Against Lemmy Karma

Soon: "Karma's getting too high. Time to go a'trolling!"

That's a great idea.

Love this. It's sort of the same principle as outlawing billionaires.

Genius 🤯

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)

I don't see how filtering by karma combats bots whose whole job is to farm karma. Wouldn't that just filter new bots until one of their posts takes off in some other community that does allow new accounts to post?

Hard disagree. If bots are concern, bot detection tools are the answer, not karma.

Don’t worry, reposting will happen with or without karma! 😜

I also miss karma a bit. I can live without it but seeing a score is nice. I will behave the same with or without here on Lemmy though. For some reason, I've really found my voice here on Lemmy and am much more active then when I was on Reddit.

Still, that being said, I do feel a boost when I look at my comments and see that number lol.

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.

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...

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.

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.

You guys are forgetting about spam accounts, toxic individuals, trolls, etc. I think they need to take into account karma but just not show it.

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.

Reputation is a kbin specific thing

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.

True, "Karma" doesn't mean much unless you can refine "Karma" statistics, e.g. upvote/ downvote ratio, "karma" trend against time graphs, last 30 days net "Karma", filter "Karma" statistics specific to community/instance.

Still, you can't stop someone from selling a 5 million "Karma Points" account to trolls, so I disagree with showing "Karma" like Reddit.

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

It was primarily about bot farms.

It's so people can judge how other people receive their post. If I take a picture it can give a dopamine hit if people upvote it, and at least tell me it needs work if people downvote it.

Does a user have a separate karma score on each instance, or a total for the whole fediverse?

That's also part of why votes need to be public, because how else would you know an instance wasn't inflating it's numbers. And the total number of votes would always need to at least be accessible on the backend to order properly. We can't just get rid of these parts and still keep core functionality working. Sure this can be hidden from the user, but it's not feasible to throw out.

Edit: I want to clarify that I'm open to suggestions. Please respond with how you think the system could avoid abuse and keep post ordering without a way of auditing/accounting for votes. I haven't been able to think of one personally.

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.

Account age or number of posts could serve the same function. (Not perfectly, but neither does karma.)

Karma! We won't farm ya!

While I agree with most points I'd like to give a reason why a voting system can be a good idea. It is a way to filter interest or engagement, posts or comments that got a reaction are likely more interesting to other users as well. And another argument is that it gives perceived value to an account, meaning people will not spamm accounts and banning someone has a perceived consequence. I don't moderate any community so I don't know if that is effective but I feel like thats a reason for keeping a version of that around

Buying an account is more effort than making one, so fewer banned users will bother with it.

Jerboa doesn't have anything to do with it, it is the app you use to access the fediverse/lemmy.

Lemmy has upvotes, downvotes and the tally of those two. Karma is a step further; on reddit, every user has a total tally (Karma) as well, where all up/downvotes of every comment and post are added together as a "score" for the user. So people post popular stuff to get upvotes and thus have a higher score (which some subreddits required to 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.