2y ago

YSK: Lemmy DOES have a karma system

There's some misinformation floating around regarding Lemmy not having a karma system. While many have discovered otherwise, this is for those who may not have.

While it's not exposed in the Lemmy default user interface, Lemmy does have a fully functional karma system and it is visible in third party clients such as WefWef and Memmy.

Do with that what you will.

https://join-lemmy.org/api/interfaces/PersonAggregates.html

205 comments

I think I will do nothing with that information.

Upvotes are useful for determining what people like and dislike so you can sort posts and comments
Account karma is for narcissists to masturbate about how loved they are
- Hey I'm already tracking my karma, no need to convince me !
- Don't threaten me with a good time!
- Can confirm, am narcissist
- Haha yeah. Now let's see Paul Allen's karma...
- Upvotes are useful for determining what people like and dislike so you can sort posts and comments
  Things people like get more upvotes
  Upvotes give you karma
  Therefore posting things people like gives you more karma
  
  Not sure if this was an argument for karma, but it sounds like an argument for avoiding contraversy and trying to fit in This is why everyone on Reddit appears to have the same opinion. I much prefer a diversity of opinions, and no penalty for speaking one's mind (while treating each other with decency).
  Karma makes sense, in theory, but in practice, it just punishes anyone who diverges from the herd.
  
  And?

Thanks, I hate it. Promotes gamesmanship and super douches like Gallowboob.
- Yeah if people start going for Karma we'll be plagued by "this" and stupid puns. Yesterday I saw a reddit post where the guy misspelled WiFi as Wife when explaining his problem, and then the top 10 comments were "omg dude you can't just get a new wife" or "I wouldn't come to Reddit for a problem with my wife"
  The actual solutions to the problem were rubbish too
  
  Yup, there's a lot of hurrrr hurrrr hurrr stuff on reddit. Which isn't inherently bad...but they often just keep pushing it ad nauseum. There's no such concept as "OK, enough already" on there.
- But it also encourages people to generate content. It's a slippery slope.
- At the same time it's shows who you should block. I don't always remember usernames but I had the top posters like that blocked. Made reddit so much better to use.
  
  Yeah, I blocked gallowboob years ago, I was just wondering if he left during the reddit exodus or if he's still there, posting 80% of the front page content. Not gonna go check though..
  
  Yeah, that is basically what the Karma System was for.
- Have an upvote, so as to better game the system stranger.

Honestly should be removed
- I don't think there is a way to remove that. "Karma" is just the sum of upvotes on all of a users' posts/comments and that info is always accessible.
  We could make the decision to not show that value in the front-ends of course but you'll likely have very different opinions on that and some front-ends will inevitably show karma.
  
  But if it wasn’t available in the API then apps would have to do a fetch of all the users posts to calculate it, possibly discouraging it.

Welcome to Lemmy where everything is made up and the Karma doesn’t matter.
- Well said.
  
  Thus the tradition was carried over from the dark place. Go back? Namaste.
- That's right, the karma is just like the salad bar at an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet
- Whose line was it.. can’t remember! Anyway..

Honestly is it even worth anything? Even on reddit I didn't really pay attention to how much karma a user had, maybe when I wanted to check if it was a bot or something.
- When it comes to gauging advice, or doing something like buying or trading used goods it was helpful as a proxy for trustworthiness. Older accounts with good karma are a lot less sketchy than brand new accounts.
  
  Yeah but that can be determined just by account age and number of posts, not by the public reception of those posts.
  
  You're right, didn't think about that.
- I’d check sometimes whether someone had a history and how long their account had been around, but 18,000 vs 80,000 or 800,000 is super meaningless to me. Personally I’d delete my accounts every 1-6 months. It was a pain to start over but after that, so what. Reddit is practically anonymous. Posts and comments stand on their own to me… it’s not about the reputation of the author.

Well, I completely ignored karma on Reddit for around a decade, until a friend one day pointed my huge karma out to me in a very enthusiastic way. I believe I will also ignore it here.

Mine (on both 3rd party apps) are very inaccurate lol. I have a post with over 2k and it says my karma is 300
- Apparently something in the 18.1 upgrades made a mess of it. I noticed someone providing a script to fix up the databases this morning
  
  Awesome, thanks for the news! Hopefully it’ll be fixed in the next update/by my instance admin
  
  That's a nice query!
- I can only speculate, but the number may relate to when the number was fetched or the numbers from a single instance. I know the instances are independent, but rely on a number of bot like "helpers" to pass information between federated instances. I saw an issue come up when .world was scaling and the conversation went into the need to allocate more of these "helpers." The way the instance is configured to update these stats probably has an impact on what you see in an app.
- Ohhh that's too bad! Isn't it?
  /s

Are you telling me I wasted my time manually tallying up my karma with calculator to track my karma-removed activity?
- Total points comes back from an endpoint, so if you hit that endpoint it tallies it for you.

One thing I love about the fediverse is I dont have to give a fuck about karma
- WE WILL MONITOR YOU FOR YOU.

I used to create a new account on reddit every few years to "reset" my Internet presence.
Didn't give a shit about karma, still don't.
- Same here. If any of my friends correctly identify my username as me, my annual account reset puts them back to square one...not that my accounts were anything but completely tame.
  Also nice username!
  
  Also nice username!
  right back at you!
- When you need a bit more, there are a couple of ways you can do a quick search/copy/paste as new jokes/memes pop up and you get votes for the Lolz. Easy to farm a couple of hundred or more each time.
  However, by talking sense in r/Thailand (i.e. from a perspective of someone who actually LIVES here) and call out stupid bullshit posts from wannabes (people who know everything about a country after a week's holiday in a removed hole) and you'll get a hundred downvotes in ten seconds.
  Karma is crap.
  
  Reminds me of California and Bay Area related posts. 98% of the people have never even been there and just lie and exaggerate its problems.

I know I'm in the minority here, but I think the karma system has value and I'd like to see us keep it. I did time as a moderator on a fairly busy subreddit, and requiring accounts to be >30 days old and have >100 or so karma saved us a lot of work. E.g., it made ban evasion a little harder to do, and reduced brigading.
It also helped to keep folks fairly civil and promoted considering perspective when posting, which I think is valuable.
With that said, I'd LOVE to allow communities to disable down votes... it's a missing feature in reddit, and if you are trying to promote discussion of a divisive topic, or to actively suppress an echo chamber, I think down votes are counter productive.
- requiring accounts to be >30 days old and have >100 or so karma saved us a lot of work. E.g., it made ban evasion a little harder to do, and reduced brigading.
  Counter-point: Requirements such as these were the reason repost/copy-paste bots were getting so rampant on Reddit.
  
  Kinda, but not really... if you are a user who has had your account for more than 5 minutes and you're not a troll, odds are you never run into those rules.
  The repost / copy paste bots were mostly to build a believable strawman that could be sold for astroturfing / "viral marketing", etc.
- Requiring accounts with X days or X karma lead to subs where people would literally post just to get upvotes and the creation of bot accounts.
- Should probably be a per-server karma system. Or else anyone could create their own instance and auto-give themselves enough karma to be "trustworthy" and set their account date.
  
  This is already possible on a per-server basis. Beehaw already does this.
  It would be interesting to make it a per-community feature though.
  
  Definitely seems like that would end with defederating that server
- I'd LOVE to allow communities to disable down votes...
  Upvote-only system is bullshit and you also know it. How else would you motivate user to post a quality content? Karma should also exist for this exact reason.
  I don't want yet-another-facebook-or-youtube here. 🤷
  
  People that post quality content don’t tend to care about internet points. People that care about internet points won’t bother to collect them via posting quality content.
  Downvote systems can also discourage open discussion, as too many people can’t help themselves from downvoting dissenting views. Communities end up one sided hiveminds.
  Maybe there is a middle ground, perhaps downvotes could be rationed instead of outright disabled.
  
  Being left on one would be the equivalent of being downvoted. What's the difference? Downvotws often just serves as a fuck you, and makes people feel like they're being attacked.
  
  Not every sub is for "quality content", some subs are intended for debate / dialogue between people that disagree with each other, and use the downvote button to mean "disagree" ... which means if you are coming for a quality dialogue, you tend to only see a quality monologue unless the user base is split 50/50 on the topic, which is rare.
- You had my approval until: I'd LOVE to allow communities to disable down votes...
  No... Just No...
- yeah, like if we pick a certain flair, down votes will be disabled to prevent echo chamber for a certain conversation
- So no free and open discussion then? Only approved group think will be allowed?
  I understand the benifits of what you are asking, but those are the very things that lead Reddit to what it is now.
  
  How does requiring a minimum account age cause group think?
  
  Requiring basic levels of karma or age is not “group think.”
  
  Sorry, what? That's the opposite of my point. I think most subs benefit from outright trolling and off topic nonsense being prohibited, but my issue is that downvotes promote group think, and on a discussion sub, you should be able to limit or remove them.
- Voat had a system where you only had ten downvotes a day. Kept people in check
  
  Voat
  Kept people in check
  I don't think so dude.

Karma is about which faction will turn hostile to you.
- Tell me more, so I can love you or hate you.
  
  Unlike other Bethesda games, In Fallout New Vegas there's a karma system that tracks your reputation among various factions, you can help and have good karma with one group of people and consequently worsen your reputation among other opposing factions.
- Dang, should this be a feature in lemmy now? Can there be a breakdown on which communities your karma comes from?

Let's not make Lemmy Reddit, or at least can we label this feature Anti-Karma?

With Reddit, though, some subreddits required a minimum amount of karma to post, whereas if you have access to an instance you can post freely.
So it’s more a user rating of “this was good/how have you survived until this point” than a gatekeeping device: you, as a poster, can freely ignore your points and the points of others if you don’t care.
- Plus, at least in the web interface, there no cumulative total of karma for an account, just on individual posts and comments.

In Lemmy, karma is not important.
Alignment, however, is paramount.
Mine seems to be chaotic ADHD asshole. Wait, is this even a proper alignment?!

I think I am the only one that finds karma useful. Albeit my experience is based on Reddit, but I found it handy to check out who are the serial reposters that have huge submission karma and very low comment karma. My RES filter was getting..... large.
Lemmy? I dunno. I'm still pretty new here.
- Mmm I think you find the ability to determine if a user is a bot on your own to be helpful, but karma itself is useless.
  It’s vulnerable to manipulation by coordinated groups/bots.
  Karma is an artificial means to quantify value of a post. I think we need a better way than a voting system (I’m gonna say it: Machine Learning)
  
  It's not only for bot accounts, but super-users like Gallowboob on reddit, who was basically a serial reposter/karma farmer. My feed got significantly better once I blocked him.

Does that karma allow me to buy NFTs, then resell them for double the price I paid, then create bots to karma farming, be called a karma removed by jealous people, grow my evil power, become the CEO of Lemmy, put ads, charge for the API so my official app is the only one allowed to work and talk to shareholders? If it doesn't allow me to do that, then there's no karma 😝

My points have reset a couple times over the last couple weeks, so they don't mean much.
- Apparently "something" goofed things up with regards to the tallies with the 18.1 updates. Noticed a script that reconciled things published to Lemmy Support this morning for a short-term fix. Whether there will be a great reconciliation baked in to the system or not, in the future, remains to be seen.
  
  I don't really care. My primary account was on vlemmy, but that seems to be dead now.

Pretty sure this is just the apps adding up all the upvotes/downvotes you receive and not an actual Lemmy feature.
- It's right in the API: https://join-lemmy.org/api/interfaces/PersonAggregates.html
  Returns: comment_count, comment_score, id, person_id, post_count, post_score

Oh no. Anyway, karma wasn't the worst thing about reddit so it should be fine, I hope...

My "karma" got reset a few days ago. Lol.
Honestly makes no diff. But it's a little nice to see. Didn't really change my behavior. I'm just happy to be here and I am engaging more than I ever did on Reddit.

Does it have any effect - e.g. on the visibility of posts? I don't care about karma, but I do wish the web UI would hide comments with large numbers of downvotes.
- I don't. I have a lot of really unpopular opinions and it's important to me that everyone knows about them.
  If you've got a few minutes to chat I can give you the gist.
  
  Upvotes are useful for determining what people like and dislike so you can sort posts and comments.
  Karma is just a bad way to have someone crucified for expressing an unpopular opinion... anyone remember COVID?
  Whatever your opinion (and mine was unpopular - still is, as many Thai's STILL wear masks in the street - even if they're walking down the middle of an empty street FFS) a recent study has proven me right - the lockdown did sweet FA (maybe a 1% reduction in deaths from COVID, but an increase from 1.5% to 40% in mental disorders reported in 18-45 year old people and MASSIVE economic and educational damage.

I know my comic praising lemmy for no karma added to the confusion on this but I do appreciate that lemmy.world does not feature the server karma on profiles for reasons already said in the comments. Thanks for clarifying.

https://join-lemmy.org/api/interfaces/PersonAggregates.html
Yup, you can see it's in the API.

I really like this system as a bonus points, a thing you gain from being an active member, I know it can be abused and bring karma-removed, but I really hope they will not remove it in the future.
- Agreed. I'm not immune to the rush of seeing a post take off as a bonus reward for contributing. I also find it helpful in communties that deal in factual information as a loose system of trustworthiness.

Karma on Lemmy has zero value, because you can easily manipulate the numbers.
- Unlike Reddit?
  
  Can you spin up your own Reddit instance and give yourself ♾-1 karma?

I'm a karma removed, and I love this
- I bet you made this comment just to receive more upvotes.
  
  You sir have deciphered my life purpose

I went the other way and configured Liftoff to not show scores anywhere. And to be honest my experience is all the better for it.

Sweet
- Nice.

nudes in your inbox for every upvote (thank god that is a thing of the past)
- Hello please send nudes I upovoted
  
  Hello please send upvotes I'm nude
- Hell yeah, bring on a bit of nude pussy!!!!
  
  Aww yesss this the shit Im looking for

as an ex-Redditor and used to be a karma removed myself, I find this disgusting. If you want a karma system, go back to Reddit.

You just wanted to show off your post score, didn't you?

~~But you have to consider the difference to Reddit's karma system. If you have a high-karma account on Reddit, your comment or post trends much higher. That's not the case with Lemmy, as far as I know.~~
Apparently, I was mistaken. Sorry.
- I'm pretty sure that's not true. I had 320k+ Karma on reddit when the admins banned me for participating in the protests and I regularly posted things that got very few upvotes.
  
  Yeah that’s definitely not the case. Karma is used to determine how frequently a user can post or comment, so that bot created accounts are limited from instantly flooding a subreddit or comment thread. It isn’t visibility or automatic upvotes.
- That isn’t a thing, I dislike Reddit as well but we shouldn’t start making false statements about them.
- i'd been on reddit for over a decade and i never knew that.
  
  Because it's false.
- Interesting. I never would've considered that since I only sort by New. Can neither confirm nor deny because I can't read Rust.
  
  I thought the best/top/hot were governed by upvotes/downvotes on that specific post. Not the user's Karma.
- Really?
- Is this something thats actually in the reddit ranking system. I.e reddit will activly push posts/comments from high karma accounts higher? Or just that high karma accounts tend to get more upvotes, etc ?
  
  No, it’s not a real thing, I’m not sure why the commenter said that.
- Here I see a new comment right above the top comment which is great because everyone has their comment up top at first. This might be a jerboa thing tho

What Lemmy does with that score is ultimately instance-specific. Over time I expect we’ll see more differentiation between instances in terms of how they treat things like that.

How accurate is it? I use Memmy and after an update I went from 50ish points for comments to 3. I just checked on Wefwef and it shows that same score as well, so I'm unsure what happened. I didn't delete or change anything
I don't really care about karma, I actually would prefer if neither of them had it visible, but I'm interested to know what happened

And just to make things weirder. On kbin we have up and downvotes. But it seems only upvotes come in from other platforms. I never see a post or comment with a downvote here.

I am extremely disappointed by this.
I thought we were free of such toxicity here.
- Not like forums without karma aren't toxic. I think karma has merits. The motivation of people to get the number go up can be both good and bad.