What is your opinion about Lemmy not having karma but Kbin having reputation points?

gylotip@lemmy.ml to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 116 points –

Personally, I prefer Lemmy over Kbin because I hate karma and reputation points. I do not want to worry about downvotes, and Lemmy feels so fresh. I can post things that will receive lots of downvotes and not need to worry about losing karma.

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A karma score encourages making poor quality meme posts and comments in large quantities to gain more fake internet points. It's easily abused; Reddit is full of karma farming bots.

No downvotes was also mentioned here, but I heavily disagree. Downvotes, in my opinion are for a large part a positive thing. Youtube hiding downvotes was a move towards a "good vibes only, no criticism allowed" type of environment. Remember the reaction when Ubisoft pushed some stupid NFTs there?

Downvotes allow users to express disapproval of content, even if it isn't strictly against the rules of the particular community. I believe there's a very clear intermediary between "good" content and something that's so bad it has to be removed by moderators. Ignoring it or having it erased by mods are both worse solutions.

Lemmy pretty much meets my ideal in this regard, it has downvotes and doesn't have a broken social credit system.

Edit: Expanded the comment quite a lot

There are posts that contain despicable information/news but are useful to know, and I always struggled between upvoting or not voting since downvoting would remove karma from OP.

Downvotes aren't intended for the subject of the news, but for OP for making the post. If you hate the subject, I guess the correct action is to express it in the comments, or give an upvote if someone else already did.