybe that will change with a “new” platform that already feels less corporate.

Actually I think the whole upvote system sucks. I prefer 4chan, every comment is equal and people just ignore dumb shit. The upvote system promotes popular opinions and discourages saying anything that remotely goes against the flow. It's what made reddit such a echo-chamber circle-jerk place.

Upvotes can amplify popular views or feel like a popularity contest, but they're just a tool. You can avoid the echo chamber by sorting comments by "new" or "old". Upvotes don't control the conversation, you can choose how you engage.
- Yeah but unless everyone does it it means there's no discussion on downvoted opinions which is what creates the echo chamber effect.

What I really want is a "Lemmy Enhancement Suite" with all (or most) of the additional options that RES provided.

In particular I'm missing keyboard navigation, custom post filters (or just hiding posts in general), and collapsing in-line images. Those would be really nice to have here.

Same
- @x4740N@lemmy.world @Ech@lemmy.world I made a keyboard navigation script here https://github.com/vmavromatis/Lemmy-keyboard-navigation

I never understood the karma thing. Why do I care about a made up number. Unless it equates to something tangible. I can see it to help with spam bots, but that's about it.

For one thing it always spins it's own shadowbusiness. People with lots of karma did sell their accounts for a quick buck in the past. That also made the platform more full of bots.
For one thing it always spins it's own shadowbusiness. People with lots of karma did sell their accounts for a quick buck in the past. That also made the platform more full of bots.
Drives engagement and gives people that coveted dopamine hit

Are they? I haven’t seen anyone demanding that yet but I’m certainly not a seasoned fediverse vet. I never cared about Karma on Reddit so hopefully it doesn’t make it here.

On other instances in lemmy, other platforms on tlides, on squabbles.

They demand to change the dites to suit them. They demand, amongst many things. Karma, downvotes, porn

I've seen them shot down by other users many times.
- I mean... Certainly there are or will shortly be instances that welcome porn...
  
  But yeah, please no karma.
- Well as a former Redditor I say fuck that. We saw what happened to Reddit. Let try not to repeat that here.
Kbin has it, so users who really want it can get their fix there while still interacting with the rest of us.
- Yeah i was really disappointed on seeing karma ( reputation) displayed on kbin. Some posters are really concerned that the computation in their karma is not accurate.

I don't care about karma. I just want to be notified when someone responds to my comments so that I can have an actual conversation.

Former redditor here. Never gave a crap about karma. Just here to laugh at funny Internet things.

I never understood the point of it anyways. I mean it's cool to see that your post is popular but the total karma seems pointless. I used to make a new account about once a year anyways and that would obviously reset my karma aswell and I didn't even give it half a thought

Nah keep that thing outta here

Internet points

Why?

Posts should have the ability to be promoted or buried, to help highlight interesting stuff.

But why people? I don't get it. Isn't this place more like a forum than a social network?

Leave that crap for Facebook etc..

Nah, I'm good not seeing the numbers or having the awards and such.

Karma deezn

Lmao

How do the comment/post scores on Lenny compare to Karma? At first glance, they seem quite similar!

They're not combined into a total karma score for the user, just on each individual comment or post.
- Oh I see. Thank you!

When i first joined a couple days ago i kinda missed the karma, but i see why its bad

Reddit = Redditors

Lemmy = Lemmytors?

Lemmings

I never understood this obsession with internet points to the point where people are willing to farm them. I guess on Reddit there was a monetary incentive, with people selling accounts with certain amounts of karma. Honestly to me it’s always been more like “cool, I got 48 upvotes on this post” or whatever, and move on with my day.

Karma is a double edged sword. I say, we don't need it but I can see why people want it.

On Reddit I deleted and burned my account yearly. Still debating wether I should to it on Lemmy and Kbin. We'll see

but my imaginary internet points :(

They hold the Karma Anonymous meetings at the local church on Tuesday nights
- The Karma removed aren't church going folks LoL.
  
  If you held the meeting online, out of someone's mom's basement you'd probably be closer to the Truth..

I'm sorry to anyone that needs internet points to feel good

I feel good about my StackOverflow points... but the Karma from Reddit means nothing to me.
- StackOverflow points are actually useful, you can post your profile in your resume, it's a talking point for an interview. Reddit karma is just an epeen measuring contest.

No karma. But nice try, have a cookie

It’s my karma and I want it now!

Updoots to the left....

But no cumulative number on the profile. How are we supposed to advertise our ego- er.. I mean tell who is a reputable member of this esteemed site?

If people really want karma, they can write a 3rd party app to total their comments and posts scores. This isn't reddit.

Why do they even want karma? So they can monetize bots with high karma and plague the place with automated content? Screw that.

I am not a fan of the idea but a guy did just make a UserScript. https://feddit.de/post/1185964

That was fast, i mean it could help some peaople ease into lemmy. I quite welcome not having karma on lemmy as well.

Do not make it so

I've been pondering the concept of Reddit "karma," and I believe it's time for a serious discussion about its true nature and the impact it has on our communities. I've written multiple posts about this previously here on kbin (https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/95140/Dearest-developers-Stop-reinventing-the-wheel) with very mixed results in the engagement. Though I am still working on refining the argument.

While the idea behind karma is to provide users with a reputation score or social credit, I've noticed that it doesn't necessarily align with those intentions. Instead, it often serves as a reinforcement for users to stay within their comfort zones and echo chambers, stifling diverse perspectives and constructive dialogue.

One of the main issues I've observed is the tendency for downvoting to occur when a user expresses an opinion that goes against the prevailing sentiment within a particular community. Even if the opinion is well-thought-out, respectful, and contributes to meaningful conversations, it becomes a target for downvotes. This behavior discourages users from engaging or expressing differing viewpoints.

It's disheartening to witness how users can manipulate the system out of spite. Some individuals go as far as visiting other users' profiles and downvoting their past posts to deliberately lower their karma score. This kind of behavior further emphasizes how the current karma system is more of a reflection of how often a user participates in echo chambers that align with their views, rather than an accurate measure of their quality engagement or contribution to the community.

With that in mind, I propose that we reconsider the name of the point system to better reflect its actual usage. Here are a few alternative names that encapsulate the behavior we often see:

Echo Chamber Score: Highlighting the tendency to reward users who stick to echo chambers and discourage exploration of different perspectives.
Bias Points: The system measures a user's inclination to conform to specific biases or ideological groups.
Conformity Score: The score reflects a user's adherence to the prevailing opinions within specific communities, rather than their engagement.

I believe a change in the name would serve as a wake-up call for the community, highlighting the importance of open-mindedness and respectful discourse. It would encourage users to think beyond their echo chambers and engage in meaningful conversations, even if they hold different opinions.

I've previously discussed how it would be more beneficial to leave the rep system in place, but keep the scores hidden to everyone besides the user of that profile. Another thing to think about is the way Steam has a rep system regarding VAC Bans. Instead of banning a profile completely, just some big red text on their profile noting which game or community there were banned from and how often.

I'm eager to hear your thoughts on this matter. What are your suggestions for improving the system to foster more open and constructive dialogue?

I don't think downvotes do anything. I don't think negative reputation scores represent much more than a user's inability to engage prosocially in any environment, and those users should just be referred to admins. So, I think downvotes should be left in the rear view mirror.

Instead, I think we should replace upvotes with two actions: 1) A 'favourite' action, which could be a single, mod- (at the community level) or admin-defined icon, or maybe even user chosen emote reactions, and 2) a 'helpful' or 'interesting' action. This would allow uses to differentiate between things they find interesting or helpful, and things they just enjoy, and it would give an extra dimension to use in sorting posts and comments.

If we want to attach any kind of reputation score to a user (and I'm not convinced that we should), then we can consider having aggregate breakdowns of those different point pools. Which instances did those points come from? Which communities? If a user has 80,000 points but they all come from c/ElonForGodEmperor, that tells you something significant about how you might want to weight those points.
- I'm already disheartened after a single day because I did in fact engage in a thoughtful discourse but was summarily reprimanded. I was hoping this environment would be different than the echo chamber that was Reddit.
- I like the idea of a more nuanced upvote. It's much more useful. Also I agree with you about a reputation system. No matter what you have in place, users will find a way to exploit it. I think a breakdown of the communities that contribute to a reputation score would actually be useful rather than a generic single score. I love both your ideas. I give it the HELPFUL💁 upvote.
dayum lemmy is on fire with science today. steam is a great example but i don't know lemmy well enough to know if such a system would fit here.

Honestly would rather have something more concrete than up and down votes. Now reason for up/down vote can be anything like agreement, disagreement or it could be about the quality of the post being good, bad, interesting or just funny.

But guess it's just simpler this way, but I would personally prefer system similar to discords reactions.

I still miss Slashdot's modding, where your vote had a reason (informative/insightful/interesting/funny) built in. The set of reasons was arguably too limited, but I still liked it.

Personally, I like "points." It makes it like a game. I want the high score.

I like seeing the points on individual comments and posts. I don't really care about my account total.
- I liked seeing someone's comment karma. Are they a troll? Are they a farmer? Are they trying to have a legitimate conversation? It helps end pointless conversations quickly.
  
  But I don't think it's necessary.