Did people actually change what they'd say based on whether or not they thought they'd get upvotes? I always just said what I wanted and used the karma to determine how popular of an opinion it was, so pretty much exactly how Lemmy works now. I don't think I ever looked at my overall account karma on Reddit.
Yes. It can also trick you into thinking a reactionary opinion is actually a popular one. For example in my country, ireland, there's been a few incidents were people of different nationalities have done unsavoury things caught on camera. This usually results of the comment section of the ireland sub to have a debate about whether there's too many immigrants in the country. Whichever side gets more upvotes is widely perceived to have "won" and bystanders will in turn adopt that position.
I don't think I've ever changed an opinion of mine to go along with the hive mind but the karma system has definitely discouraged me from commenting things because I would been downvoted into oblivion. It's not worth getting into arguments when you can clearly see people not siding with you.
How does this system solve that? Comments still have vote counts and reactionary comments still make it to the top of threads, there's just no visible count of total aggregated votes.
You're correct, the entire system is already in place. The only thing that is currently missing is adding up all of someone's 'karma' from their their posts and having it shown on their profile. Some of the apps already have this implemented since it's easy to incorporate.
That's not the only thing that's missing. A total upvote count on my profile page wouldn't be the problematic element that Reddit has. I would welcome a total upvote count on my profile page.
I'm fine being downvoted to oblivion by some anti-good astrotufing campaign, but it's getting honest, legitimate opinions slid down and out of discussion that feels risky
I'm definitely anti right wing, but that doesn't automatically make the left right about everything.
What is true about both sides is that some people just wanna look for a fight/argument and dehumanize their political 'other'. It's easy dopamine and righteous rage that drives engagement in every human.
Any good faith comment that points this out in an argument and has credible examples is always worth its salt.
I actually like finding out I'm wrong or my information is incomplete/outdated. I don't care for unfounded opinions in myself or others regardless of how they make me feel!
It did the opposite for me. I see those threads in r/canada or other posts and I'd comment trying to get downvoted because I hated the circle jerking and manipulation of threads with cliché comment chains intent on being dog whistles. I hated karma and somehow ended up with a stupid amount of it.
The big thing for me is that I've seen a lot of people say they've had their accounts stalked and harrassed for saying really mild things. With how many times I've read "I read your post history and..." over even the most mild disagreements, I absolutely believe this happens on a regular basis. Dropping an obviously unpopular opinion feels like an easy way to become a victim.
I've had my account stalked! Right in the middle of it I switched from Kbin to Lemmy (so I could try out the apps) and had to inform my stalker about the new account.
Frustrated and annoyed at having to look for my posts in many different places, they seem to have given up 🤷
This is a clear win for the Fediverse! I was able to switch instances and get subscribed to all my previous communities in no time at all while this doubled up stalking efforts 👍
Whenever someone said they checked my post history I immediately considered it a victory and moved on.
Yea there's some psycho's out there. I picked a few up. Nothing really crazy from them and surprisingly most of them had poor infosec so I was never too concerned that they were anything to worry about. Really emotionally invested people who don't like when they read things they disagreed with
100%. I’d even be ok with getting rid voting mechanisms all together. The comment and responses to it should be indicative of it’s quality instead of some vague numerical value which somehow makes it better than the other because more people voted for it based on their own understanding on how a vote works.
Discussions shouldn’t be about what’s popular. Social media has corrupted our ability to have intelligent discussions because non popular viewpoints aren’t entertained anymore and people with non popular viewpoints don’t want to contribute due to the retaliatory nature of likes/votes.
It’s eroding our ability to reason and we need to stop it.
Interesting. How do you know this? That the bystanders looked at the upvotes and decided their opinion on immigration based on this? Were there polls or something?
Absolutely. People thought karma actually meant something.
I mean, it kind of does mean something small, which is credibility. Karma wasn’t ever a flawless way to determine credibility, but it was a decent first pass, like an online ocular patdown.
Uh, no. Lol
It maybe showed popularity. But it was frequently manipulated.
Example: replace this entire comment with a portion of a highly upvoted comment below from this same thread, combine that with an official experience that only shows one or two top level comments and those copies can also get lots of upvotes. Reddit was rife with these kinds of bots.
In ideal situation downvote should not be used for disagreeing but topic relevant and quality. In ideal situation…
Bro I've never for a second thought that gallowboob had any credibility whatsoever and the motherfucker had like, all the KARMA
You’re completely missing my point. I’m not saying you should worship the guy, but he has more credibility than a troll with negative karma or a 3 month old tshirt bot with a few hundred karma from plagiarized comments.
That and also many subs wouldn't allow people to participate if they didn't have a high enough karma
That was used as a crude spam filter against bots and new accounts
Yes, people definitely did. Maybe not a majority but a lot
Karma did limit where and how frequently you could post
And that makes sense to some degree. I used to mod a large community on re**it and usually rage bait/flaming/troll accounts got filtered out by our automod which was set to 50 karma iirc. Most communities that use a karma filter have it set really low so farming a lot of karma is really unnecessary
Y'all act like that can't happen on Lemmy. The total score is already visible via API. Nothing's stopping a community from running a bot that auto removes anyone below a threshold. It's entirely possible right now to write that code.
I always thought it was amusing if I got into an argument with someone and they downvoted each of my comments before replying as if that meant something. Dude, I already get that you don't agree with me. Why are you bothering?
Did people actually change what they’d say based on whether or not they thought they’d get upvotes?
I'd argue anyone who did that probably had nothing interesting to say and/or didn't actually care about what they were saying. Same with the people who complained about downvotes.
/me watches some dude post hateful contrarian bullshit on a light hearted comic.
"It's not even funny and this shit comic comic has been done before. Quit self promoting on reddit bitch!
Edit: Why am I being down voted!? Fuck you know it's true! Mods temp banned me apparently. I don't care I'm never going to block her so I can always down vote!"
Somehow everyone who commented on his parent comment has every comment in their profile down voted for the last 50 comments...
Oh I remember those, wasn't that the brigading train?
I think you are envisioning something a little more intentional/thought out than it is. We do this socially all the time. You gauge the audience and you adjust what you’re going to say to better fit it. Or to upset them if you’re trolling but that tends to be more deliberate.
I bet if you took your comments from a hobby sub/forum/group/etc. you frequent, and then one from a meme community, you will find your tone and rhetoric are very different. And again this is not a bad thing! You are doing and saying what is appropriate for the context. It is very natural to do. But the point is you probably don’t sit down and calculate your exact wording. We just sort of do it, and our goal is generally to “fit in“ or get some affirmation from the community we are participating in.
Yep. I remember someone asking on a hiking sub about a backpack. It was a very fashionable and heavy canvas pack. I hike a good bit and have never seen a pack like that being used by others in the trails, so I said that I wouldn't recommend that pack. I think it had like 30-40 down votes.
I never gave my opinion on a pack again.
I think the karma system on reddit had a real effect on behaviour. What you often found it did was cause people to write comments for the audience of voters instead of for the person they're responding to. This eliminates personal interaction between users and turns everything into soapboxing. You stop having real conversations with each other, instead it becomes about pandering to votes.
This then also causes people to vote based on this as well. "You're not saying what the group wants to hear" downvote is the voting behaviour it creates.
This so frigging much. People are not having conversations, they are posturing.
It's like going into a debate prepared for discussing ideas, and the other debater is going for discussing emotions.
Truly fucked up and patently divisive
Yeah it's annoying. Things are far more pleasant when people are actually talking to one another, it creates a more human interaction and you don't get the kind of bad-faith engagement associated with trying to pander to votes. People self-censor far less as a result as well, aside from instance rules.
The weirdest part is the interactions, I swear to God people is hell bent on their conversations being pre-tainted with assuming the worst possible take on the others side.
It's like people can't no longer have different thoughts on the matter without going full civil war in the comments
To be honest I've gotten used to that and have had that here with "you glorify Lenin blah blah blah 100gorillion deaths gommunism no food". I think that's a specific type of person issue.
:/
Guess it's gonna take a while. I think it'll never get used to it haha
The amount of deleted downvoted comments makes me think most people at least change their minds afterwards. Which to me is the real weird part, you hide your opinion so you don't lose useless internet points..
how do people on this site not realize that the points next to your posts affect how your posts are sorted and are literally the exact same system as reddit? am i just so blind that i can actually see the numbers next to my posts or is everyone here just trying to be so anti-reddit they'll make up bullshit that isn't reality?
They are talking about karma as a thing you could collect, point totals for all posts added together displayed on your profile. Not the voting mechanism itself.
Lemmy also has this and everyone's point totals are visible from the API. If you're not seeing it, that's because your client is hiding it, not because it doesn't exist.
The nice thing is though, it's different for every server and from every server, so unless you follow a convention to say the user's homeserver vote total is the definitive amount, then there's no true karma.
My beehaw account is a great example. I made some comments on Lemmy world before it defederated. World and shitjustworks users can still vote on the old comments but they won't count to my home total, and from Lemmy.world my vote total won't change for that account significantly from that point. The vote totals on this lemmy.ca account will be different from lemmy.ca, beehaw.org or lemmy.world's perspectives because the servers defederated can't see the karma I earned on each comment on the other server, while lemmy.ca can see both.
Downvotes are also disabled on beehaw, so any downvotes won't affect my total at all but could show on other servers.
Lastly, there are some servers with 40000 accounts and 3 active users (who post and comment), vote botting is feasibly a thing. Imagine if I made a Lemmy server at Rentlar.org and as the admin I made 20000 accounts who upvote me every where I post. I'd be the first user on Lemmy with 1M total votes, but would that mean anything other than I'm a somewhat tech-savvy narcissistic loser? No.
Wait why is downvoting disabled on beehaw?
because being negative isn't allowed there.
You are pretty much correct. Although the moderation is very strict, it makes for a more laid back and friendly experience.
its real laid back because there's so few people there.
Discussions with 5 friendly people are more fun to me than with 20 decent people and two jerks.
And there is 0 content so no one is going to show up. This site will fizzle out if all the admins don't start pushing to grow so that nitch communities start getting populated.
The site will fizzle out if all the admins don't start pushing to grow...
I know where you're coming from but this is a misguided take, imo.
Servers like Lemmy.ca, beehaw.org,have stuck around just fine for over a year with less than 30 people actively posting. When I joined in March this year, All/New was the only way you could get a refreshed set of stories more than once a day. But it was fine like that too, imo.
So Lemmy servers can totally survive without the need to grow for growth's sake. This mindset that says growth at all costs is what turns websites into shitholes like Twitter and Reddit, and reminds me too much of the hunger for infinite unsustainable growth commanded by capitalism.
Lemmy also has that bro. Some clients display it and some don’t, but when I click on your name I see that you have 510 total comment score and 0 total post score.
I believe the devs have said they aren't going to make it officially visible, which is all I care about. If you want to make value judgements on people based on a number so bad that you had to find a client that shows it, more power to you.
I hadn't thought about it until just now but IDK if that number is accurate. My instance doesn't have downvotes, so if you view my profile from lemmy.one it might look like I have a higher karma than if you look from lemmy.world, I'm not sure.
And that system was irrelevant on Reddit just like it is here. You still have a total karma number in the API, every app I have used shows it, even if it is broken right now. Only the default theme on the web page hides the number. The only people who saw value in karma are the people who farmed it and the people who bitch about the people who farmed it. Either way, making posts that get a lot of upvotes specifically to get a lot of upvotes happens here just like I does on Reddit so idk what this OP is trying to say because they're farming karma lol.
There were many subreddits that did not allow participation unless someone had a karma over a certain threshold. For many of them the threshold was pretty low, only meant to stop brand new accounts and trolls, but still.
Additionally, the "people who farmed it" often did so because a reddit account with a high karma score was literally worth money to adspammers and people running bots.
The karma system contributed to what made reddit bad.
Karma is the total of upvotes and downvotes a user receives over time not just single posts and comments. It leads to discrimantory moderation and users tend to whore themselves out for upvotes to boast.
Ever heard of gallowboob?
and this site has that exact mechanic in the API.
It wasn't a 1upvote=1karma system on Reddit. Mostly, Lemmy does it better by the community caring less and not having posts limited if a user is under a threshold.
Arguably one difference is that on lemmy it's just a straight up sum AFAIK, while on reddit there are some algorithms attached to tweak things so you can't lose vast amounts of karma from a single shit comment and such.
you can only lose 15 points for a comment and 0 for a post. the only thing they do is they jitter the total points to fight botting. its designed to make karma a representation of content given, not necessarily that you have a high hit rate.
Reddit bad lemmy good, you are not allowed to say otherwise.
Edit: Bruh people on lemmy don't get sarcasm either 😭
[This comment has been deleted by an automated system]
Pretty sure karma isn't properly federated since nobody cares about it
You are correct. The calculation itself is bugged, and any time you delete a comment it resets to 0.
That's what I fucking did. Reddit was shit not because of karma, but because of hivemind and owners. Lemmy is not protected from that either, but at least users potentially have more power here
Also karma on Reddit is basically irrelevant. The only place it matters is in automoderation removing posts and comments for users under a certain level of karma.
Which is honestly freaking dumb. Sure you can do it with a big community but it will speed up the hivemind and alienate new users and frankly did nothing to curb bots because bots just farmed karma elsewhere on a sub where it was open by spamming posts and comments. And then went right back on the "threshold" subs.
I'll dissent. I like the karma system. It gives me a quick read out of who's a troll and who isn't.
I don't care about post karma so much, but the comment karma was an interesting stat.
Edit: An important caveat. We MUST keep downvotes visible. MUST. Having just a positive score breeds absolute insanity.
Negative karma doesn't necessarily indicate a troll, any unpopular opinion can get down-voted to hell while similar but differently expressed ideas get up-voted in the same thread. I'm not against karma system though, just think it's quite useless in most cases.
All comment karma tells you is who was first to a thread basically in my experience, and I had over 500k of it lol it's nothing though I could go troll for days before making a dent in the 10k you get from an obvious joke on the new tab and then the thread takes off
Best way to tell if someone is a troll is just to look at what they say imo 🤷🏻♂️
I had my third party app and browser extensions set to automatically hide comments by people with very low karma and very low comment scores. I'd only ever see hateful comments if I clicked to unhide them and I liked that
Doesnt lemmy have a karma system already? I can see up votes on my posts, and a sum total on my account page.
Or do you mean something else by “karma”?
some third party clients sum up the upvote count of your posts to make a count turns out the lemmy api does send it to you
but lemmy itself will never get a proper karma system in the ui as has been said by the main people working behind it multiple times
The apps aren't "summing it up", while the lemmy webUI does not display it, it's perfectly accessible via API.
Wow you’re right. I’ve gotten so used to Memmy and Wefwef that I didn’t realize the main site didn’t have it lol
but you just said lemmy has the exact same karma system reddit has.
Kbin has “reputation” unfortunately. I like Kbin enough to ignore it and I’m hoping others will do the same.
I use it the same way I did on Reddit; it's a decent gauge in how willing I am to engage with that person. If their history is littered with downvoted posts, then I'm less likely to engage because it's more likely they're being inflammatory on purpose.
Karma systems don't make places worse; the value placed upon them by the users does. It's not meant to be a counter for how liked you are, it's supposed to be representative of how you interact with the community; bad karma for bad interactions. But people use downvote as a disagree button, and people spam posts cause "big number make feel good". Good idea, difficult implementation given how humans work.
Reddit has a karma sum which is used to deny access from posting altogether. Here if you say something unpopular, you don't get the dopamine hit from upvotes, but you're also not silenced, unless the mod explicitly bans you.
While I agree unpopular opinions often get shouted down, i think people often forget that sometimes what they consider an “unpopular opinion” is unpopular because it’s abhorrent or just wrong lol. Not every comment/idea is valid and deserves to be entertained.
Being anti-vax is unpopular in a lot of circles and I am perfectly happy with seeing those comments downvoted/ removed and the users banned.
Why banned? The downvotes are definitely deserved but why TF ban them on a sub about a topic not related to vaccines or medicine?
Why are you changing the parameters of my example lol
Even if the numbers don’t carry elsewhere in a meaningful way, seeing the high positive number next to your post still means that other people agreed with/liked what you said on that particular post/comment. And that alone can give a mild dopamine hit.
Less useful for bots trying to farm rep for nefarious reasons, more useful for real people who can feel the joy of a moment.
Karma was pointless. Nobody cared at all. Upvotes and downvotes are fine and useful to be able to see both. Karma is a worthless system and encourages spamming low-effort garbage memes and endless reposting of the same shit.
It gave me a pointless feeling of pride and accomplishment. Which was exactly what I did not need.
Getting downloaded here I can see that their sentiment against my point, but it doesn't really piss me off. On Reddit I get angry and try to defend myself It was a really huge waste of time.
wait, you can get downloaded here?
Turns out, I would download a person. Take that, record companies!
I'm against any sort of gamification on social media. Not even achievements/badges or awards. That is the start of dark patterns and addictive design.
Exactly. It feels rewarding to receive karma but that dopamine rush is actually what Instagram, TikTok and all the other corporate-driven platforms out there are exploiting. We don't need that here.
I agree. The karma system really pushes group think.
I like being able to say what I want without being banned by a power-tripping mod, or downvoted into irrelevance by a circle jerk. We need to be able to point out that the Emperor isn't wearing clothes.
Does karma change that? We still have upvotes and downvotes, and you can sort comments by how well they do, and mods can still ban people not only from a community, but from a whole instance.
Abolitely 100%. This is not R and people should stop talking about R and stop fucking trying to make it more like R was.
R still exists, anyone who wants that can go back to that shithole.
This is the weird web. A return to a time before it was taken over by 4 major corporations.
Fuck R, fly your freak flags, people!
Well except for those who are here because of a bullshit Reddit ban, but my attitude towards that is "You can't fire me I quit"
We're free of the mundanes, I can say what I want as long as I'm not being toxic af! No auto-moderator is going to flag me for using "Ableist Langauge" because I can't keep with what terms have and haven't been considered "problematic"
I mean, the word "retard", obviously (God what places on the Corpo Net can you say THAT word nowadays?), that's not cool to say. But seriously I had one auto-mod flag me for saying "crazy" because it was "offensive to the mentally unwell"
Bitch I'm bi-polar and literally autistic, I AM mentally unwell, I think I have an n-word pass in this instance... Not that I should need one to say "crazy"
I like being able to say what I want without being banned by a power-tripping mod
There's currently nothing stopping a mod from creating a bot that deletes comments below certain threshold or that bans users for commenting on communities they don't approve like they did on Reddit. Only site policies can prevent that.
I hope this doesn't become a bot driven cesspool like reddit
Ugh.. I remember the "Sorry you have been banned from...." messages, it was amusing when I was banned from subreddits I hadn't heard of.
Thing is Reddit policies are supposed to make it so you can't be banned from one subreddit for your reputation or behavior in another, I actually told a mod this and he just laughed at me.
Did karma ever stop anyone from posting their racist, hateful shit on the other site?
Nope. Frankly a karma system would be such a terrible idea for Lemmy. We just need more mod tools, which is a downside of Lemmy being a new platform that grew really quickly.
Never. It only insensitived the other bad behaviors. Karma farming, fake content, and reposting.
Not to mention the karma system on Reddit created some of its most annoying users. Would be terrible to bring it here.
I always hated those subs that prevented you from posting unless you had a minimum amount of karma.
I used reddit for nearly a decade, but sometimes I wanted to make a throwaway for a specific, non-trolling purpose but was unable to do anything because of stupid, worthless karma.
For the karma whores out there, if you want a karma system so bad, go back to reddit where you belong. - Ex-Karma whore
Imagine being so addicted to social media you let a number change his you act. Absolutely sad.
I agree with you, but it's an addiction to approval. It's similar to cracking a joke and everyone laughing at it. It is sad but it's also pretty human.
In my early days of reddit i got a bit invested in karma. Enough that i did change the way i posted a bit. I got a few 1or 2k comments, noticed they were pop culture references, and tried to emulate that success.
I grew out of it, but you see how the karma system incentivizes that type of comment.
The Karma system was never a great system, I thought. Due to group think on Reddit, at times people get downvoted for no good reason. I think it's good to have a little diversity and not just have a model. I like Lemmy so far a lot and I think it is getting better and better. This is exactly how red it should have been, but they ruined it, of course.
The irony is that is seems like some parts of Lemmy has more of a hivemind than Reddit ever did. That is exasperated by the fact that there are so few of us here compared to Reddit that one or two votes weigh more than they would elsewhere.
Oh no, a few downvotes and you get buried in the tens and tens of other comments!
This is why I feel it's best to sort by New Comments. If discussion is the thing you're looking for, this will push anything newly posted or with a new reply to the top without taking into account votes, so only the actual threads with people talking about stuff are up there. The comments can also be sorted in ways that the votes don't mean jack.
But isn't there a karma system? At least I'm seeing points on posts and comments and that's what karma is/was on Reddit right?
Karma on reddit is the sum of upvotes an account has received on all it's posts and comments combined. Lemmy only has the voting per individual post and comment, but doesn't accumulate this as a sidewide score.
Oh ok I never realised people cared about that I thought it was only about getting rewards and like high scores on your posts.
How have I been using Reddit for 10+ years without knowing this? XD
It affected how easily your comments or posts could get upvoted, the more karma you had the more "trust" you had. Bot accounts were bought from people with high karma due to this reason, and sold further for a higher price after farming.
At some point the post/comment karma was changed to a fuzzy number, someone claimed your karma affected how it was calculated. Not sure if true.
Reading about how digg died, one reason was "front-page" bandits/groups. Basically people grouping up and getting paid to land posts on the front page. The more they did it, the more "trust" they had to hit front page again, similarly to high karma accounts on Reddit.
Lemmy only has the voting per individual post and comment, but doesn’t accumulate this as a sidewide score.
Saying what you mean can be impossible when every sub demands "respect" or "civility" instead of honesty, accuracy, and appropriate behavior.
Sometimes telling someone to go fuck themselves is entirely appropriate.
Sometimes explaining to someone why they're being a moron is entirely appropriate.
Yes, you can navigate those situations with G-rated kum-by-yah language, and you can eat yogurt with a fork. But demanding anyone do that is aggravating fucking nonsense.
Intense moderation can create a forum where there's never reason to poke someone over what an asshole they're being - but that's not what anyone's doing, here. They're mostly protecting trolls, by refusing to comprehend what trolling is. It's not when you say dumb shit you don't mean and people get mad at you, like some playground argument with one smirking child in a shouting match about the make-believe. It's people spreading disinformation with textbook fallacy. It's emotional abuse with "do you still beat your wife?" level manipulation. It's not deep. It's neither hard to spot nor hard to call out.
But what's currently forbidden is calling it out.
Insisting people take it in good faith is failure. That's exactly what trolls demand. It is the only way trolling accomplishes anything, ever. If they just said dumb shit nobody believed, there'd be no problem. But the appearance of a sane argument, and the trappings of "debate" around their infuriating horseshit lies, create false legitimacy. It helps abusive dishonesty spread. It is actively ensuring that whatever "free marketplace of ideas" is supposed to filter out total garbage, can't.
And anyone who falls for them going 'punishing me would only make me stronger!' is incapable of dealing with a smirking child. They're just fucking lying. It's not deep, or hard to spot. Call their bluff and see what happens. The answer will apparently blow your mind.
I just fucking say it and tbh, I ended net positive most the time. Wasn't even a concern of mine but I can see how it might have influenced others.
Easiest way to collect negative downvotes is originality or making fun of what passes for German humor.
Easily the communities I spent the least amount of time with.
I'm not understanding how lemmy doesn't have karma when there's still the upvote/downvote function and profiles still mark how many votes you got for comments and posts.
Edit: Someone asked what app I'm using but I can't find the comment. I'm using Connect for Lemmy
The upvote/downvote system by itself is really just a human powered sorting algorithm that uses consensus to move the most relevant comments up where they can be seen, and to hide unproductive comments at the bottom.
So if all you have is an upvote/downvote system, that's all it is. Note that it doesn't matter that much, with a simple up/down system, if you got a bunch of downvotes. Your comment got buried, but that's kind of the end of it.
Karma is a score attached to individual users that probably sounded like a good idea at the time, but it tallies whether you have more upvotes than downvotes, and probably some other mess under the hood. It was supposed to be a measure of how often a given user provides relevant and helpful feedback to others. In practice, it's a social credit score like the one being developed by the Chinese government.
Even worse, karma got used as a metric to aim for, and it's what you used to make sure that your accounts were marketable to buyers, who wanted lots of positive comment karma on accounts, so they could post where they liked once they bought them.
When Reddit was born it was even techy-er than it is, now. So there was a lot of discussion about programming, and programming problems, similar to what happens on Stack Overflow these days.
Imagine I've asked Reddit a programming question of some sort, and soon, some comments reply.
User A, first on the scene: Idunno, man this looks like a tough one (doesn't answer the question, not really relevant)
User B, who showed up later: Ah yes, that's a bitch [proceeds to answer the question in detail, very helpful to OP and everyone else].
So, as a user, even a spectator, you were supposed to upvote User B, and maybe downvote A. Upvoting B was more important than downvoting A, since the upvotes would bring B's answer up to the top, anyway, while A's answer would fall down without anyone downvoting them on purpose. You were supposed to be hesitant to downvote, because of this. The poor answer essentially downvotes itself, no need to dogpile on User A.
Without a karma system, that's the end of it. User A's poor answer has no bearing on their treatment anywhere, their performance is not recorded and shown to the public at all, and User B may develop a reputation as a helpful person by name alone, but there's no karma, there, either. The whole thing stayed within the context of that post. User B's helpful post floats to the very top of the thread on a wave of upvotes, the end.
With a karma system comes a new dimension.
User B, who provided the great answer, would begin to accumulate positive comment karma, and in theory this would help you to judge B's answers in the future, just like you check the reviews on an Amazon listing. Remember that B might be answering a question on which you were ignorant, so you depend on karma to see if this person gives good answers, usually, or if he's just troll noise.
Reddit was born in the era of people asking a computer question and getting, "oh, yeah, just delete system32" as an answer. For the record, that is a very important Windows system process you must never delete, so that's just troll shit, trying to fuck an ignorant person over for lulz.
Reddit was trying to thwart that with the karma system, they needed people to be able to ask questions and get good faith answers. If a user provided lots of troll answers and lies, that should mean lots of downvotes from other users, negative karma. People know not to trust this person's answers, at least not easily. If they have tons of positive karma, shit man, that might be The Woz answering you for all you knew, a good sign.
It was entirely up to you, the user, to be very high-minded about this. So, even if User Z said something that you didn't like, but it added important information to the conversation, you would still upvote that comment. That kinda sorta worked, but then the Great Digg Migration happened, and a flood of normies came on board.
Normies all used the downvote button for what it was obviously for, it's a fuck you go away I don't like you button. It was pretty naive to think it would be anything else, but the founders had high hopes.
Now you can start accumulating negative comment karma from saying or doing things other people don't like, it doesn't take much, and automated moderation systems will start doing things like blocking you from joining communities because you have too much negative comment karma. It is assumed that you would have better karma if you weren't a shitty person. However, it's easy to abuse. If a bunch of fashy people downvote the everloving shit out of somebody for saying something like "black lives matter" now the wrong damn person ended up with lots of negative comment karma.
The fash can also open lots of extra accounts and upvote the hell out of each other and themselves, so they have lots of positive comment karma while being literal practicing Nazis at the same time. It's pretty easy to game the karma system and not very useful anymore. In practice, your karma score just records how often you comment things that the Reddit hive mind agrees with. The highest karma points probably belong to bots.
It's problematic, to say the least.
So it's possible to ditch the karma system entirely while still using upvote/downvote, they're actually two separate things. Since we are no longer all that worried about a solution to programming questions, and since the idea of karma got corrupted and stepped on pretty bad, it would be nice to leave it the hell behind with Reddit, where it belongs.
That is what OP is arguing for. Perhaps on the Fediverse we can forge ahead with new approaches, and let this Reddit-like situation be a springboard to something better in the future, something more unique to Lemmy itself.
This is a much better write up than I expected from this comment section.... you deserve at least hotdog for this effort.
I think they should put an extra condiment on there too, even some onion. Was a fantastic take on exactly how beyond the surface of the system that they are very different at their core.
One of the worst things Reddit to itself did was not address how easy it was to game this system after they blew up and the problems became evident. The flood of automod bots and other things to try to address it just made the platform worse imo.
One thing I never want to see on Lemmy is a bot that checks the communities you're subscribed to and automatically permabans you no matter what. That thing reinforced terrible echo chambers and was a lazy insult to the users of the platform overall.
Having Karma gives users a high score to achieve, which incentives posting things that you know gets upvotes over something helpful or your genuine opinion.
How is lemmy different when we can still see these points. I'm just not understanding, I'm sorry.
Because the points only relate to the post, not you. You can't see your aggregate total from all posts combined, which would otherwise incentivize you to post things that will add to your total "high score".
You still have a minor incentive to post a high scoring comment, but it's only per-comment. If you feel like pleasing the masses, go ahead and play to their wants and needs. You might get a lot of points for it, and it'll feel nice.
But if you wanna tell em how you really feel and put them in their place, you can just not care about your points for that post. It's whatever. There's no danger that your -478 points is going to drag down your total, discouraging you from ever posting something that upsets the status quo.
I think I'm confused because I actually can see how many point everyone and myself has accumulated.
It could possibly be your frontend. What app / webapp are you using for Lemmy?
Finally I can actually reply to you! I'm using Connect for Lemmy.
One problem I foresee is that it would be too easy to game any karma system in a federated space. One could conceivably create their own instance and use bots to give "unearned" upvotes.
Several apps already show total user comment and post upvotes.
Here is your profile from Memmy
I think I saw somewhere that there is still karma but it isn't viewable.
If Lemmy's karma system can stay as it is, without adopting the Reddit way of how it handles it, I guess it's fine. Personally, I'd like to at least have some place to go to, that doesn't have likes, doesn't have karma points or anything. Because it just encourages people to groom themselves to say things, that'll garner the most attention. It invalidates your way of thinking and makes you check back on scores to feel validated.
I hate that I can't go almost anywhere anymore, without seeing some stupid form of a karma points system. It serves no purpose. Reddit's is worse because they tie your account to it. Don't have enough? Welp, too bad, can't post here. Got downvoted to oblivion? Welp, too bad, gotta wait some 10 minutes and fill a stupid captcha check.
If Lemmy can avoid that, then fine, I guess.
I spent a fair amount of time on reddit over something around 15 years (I think) and not once did I happen upon someone with -100 karma that didn't earn it by being a troll. I found it very useful to be able to weed out people who weren't actually commenting to further the conversation, but derail it. Is that the type of thing you're talking about not wanting?
People are confusing (probably due to intentional prompting by those trolls trying to have bystanders fight their battles for them) the very real problem on Reddit that if you chase karma there were benefits to be had in terms of credibility and reach of your messaging and so whatever entities might benefit from such would tend to fill the space over in Reddit with content like that. Realistically that doesn't change the most common content much as it really comes down to the sort of thing people will upvote but it did make it a bit worse. That's being confused with some notion that somehow anyone who wasn't chasing karma was entirely ignored. That just isn't true. You might not be the absolute center of attention unless you've either post or said something especially worthwhile but so what?
I had a fair amount of karma over there and it didn't seem to grant me any special privileges that I could see. The issue for lemmy, is that the data is there, being federated. Maybe all the major platforms can be convinced to cap the top and the bottom, to prevent "karma whores". Say, a range from 100 to -100?
A point system does help to bring popular topics to the top. If someone gives good advice and it gets enough upvotes then it rises to get more views by the larger audience. I think if there was a way to eliminate the point system and still give good stuff a louder voice then I would say that's the system we need.
I've been using Connect for Lemmy, and it lists all your points on your profile. I didn't even realize that wasn't included on the website until right now.
Karma sucked ass on Reddit. Essentially people could ban you from participating because you pissed too many people off even though you didn't break any rules.
Karma count is an ass kissing metric, high karma shows that you kiss people's asses for upvotes, low or negative karma shows that people dislike what you say which is absolutely ok. People having different opinions vs going with the group is the difference between a healthy platform and an echo chamber.
By the way Trolls and malicious actors who that system is targeting should be dealt with directly. If someone's posting hateful transphobia instead of downvoting their acount they should just be BANNED from the community or the platform as a whole, keep bad people out of the community.
But a Karma system doesn't impact your ability to post? Or 99% of other poster's opinions of you...
(Disclaimer: Don't care either way, never considered someone's "karma" at all, ever.)
If you have less than x amount of karma on a good portion of subReddits you can't post at all.
That is usually to avoid bots. Any normal person can easily get a couple hundred karma by just posting a bit or commenting a few times, but any bot doing the same is gonna undergo scrutiny.
True. But then you got 1 karma for every comment you made anywhere on the site and often the requirement was like 50 karma.
Restricting posts to users who have managed to make a maximum of 50 comments that didn't overwhelmingly piss everyone off isn't actually very restrictive.
I really don't buy into any of this "oh, you had to only say what people wanted you to say!" handwringing. I never once saw a user with negative karma who wasn't just there to actively cause trouble. I'm quite certain this notion that you had to subscribe to some sort of groupthink to make it through the karma system originates from a very tiny number of people who perceive not being actively anti-social in a social space as oppressive persecution of their "totally valid" "alternative opinions". By all means, show me accounts that were actually participating in good faith that were pushed out of the conversation by the karma system and I'll loudly complain with you on their behalf.
But you can't do that. Because they're always some flavour of racist nazi troll dickhead.
I said whatever the hell I wanted and was frequently confrontational or contrarian and still had some embarrassingly high amount of karma simply because I participated a lot and wasn't actively there to fuck things up by intentionally being a toxic edge-lord troll.
Yes it does. Some filtering is done by reddit and some by the mods. Also your votes don't count if you don't have certain amount of karma accumulated on the sub you are voting.
Yep,this way we have less bs/repetitive posts just trying to farm karma.
In a way I agree. In my experience with Reddit, the closest you'll get to posting somewhere with zero downvote risk is in r/CasualConversation, and even there, there have been times I've had fate handed to me because of some form of bad influence. There was one question where I basically got called a narcissist for, of all things, asking for advice on what makes an apology good, and ended up getting the short end of the karma stick.
Sometimes things get weird with upvotes and downvotes. I've been downvoted for pointing out that RCV still has spoilers, which is just a mathematical fact, but people don't like bad news.
I got banned from a subreddit for disagreeing with a mod's comment. Asked him what rule I broke and he ignored me. lol
What....what is the number under the post I'm making right this second? What is the overall number when I click on my profile?
On Lemmy.World the only numbers I see tracked in my profile are the total posts and comments I've made.
IIRC, someone mentioned Kbin actually shows a total updoot count on your profile. Lemmy does track it, but it's up to the instance/app you're using whether it's displayed anywhere.
I have a number on my profile now that I look? I never really paid that much attention to it? I don't know if it's weekly or what? It's 74. I've had single comments almost reach that. I don't know what I'm looking at lol
You are in for a hell of a ride when you figure out that folks STILL downvote randoms for self-validation purposes, even if theres no "punishment" for the other user.
What's karma, i was on reddit for 12 years and never looked into it.
It's a system of points where if you make enough ad revenue for reddit u/Spez sends you a dick pic as a sign of appreciation.
Oh man. I would have Karmawhored harder if I had known that was a reward tier.
I earned 7 dicks!
In my experience with having Karma as a mod. If the person had negative karma they were a troll or a really bad person. Giving us the ability to make a community feel welcoming.
I said what I wanted anyway, the karma system didn't affect your ability to say what you want. But yes, the karma system wasn't perfect, nooo way.
Do people really consider karma to mean the sum of your comments' and posts' points and not the points themselves?
Yes? I don't think I've ever heard the vote totals on individual posts and comments referred to as "Karma", just upvotes and downvotes. In my experience Karma is exclusively used to describe the total on peoples profiles. "Karma farming" is increasing that number by posting lots of different low effort posts, not when someone posts something because they think that one post will get many upvotes, as an example.
It's a genuine question, because I still check my comments and their scores. Big numbers make me feel good, small numbers make me feel bad. (Not losing any sleep over it or anything.) So I could still see people who make posts they know will get a lot of points being referred to as "farming karma." The same way you might accuse someone of "fishing for compliments" on social media. If that makes sense.
I never paid attention to the karma and would say what I fucking wanted to anyway. The votes mean nothing to people who don't sort by the dumb shit algorithms.
I love that this was the first comment for me even though it had -1 net votes
idk, I say the same stuff regardless. Sometimes people like what I say, sometimes they don't
Bravo
Karma needs to stay on reddit
But I want my sweet sweet pointless internet points
If saying what you want to say tanks your karma, the problem might be you and not the karma system.
Kbin already has something called reputation buried in the profile.
I agree but my dude this meme format is for being intensely sarcastic about things you hate, not saying how much you actually love something
It's cool though
I can finally denounce the lizard people conspiracy to steal my catfood!!! Damn you lizard people! Buy your own cat food!!! This is mine to eat!!!
It's also here. Just hidden normally.
No karma system, no karma whore.
Fork the code, add Karama, and run an instance.
"Shitty dick triples, triple dipped in shitty applesauce" could not exist in karma world. Really think about that.
Oh I thought this was talking about videogames.
You always could do that.
Other than karma to post limits, I've never understood why people gave a shit about fake internet points.
I think it was always the same psychology of making a number go up makes people get dopamine or something. Otherwise, it was a system to try and filter out bots used for astroturfing that I felt didn't really do a good job. There were always plenty of karma farming bots that would literally just copy and paste a different comment to create a fake post history.
Its original intent was to filter good vs. bad content. Prior to karma/voting systems, message boards were just a list of the most recent posts by anyone. With a voting system, people can decide what content best fits the community's purpose. If I post a dog image on a cat forum, people can downvote the post so newcomers aren't seeing dog pictures on a forum about cats. Without karma, you're relying entirely on moderators to manage that. It's basically crowd sourced moderation.
Karma has other issues for sure. It can be manipulated with bots. People tend to use it to say "I don't like this opinion" and not to say "this opinion is within the domain of this forum".
All of that being said, I believe karma systems should be hidden from the users. Jerboa is an Android app for Lemmy and it shows the karma count. I don't prefer that. I like being able to vote, but I don't want to feel the bias of "big number == good opinion". But I think karma is a good system for helping moderate the content that shows up in a forum. It's a democratic way of managing content. But it probably has room for improvement.
Did people actually change what they'd say based on whether or not they thought they'd get upvotes? I always just said what I wanted and used the karma to determine how popular of an opinion it was, so pretty much exactly how Lemmy works now. I don't think I ever looked at my overall account karma on Reddit.
Yes. It can also trick you into thinking a reactionary opinion is actually a popular one. For example in my country, ireland, there's been a few incidents were people of different nationalities have done unsavoury things caught on camera. This usually results of the comment section of the ireland sub to have a debate about whether there's too many immigrants in the country. Whichever side gets more upvotes is widely perceived to have "won" and bystanders will in turn adopt that position.
I don't think I've ever changed an opinion of mine to go along with the hive mind but the karma system has definitely discouraged me from commenting things because I would been downvoted into oblivion. It's not worth getting into arguments when you can clearly see people not siding with you.
How does this system solve that? Comments still have vote counts and reactionary comments still make it to the top of threads, there's just no visible count of total aggregated votes.
You're correct, the entire system is already in place. The only thing that is currently missing is adding up all of someone's 'karma' from their their posts and having it shown on their profile. Some of the apps already have this implemented since it's easy to incorporate.
That's not the only thing that's missing. A total upvote count on my profile page wouldn't be the problematic element that Reddit has. I would welcome a total upvote count on my profile page.
I'm fine being downvoted to oblivion by some anti-good astrotufing campaign, but it's getting honest, legitimate opinions slid down and out of discussion that feels risky
I'm definitely anti right wing, but that doesn't automatically make the left right about everything.
What is true about both sides is that some people just wanna look for a fight/argument and dehumanize their political 'other'. It's easy dopamine and righteous rage that drives engagement in every human.
Any good faith comment that points this out in an argument and has credible examples is always worth its salt.
I actually like finding out I'm wrong or my information is incomplete/outdated. I don't care for unfounded opinions in myself or others regardless of how they make me feel!
It did the opposite for me. I see those threads in r/canada or other posts and I'd comment trying to get downvoted because I hated the circle jerking and manipulation of threads with cliché comment chains intent on being dog whistles. I hated karma and somehow ended up with a stupid amount of it.
The big thing for me is that I've seen a lot of people say they've had their accounts stalked and harrassed for saying really mild things. With how many times I've read "I read your post history and..." over even the most mild disagreements, I absolutely believe this happens on a regular basis. Dropping an obviously unpopular opinion feels like an easy way to become a victim.
I've had my account stalked! Right in the middle of it I switched from Kbin to Lemmy (so I could try out the apps) and had to inform my stalker about the new account.
Frustrated and annoyed at having to look for my posts in many different places, they seem to have given up 🤷
This is a clear win for the Fediverse! I was able to switch instances and get subscribed to all my previous communities in no time at all while this doubled up stalking efforts 👍
Whenever someone said they checked my post history I immediately considered it a victory and moved on.
Yea there's some psycho's out there. I picked a few up. Nothing really crazy from them and surprisingly most of them had poor infosec so I was never too concerned that they were anything to worry about. Really emotionally invested people who don't like when they read things they disagreed with
100%. I’d even be ok with getting rid voting mechanisms all together. The comment and responses to it should be indicative of it’s quality instead of some vague numerical value which somehow makes it better than the other because more people voted for it based on their own understanding on how a vote works.
Discussions shouldn’t be about what’s popular. Social media has corrupted our ability to have intelligent discussions because non popular viewpoints aren’t entertained anymore and people with non popular viewpoints don’t want to contribute due to the retaliatory nature of likes/votes.
It’s eroding our ability to reason and we need to stop it.
Interesting. How do you know this? That the bystanders looked at the upvotes and decided their opinion on immigration based on this? Were there polls or something?
Absolutely. People thought karma actually meant something.
I mean, it kind of does mean something small, which is credibility. Karma wasn’t ever a flawless way to determine credibility, but it was a decent first pass, like an online ocular patdown.
Uh, no. Lol
It maybe showed popularity. But it was frequently manipulated.
Example: replace this entire comment with a portion of a highly upvoted comment below from this same thread, combine that with an official experience that only shows one or two top level comments and those copies can also get lots of upvotes. Reddit was rife with these kinds of bots.
In ideal situation downvote should not be used for disagreeing but topic relevant and quality. In ideal situation…
Bro I've never for a second thought that gallowboob had any credibility whatsoever and the motherfucker had like, all the KARMA
You’re completely missing my point. I’m not saying you should worship the guy, but he has more credibility than a troll with negative karma or a 3 month old tshirt bot with a few hundred karma from plagiarized comments.
The biggest issue in some places was, even if your opinion is valid, if it didn’t fit the group speak, it would be downvoted regardless.
It wasn’t really a great indicator if your opinion was popular or not, it was more if it got that groups niche.
... That's called popular opinion lol.
Of course it matters where you say something. It's literally no different than IRL.
That and also many subs wouldn't allow people to participate if they didn't have a high enough karma
That was used as a crude spam filter against bots and new accounts
Yes, people definitely did. Maybe not a majority but a lot
Karma did limit where and how frequently you could post
And that makes sense to some degree. I used to mod a large community on re**it and usually rage bait/flaming/troll accounts got filtered out by our automod which was set to 50 karma iirc. Most communities that use a karma filter have it set really low so farming a lot of karma is really unnecessary
Y'all act like that can't happen on Lemmy. The total score is already visible via API. Nothing's stopping a community from running a bot that auto removes anyone below a threshold. It's entirely possible right now to write that code.
I didn’t. If anything I enjoyed the downvotes sometimes. Your downvotes mean nothing
I always thought it was amusing if I got into an argument with someone and they downvoted each of my comments before replying as if that meant something. Dude, I already get that you don't agree with me. Why are you bothering?
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Did people actually change what they’d say based on whether or not they thought they’d get upvotes?
I'd argue anyone who did that probably had nothing interesting to say and/or didn't actually care about what they were saying. Same with the people who complained about downvotes.
/me watches some dude post hateful contrarian bullshit on a light hearted comic.
"It's not even funny and this shit comic comic has been done before. Quit self promoting on reddit bitch!
Edit: Why am I being down voted!? Fuck you know it's true! Mods temp banned me apparently. I don't care I'm never going to block her so I can always down vote!"
Somehow everyone who commented on his parent comment has every comment in their profile down voted for the last 50 comments...
Oh I remember those, wasn't that the brigading train?
I think you are envisioning something a little more intentional/thought out than it is. We do this socially all the time. You gauge the audience and you adjust what you’re going to say to better fit it. Or to upset them if you’re trolling but that tends to be more deliberate.
I bet if you took your comments from a hobby sub/forum/group/etc. you frequent, and then one from a meme community, you will find your tone and rhetoric are very different. And again this is not a bad thing! You are doing and saying what is appropriate for the context. It is very natural to do. But the point is you probably don’t sit down and calculate your exact wording. We just sort of do it, and our goal is generally to “fit in“ or get some affirmation from the community we are participating in.
Yep. I remember someone asking on a hiking sub about a backpack. It was a very fashionable and heavy canvas pack. I hike a good bit and have never seen a pack like that being used by others in the trails, so I said that I wouldn't recommend that pack. I think it had like 30-40 down votes. I never gave my opinion on a pack again.
I think the karma system on reddit had a real effect on behaviour. What you often found it did was cause people to write comments for the audience of voters instead of for the person they're responding to. This eliminates personal interaction between users and turns everything into soapboxing. You stop having real conversations with each other, instead it becomes about pandering to votes.
This then also causes people to vote based on this as well. "You're not saying what the group wants to hear" downvote is the voting behaviour it creates.
This so frigging much. People are not having conversations, they are posturing.
It's like going into a debate prepared for discussing ideas, and the other debater is going for discussing emotions.
Truly fucked up and patently divisive
Yeah it's annoying. Things are far more pleasant when people are actually talking to one another, it creates a more human interaction and you don't get the kind of bad-faith engagement associated with trying to pander to votes. People self-censor far less as a result as well, aside from instance rules.
The weirdest part is the interactions, I swear to God people is hell bent on their conversations being pre-tainted with assuming the worst possible take on the others side.
It's like people can't no longer have different thoughts on the matter without going full civil war in the comments
To be honest I've gotten used to that and have had that here with "you glorify Lenin blah blah blah 100gorillion deaths gommunism no food". I think that's a specific type of person issue.
:/
Guess it's gonna take a while. I think it'll never get used to it haha
The amount of deleted downvoted comments makes me think most people at least change their minds afterwards. Which to me is the real weird part, you hide your opinion so you don't lose useless internet points..
how do people on this site not realize that the points next to your posts affect how your posts are sorted and are literally the exact same system as reddit? am i just so blind that i can actually see the numbers next to my posts or is everyone here just trying to be so anti-reddit they'll make up bullshit that isn't reality?
They are talking about karma as a thing you could collect, point totals for all posts added together displayed on your profile. Not the voting mechanism itself.
Lemmy also has this and everyone's point totals are visible from the API. If you're not seeing it, that's because your client is hiding it, not because it doesn't exist.
The nice thing is though, it's different for every server and from every server, so unless you follow a convention to say the user's homeserver vote total is the definitive amount, then there's no true karma.
My beehaw account is a great example. I made some comments on Lemmy world before it defederated. World and shitjustworks users can still vote on the old comments but they won't count to my home total, and from Lemmy.world my vote total won't change for that account significantly from that point. The vote totals on this lemmy.ca account will be different from lemmy.ca, beehaw.org or lemmy.world's perspectives because the servers defederated can't see the karma I earned on each comment on the other server, while lemmy.ca can see both.
Downvotes are also disabled on beehaw, so any downvotes won't affect my total at all but could show on other servers.
Lastly, there are some servers with 40000 accounts and 3 active users (who post and comment), vote botting is feasibly a thing. Imagine if I made a Lemmy server at Rentlar.org and as the admin I made 20000 accounts who upvote me every where I post. I'd be the first user on Lemmy with 1M total votes, but would that mean anything other than I'm a somewhat tech-savvy narcissistic loser? No.
Wait why is downvoting disabled on beehaw?
because being negative isn't allowed there.
You are pretty much correct. Although the moderation is very strict, it makes for a more laid back and friendly experience.
its real laid back because there's so few people there.
Discussions with 5 friendly people are more fun to me than with 20 decent people and two jerks.
And there is 0 content so no one is going to show up. This site will fizzle out if all the admins don't start pushing to grow so that nitch communities start getting populated.
I know where you're coming from but this is a misguided take, imo.
Servers like Lemmy.ca, beehaw.org,have stuck around just fine for over a year with less than 30 people actively posting. When I joined in March this year, All/New was the only way you could get a refreshed set of stories more than once a day. But it was fine like that too, imo.
So Lemmy servers can totally survive without the need to grow for growth's sake. This mindset that says growth at all costs is what turns websites into shitholes like Twitter and Reddit, and reminds me too much of the hunger for infinite unsustainable growth commanded by capitalism.
Lemmy also has that bro. Some clients display it and some don’t, but when I click on your name I see that you have 510 total comment score and 0 total post score.
https://i.imgur.com/NxSyRDg_d.webp?maxwidth=760&fidelity=grand
I believe the devs have said they aren't going to make it officially visible, which is all I care about. If you want to make value judgements on people based on a number so bad that you had to find a client that shows it, more power to you.
I hadn't thought about it until just now but IDK if that number is accurate. My instance doesn't have downvotes, so if you view my profile from lemmy.one it might look like I have a higher karma than if you look from lemmy.world, I'm not sure.
Take it all wirh a grain of salt I say
And that system was irrelevant on Reddit just like it is here. You still have a total karma number in the API, every app I have used shows it, even if it is broken right now. Only the default theme on the web page hides the number. The only people who saw value in karma are the people who farmed it and the people who bitch about the people who farmed it. Either way, making posts that get a lot of upvotes specifically to get a lot of upvotes happens here just like I does on Reddit so idk what this OP is trying to say because they're farming karma lol.
There were many subreddits that did not allow participation unless someone had a karma over a certain threshold. For many of them the threshold was pretty low, only meant to stop brand new accounts and trolls, but still.
Additionally, the "people who farmed it" often did so because a reddit account with a high karma score was literally worth money to adspammers and people running bots.
The karma system contributed to what made reddit bad.
Karma is the total of upvotes and downvotes a user receives over time not just single posts and comments. It leads to discrimantory moderation and users tend to whore themselves out for upvotes to boast.
Ever heard of gallowboob?
and this site has that exact mechanic in the API.
It wasn't a 1upvote=1karma system on Reddit. Mostly, Lemmy does it better by the community caring less and not having posts limited if a user is under a threshold.
Arguably one difference is that on lemmy it's just a straight up sum AFAIK, while on reddit there are some algorithms attached to tweak things so you can't lose vast amounts of karma from a single shit comment and such.
you can only lose 15 points for a comment and 0 for a post. the only thing they do is they jitter the total points to fight botting. its designed to make karma a representation of content given, not necessarily that you have a high hit rate.
Reddit bad lemmy good, you are not allowed to say otherwise.
Edit: Bruh people on lemmy don't get sarcasm either 😭
[This comment has been deleted by an automated system]
Pretty sure karma isn't properly federated since nobody cares about it
You are correct. The calculation itself is bugged, and any time you delete a comment it resets to 0.
That's what I fucking did. Reddit was shit not because of karma, but because of hivemind and owners. Lemmy is not protected from that either, but at least users potentially have more power here
Literally seen 0 people asking for karma system
Also karma on Reddit is basically irrelevant. The only place it matters is in automoderation removing posts and comments for users under a certain level of karma.
Which is honestly freaking dumb. Sure you can do it with a big community but it will speed up the hivemind and alienate new users and frankly did nothing to curb bots because bots just farmed karma elsewhere on a sub where it was open by spamming posts and comments. And then went right back on the "threshold" subs.
I mean, upvotes are counted and tracked so how is that different than karma?
Shhh let them just enjoy it for now
On reddit, if your karma is too low you're not allowed to participate in most communities.
I mean, it's a super low bar.
There's currently nothing stopping a mod from creating a bot to do the same. Maybe it's already a thing.
You don't have a score.
https://ibb.co/q98R6sv
I'll dissent. I like the karma system. It gives me a quick read out of who's a troll and who isn't.
I don't care about post karma so much, but the comment karma was an interesting stat.
Edit: An important caveat. We MUST keep downvotes visible. MUST. Having just a positive score breeds absolute insanity.
Negative karma doesn't necessarily indicate a troll, any unpopular opinion can get down-voted to hell while similar but differently expressed ideas get up-voted in the same thread. I'm not against karma system though, just think it's quite useless in most cases.
All comment karma tells you is who was first to a thread basically in my experience, and I had over 500k of it lol it's nothing though I could go troll for days before making a dent in the 10k you get from an obvious joke on the new tab and then the thread takes off
Best way to tell if someone is a troll is just to look at what they say imo 🤷🏻♂️
I had my third party app and browser extensions set to automatically hide comments by people with very low karma and very low comment scores. I'd only ever see hateful comments if I clicked to unhide them and I liked that
Doesnt lemmy have a karma system already? I can see up votes on my posts, and a sum total on my account page.
Or do you mean something else by “karma”?
some third party clients sum up the upvote count of your posts to make a countturns out the lemmy api does send it to youbut lemmy itself will never get a proper karma system in the ui as has been said by the main people working behind it multiple times
The apps aren't "summing it up", while the lemmy webUI does not display it, it's perfectly accessible via API.
Wow you’re right. I’ve gotten so used to Memmy and Wefwef that I didn’t realize the main site didn’t have it lol
but you just said lemmy has the exact same karma system reddit has.
Kbin has “reputation” unfortunately. I like Kbin enough to ignore it and I’m hoping others will do the same.
I use it the same way I did on Reddit; it's a decent gauge in how willing I am to engage with that person. If their history is littered with downvoted posts, then I'm less likely to engage because it's more likely they're being inflammatory on purpose.
Karma systems don't make places worse; the value placed upon them by the users does. It's not meant to be a counter for how liked you are, it's supposed to be representative of how you interact with the community; bad karma for bad interactions. But people use downvote as a disagree button, and people spam posts cause "big number make feel good". Good idea, difficult implementation given how humans work.
hmm, checked the API documentation of lemmy itself, this seems able to get a person comment/post score data https://join-lemmy.org/api/interfaces/PersonAggregates.html
Reddit has a karma sum which is used to deny access from posting altogether. Here if you say something unpopular, you don't get the dopamine hit from upvotes, but you're also not silenced, unless the mod explicitly bans you.
While I agree unpopular opinions often get shouted down, i think people often forget that sometimes what they consider an “unpopular opinion” is unpopular because it’s abhorrent or just wrong lol. Not every comment/idea is valid and deserves to be entertained.
Being anti-vax is unpopular in a lot of circles and I am perfectly happy with seeing those comments downvoted/ removed and the users banned.
Why banned? The downvotes are definitely deserved but why TF ban them on a sub about a topic not related to vaccines or medicine?
Why are you changing the parameters of my example lol
I’d argue you still can get that dopamine hit.
Even if the numbers don’t carry elsewhere in a meaningful way, seeing the high positive number next to your post still means that other people agreed with/liked what you said on that particular post/comment. And that alone can give a mild dopamine hit.
Less useful for bots trying to farm rep for nefarious reasons, more useful for real people who can feel the joy of a moment.
Where does it show the sum total? I don't see that in my profile or yours. Maybe it's instance-dependent?
Either way, upvotes serve the same purpose here so I think the incentives are the same.
Karma was pointless. Nobody cared at all. Upvotes and downvotes are fine and useful to be able to see both. Karma is a worthless system and encourages spamming low-effort garbage memes and endless reposting of the same shit.
It gave me a pointless feeling of pride and accomplishment. Which was exactly what I did not need.
Getting downloaded here I can see that their sentiment against my point, but it doesn't really piss me off. On Reddit I get angry and try to defend myself It was a really huge waste of time.
wait, you can get downloaded here?
Turns out, I would download a person. Take that, record companies!
I wish someone would download me nyaaa 💕
NGL for me atleast it was a good system to sort out the low effert users by putting a minimum karma points
I marked your name.
This ain't a shit post.
Once there is a karma system in place I'm gonna vote you down to oblivion.
deal
https://imgur.com/a/aljrb6B
Some mighty big words for someone with only 97 karma
Not one time on reddit did i consider or care about my karma
I saved up 14 years worth of karma on Reddit and traded it in for…nothing, because that's what it's worth in the real world.
I'm against any sort of gamification on social media. Not even achievements/badges or awards. That is the start of dark patterns and addictive design.
Exactly. It feels rewarding to receive karma but that dopamine rush is actually what Instagram, TikTok and all the other corporate-driven platforms out there are exploiting. We don't need that here.
I agree. The karma system really pushes group think.
I like being able to say what I want without being banned by a power-tripping mod, or downvoted into irrelevance by a circle jerk. We need to be able to point out that the Emperor isn't wearing clothes.
Does karma change that? We still have upvotes and downvotes, and you can sort comments by how well they do, and mods can still ban people not only from a community, but from a whole instance.
Abolitely 100%. This is not R and people should stop talking about R and stop fucking trying to make it more like R was.
R still exists, anyone who wants that can go back to that shithole.
This is the weird web. A return to a time before it was taken over by 4 major corporations.
Fuck R, fly your freak flags, people!
Well except for those who are here because of a bullshit Reddit ban, but my attitude towards that is "You can't fire me I quit"
We're free of the mundanes, I can say what I want as long as I'm not being toxic af! No auto-moderator is going to flag me for using "Ableist Langauge" because I can't keep with what terms have and haven't been considered "problematic"
I mean, the word "retard", obviously (God what places on the Corpo Net can you say THAT word nowadays?), that's not cool to say. But seriously I had one auto-mod flag me for saying "crazy" because it was "offensive to the mentally unwell"
Bitch I'm bi-polar and literally autistic, I AM mentally unwell, I think I have an n-word pass in this instance... Not that I should need one to say "crazy"
There's currently nothing stopping a mod from creating a bot that deletes comments below certain threshold or that bans users for commenting on communities they don't approve like they did on Reddit. Only site policies can prevent that.
I hope this doesn't become a bot driven cesspool like reddit
Ugh.. I remember the "Sorry you have been banned from...." messages, it was amusing when I was banned from subreddits I hadn't heard of.
Thing is Reddit policies are supposed to make it so you can't be banned from one subreddit for your reputation or behavior in another, I actually told a mod this and he just laughed at me.
r/MegadethFansInTheWild
You are free of that awful place
Did karma ever stop anyone from posting their racist, hateful shit on the other site?
Nope. Frankly a karma system would be such a terrible idea for Lemmy. We just need more mod tools, which is a downside of Lemmy being a new platform that grew really quickly.
Never. It only insensitived the other bad behaviors. Karma farming, fake content, and reposting.
Karma system was a horrible feature on reddit.
Also losing the ratio on comments/posts, now that I would like to see on here.
Not to mention the karma system on Reddit created some of its most annoying users. Would be terrible to bring it here.
I always hated those subs that prevented you from posting unless you had a minimum amount of karma.
I used reddit for nearly a decade, but sometimes I wanted to make a throwaway for a specific, non-trolling purpose but was unable to do anything because of stupid, worthless karma.
For the karma whores out there, if you want a karma system so bad, go back to reddit where you belong. - Ex-Karma whore
Imagine being so addicted to social media you let a number change his you act. Absolutely sad.
I agree with you, but it's an addiction to approval. It's similar to cracking a joke and everyone laughing at it. It is sad but it's also pretty human.
In my early days of reddit i got a bit invested in karma. Enough that i did change the way i posted a bit. I got a few 1or 2k comments, noticed they were pop culture references, and tried to emulate that success.
I grew out of it, but you see how the karma system incentivizes that type of comment.
I wish lemmy does not implement it ! I am here all day now !!
The Karma system was never a great system, I thought. Due to group think on Reddit, at times people get downvoted for no good reason. I think it's good to have a little diversity and not just have a model. I like Lemmy so far a lot and I think it is getting better and better. This is exactly how red it should have been, but they ruined it, of course.
The irony is that is seems like some parts of Lemmy has more of a hivemind than Reddit ever did. That is exasperated by the fact that there are so few of us here compared to Reddit that one or two votes weigh more than they would elsewhere.
Oh no, a few downvotes and you get buried in the tens and tens of other comments!
This is why I feel it's best to sort by New Comments. If discussion is the thing you're looking for, this will push anything newly posted or with a new reply to the top without taking into account votes, so only the actual threads with people talking about stuff are up there. The comments can also be sorted in ways that the votes don't mean jack.
But isn't there a karma system? At least I'm seeing points on posts and comments and that's what karma is/was on Reddit right?
Karma on reddit is the sum of upvotes an account has received on all it's posts and comments combined. Lemmy only has the voting per individual post and comment, but doesn't accumulate this as a sidewide score.
Oh ok I never realised people cared about that I thought it was only about getting rewards and like high scores on your posts.
How have I been using Reddit for 10+ years without knowing this? XD
It affected how easily your comments or posts could get upvoted, the more karma you had the more "trust" you had. Bot accounts were bought from people with high karma due to this reason, and sold further for a higher price after farming.
At some point the post/comment karma was changed to a fuzzy number, someone claimed your karma affected how it was calculated. Not sure if true.
Reading about how digg died, one reason was "front-page" bandits/groups. Basically people grouping up and getting paid to land posts on the front page. The more they did it, the more "trust" they had to hit front page again, similarly to high karma accounts on Reddit.
Lemmy does have a karma system. Here's yours.
Saying what you mean can be impossible when every sub demands "respect" or "civility" instead of honesty, accuracy, and appropriate behavior.
Sometimes telling someone to go fuck themselves is entirely appropriate.
Sometimes explaining to someone why they're being a moron is entirely appropriate.
Yes, you can navigate those situations with G-rated kum-by-yah language, and you can eat yogurt with a fork. But demanding anyone do that is aggravating fucking nonsense.
Intense moderation can create a forum where there's never reason to poke someone over what an asshole they're being - but that's not what anyone's doing, here. They're mostly protecting trolls, by refusing to comprehend what trolling is. It's not when you say dumb shit you don't mean and people get mad at you, like some playground argument with one smirking child in a shouting match about the make-believe. It's people spreading disinformation with textbook fallacy. It's emotional abuse with "do you still beat your wife?" level manipulation. It's not deep. It's neither hard to spot nor hard to call out.
But what's currently forbidden is calling it out.
Insisting people take it in good faith is failure. That's exactly what trolls demand. It is the only way trolling accomplishes anything, ever. If they just said dumb shit nobody believed, there'd be no problem. But the appearance of a sane argument, and the trappings of "debate" around their infuriating horseshit lies, create false legitimacy. It helps abusive dishonesty spread. It is actively ensuring that whatever "free marketplace of ideas" is supposed to filter out total garbage, can't.
And anyone who falls for them going 'punishing me would only make me stronger!' is incapable of dealing with a smirking child. They're just fucking lying. It's not deep, or hard to spot. Call their bluff and see what happens. The answer will apparently blow your mind.
I just fucking say it and tbh, I ended net positive most the time. Wasn't even a concern of mine but I can see how it might have influenced others.
Easiest way to collect negative downvotes is originality or making fun of what passes for German humor.
Easily the communities I spent the least amount of time with.
I'm not understanding how lemmy doesn't have karma when there's still the upvote/downvote function and profiles still mark how many votes you got for comments and posts.
Edit: Someone asked what app I'm using but I can't find the comment. I'm using Connect for Lemmy
The upvote/downvote system by itself is really just a human powered sorting algorithm that uses consensus to move the most relevant comments up where they can be seen, and to hide unproductive comments at the bottom.
So if all you have is an upvote/downvote system, that's all it is. Note that it doesn't matter that much, with a simple up/down system, if you got a bunch of downvotes. Your comment got buried, but that's kind of the end of it.
Karma is a score attached to individual users that probably sounded like a good idea at the time, but it tallies whether you have more upvotes than downvotes, and probably some other mess under the hood. It was supposed to be a measure of how often a given user provides relevant and helpful feedback to others. In practice, it's a social credit score like the one being developed by the Chinese government.
Even worse, karma got used as a metric to aim for, and it's what you used to make sure that your accounts were marketable to buyers, who wanted lots of positive comment karma on accounts, so they could post where they liked once they bought them.
When Reddit was born it was even techy-er than it is, now. So there was a lot of discussion about programming, and programming problems, similar to what happens on Stack Overflow these days.
Imagine I've asked Reddit a programming question of some sort, and soon, some comments reply.
User A, first on the scene: Idunno, man this looks like a tough one (doesn't answer the question, not really relevant)
User B, who showed up later: Ah yes, that's a bitch [proceeds to answer the question in detail, very helpful to OP and everyone else].
So, as a user, even a spectator, you were supposed to upvote User B, and maybe downvote A. Upvoting B was more important than downvoting A, since the upvotes would bring B's answer up to the top, anyway, while A's answer would fall down without anyone downvoting them on purpose. You were supposed to be hesitant to downvote, because of this. The poor answer essentially downvotes itself, no need to dogpile on User A.
Without a karma system, that's the end of it. User A's poor answer has no bearing on their treatment anywhere, their performance is not recorded and shown to the public at all, and User B may develop a reputation as a helpful person by name alone, but there's no karma, there, either. The whole thing stayed within the context of that post. User B's helpful post floats to the very top of the thread on a wave of upvotes, the end.
With a karma system comes a new dimension.
User B, who provided the great answer, would begin to accumulate positive comment karma, and in theory this would help you to judge B's answers in the future, just like you check the reviews on an Amazon listing. Remember that B might be answering a question on which you were ignorant, so you depend on karma to see if this person gives good answers, usually, or if he's just troll noise.
Reddit was born in the era of people asking a computer question and getting, "oh, yeah, just delete system32" as an answer. For the record, that is a very important Windows system process you must never delete, so that's just troll shit, trying to fuck an ignorant person over for lulz.
Reddit was trying to thwart that with the karma system, they needed people to be able to ask questions and get good faith answers. If a user provided lots of troll answers and lies, that should mean lots of downvotes from other users, negative karma. People know not to trust this person's answers, at least not easily. If they have tons of positive karma, shit man, that might be The Woz answering you for all you knew, a good sign.
It was entirely up to you, the user, to be very high-minded about this. So, even if User Z said something that you didn't like, but it added important information to the conversation, you would still upvote that comment. That kinda sorta worked, but then the Great Digg Migration happened, and a flood of normies came on board.
Normies all used the downvote button for what it was obviously for, it's a fuck you go away I don't like you button. It was pretty naive to think it would be anything else, but the founders had high hopes.
Now you can start accumulating negative comment karma from saying or doing things other people don't like, it doesn't take much, and automated moderation systems will start doing things like blocking you from joining communities because you have too much negative comment karma. It is assumed that you would have better karma if you weren't a shitty person. However, it's easy to abuse. If a bunch of fashy people downvote the everloving shit out of somebody for saying something like "black lives matter" now the wrong damn person ended up with lots of negative comment karma.
The fash can also open lots of extra accounts and upvote the hell out of each other and themselves, so they have lots of positive comment karma while being literal practicing Nazis at the same time. It's pretty easy to game the karma system and not very useful anymore. In practice, your karma score just records how often you comment things that the Reddit hive mind agrees with. The highest karma points probably belong to bots.
It's problematic, to say the least.
So it's possible to ditch the karma system entirely while still using upvote/downvote, they're actually two separate things. Since we are no longer all that worried about a solution to programming questions, and since the idea of karma got corrupted and stepped on pretty bad, it would be nice to leave it the hell behind with Reddit, where it belongs.
That is what OP is arguing for. Perhaps on the Fediverse we can forge ahead with new approaches, and let this Reddit-like situation be a springboard to something better in the future, something more unique to Lemmy itself.
This is a much better write up than I expected from this comment section.... you deserve at least hotdog for this effort.
I think they should put an extra condiment on there too, even some onion. Was a fantastic take on exactly how beyond the surface of the system that they are very different at their core.
One of the worst things Reddit to itself did was not address how easy it was to game this system after they blew up and the problems became evident. The flood of automod bots and other things to try to address it just made the platform worse imo.
One thing I never want to see on Lemmy is a bot that checks the communities you're subscribed to and automatically permabans you no matter what. That thing reinforced terrible echo chambers and was a lazy insult to the users of the platform overall.
Having Karma gives users a high score to achieve, which incentives posting things that you know gets upvotes over something helpful or your genuine opinion.
How is lemmy different when we can still see these points. I'm just not understanding, I'm sorry.
Because the points only relate to the post, not you. You can't see your aggregate total from all posts combined, which would otherwise incentivize you to post things that will add to your total "high score".
You still have a minor incentive to post a high scoring comment, but it's only per-comment. If you feel like pleasing the masses, go ahead and play to their wants and needs. You might get a lot of points for it, and it'll feel nice.
But if you wanna tell em how you really feel and put them in their place, you can just not care about your points for that post. It's whatever. There's no danger that your -478 points is going to drag down your total, discouraging you from ever posting something that upsets the status quo.
I think I'm confused because I actually can see how many point everyone and myself has accumulated.
It could possibly be your frontend. What app / webapp are you using for Lemmy?
Finally I can actually reply to you! I'm using Connect for Lemmy.
One problem I foresee is that it would be too easy to game any karma system in a federated space. One could conceivably create their own instance and use bots to give "unearned" upvotes.
Several apps already show total user comment and post upvotes.
Here is your profile from Memmy
I think I saw somewhere that there is still karma but it isn't viewable.
If Lemmy's karma system can stay as it is, without adopting the Reddit way of how it handles it, I guess it's fine. Personally, I'd like to at least have some place to go to, that doesn't have likes, doesn't have karma points or anything. Because it just encourages people to groom themselves to say things, that'll garner the most attention. It invalidates your way of thinking and makes you check back on scores to feel validated.
I hate that I can't go almost anywhere anymore, without seeing some stupid form of a karma points system. It serves no purpose. Reddit's is worse because they tie your account to it. Don't have enough? Welp, too bad, can't post here. Got downvoted to oblivion? Welp, too bad, gotta wait some 10 minutes and fill a stupid captcha check.
If Lemmy can avoid that, then fine, I guess.
I spent a fair amount of time on reddit over something around 15 years (I think) and not once did I happen upon someone with -100 karma that didn't earn it by being a troll. I found it very useful to be able to weed out people who weren't actually commenting to further the conversation, but derail it. Is that the type of thing you're talking about not wanting?
People are confusing (probably due to intentional prompting by those trolls trying to have bystanders fight their battles for them) the very real problem on Reddit that if you chase karma there were benefits to be had in terms of credibility and reach of your messaging and so whatever entities might benefit from such would tend to fill the space over in Reddit with content like that. Realistically that doesn't change the most common content much as it really comes down to the sort of thing people will upvote but it did make it a bit worse. That's being confused with some notion that somehow anyone who wasn't chasing karma was entirely ignored. That just isn't true. You might not be the absolute center of attention unless you've either post or said something especially worthwhile but so what?
I had a fair amount of karma over there and it didn't seem to grant me any special privileges that I could see. The issue for lemmy, is that the data is there, being federated. Maybe all the major platforms can be convinced to cap the top and the bottom, to prevent "karma whores". Say, a range from 100 to -100?
A point system does help to bring popular topics to the top. If someone gives good advice and it gets enough upvotes then it rises to get more views by the larger audience. I think if there was a way to eliminate the point system and still give good stuff a louder voice then I would say that's the system we need.
Anyone who demands a karma system on Lemmy should honestly stay tf out of here.
Lemmy already has a karma system
I agree, but there already is a karma system.
Can I ask for a Korma system? I'm hungry.
I'd rather a shawarma system. Looks tasty.
I've been using Connect for Lemmy, and it lists all your points on your profile. I didn't even realize that wasn't included on the website until right now.
But I LOVE fake internet points, how else am I supposed to know if people like me or not??
Upvotes and downvotes maybe?
Karma sucked ass on Reddit. Essentially people could ban you from participating because you pissed too many people off even though you didn't break any rules.
Karma count is an ass kissing metric, high karma shows that you kiss people's asses for upvotes, low or negative karma shows that people dislike what you say which is absolutely ok. People having different opinions vs going with the group is the difference between a healthy platform and an echo chamber.
By the way Trolls and malicious actors who that system is targeting should be dealt with directly. If someone's posting hateful transphobia instead of downvoting their acount they should just be BANNED from the community or the platform as a whole, keep bad people out of the community.
But a Karma system doesn't impact your ability to post? Or 99% of other poster's opinions of you...
(Disclaimer: Don't care either way, never considered someone's "karma" at all, ever.)
If you have less than x amount of karma on a good portion of subReddits you can't post at all.
That is usually to avoid bots. Any normal person can easily get a couple hundred karma by just posting a bit or commenting a few times, but any bot doing the same is gonna undergo scrutiny.
True. But then you got 1 karma for every comment you made anywhere on the site and often the requirement was like 50 karma.
Restricting posts to users who have managed to make a maximum of 50 comments that didn't overwhelmingly piss everyone off isn't actually very restrictive.
I really don't buy into any of this "oh, you had to only say what people wanted you to say!" handwringing. I never once saw a user with negative karma who wasn't just there to actively cause trouble. I'm quite certain this notion that you had to subscribe to some sort of groupthink to make it through the karma system originates from a very tiny number of people who perceive not being actively anti-social in a social space as oppressive persecution of their "totally valid" "alternative opinions". By all means, show me accounts that were actually participating in good faith that were pushed out of the conversation by the karma system and I'll loudly complain with you on their behalf.
But you can't do that. Because they're always some flavour of racist nazi troll dickhead.
I said whatever the hell I wanted and was frequently confrontational or contrarian and still had some embarrassingly high amount of karma simply because I participated a lot and wasn't actively there to fuck things up by intentionally being a toxic edge-lord troll.
Yes it does. Some filtering is done by reddit and some by the mods. Also your votes don't count if you don't have certain amount of karma accumulated on the sub you are voting.
Obligatory xkcd;
https://xkcd.com/1911/
gem (Gem) research.
::: spoiler xkcd (link)
:::
Agreed :/
Yep,this way we have less bs/repetitive posts just trying to farm karma.
In a way I agree. In my experience with Reddit, the closest you'll get to posting somewhere with zero downvote risk is in r/CasualConversation, and even there, there have been times I've had fate handed to me because of some form of bad influence. There was one question where I basically got called a narcissist for, of all things, asking for advice on what makes an apology good, and ended up getting the short end of the karma stick.
Sometimes things get weird with upvotes and downvotes. I've been downvoted for pointing out that RCV still has spoilers, which is just a mathematical fact, but people don't like bad news.
I got banned from a subreddit for disagreeing with a mod's comment. Asked him what rule I broke and he ignored me. lol
What....what is the number under the post I'm making right this second? What is the overall number when I click on my profile?
On Lemmy.World the only numbers I see tracked in my profile are the total posts and comments I've made.
IIRC, someone mentioned Kbin actually shows a total updoot count on your profile. Lemmy does track it, but it's up to the instance/app you're using whether it's displayed anywhere.
I have a number on my profile now that I look? I never really paid that much attention to it? I don't know if it's weekly or what? It's 74. I've had single comments almost reach that. I don't know what I'm looking at lol
You are in for a hell of a ride when you figure out that folks STILL downvote randoms for self-validation purposes, even if theres no "punishment" for the other user.
What's karma, i was on reddit for 12 years and never looked into it.
It's a system of points where if you make enough ad revenue for reddit u/Spez sends you a dick pic as a sign of appreciation.
Oh man. I would have Karmawhored harder if I had known that was a reward tier.
I earned 7 dicks!
In my experience with having Karma as a mod. If the person had negative karma they were a troll or a really bad person. Giving us the ability to make a community feel welcoming.
I said what I wanted anyway, the karma system didn't affect your ability to say what you want. But yes, the karma system wasn't perfect, nooo way.
I never liked reddit Mods ,they had too much power.
What do you mean, no karma system? There is a karma system.
No idea why we'd want it...
Even on Reddit, it didn't do much.
This post really narwhals my bacon
Do people really consider karma to mean the sum of your comments' and posts' points and not the points themselves?
Yes? I don't think I've ever heard the vote totals on individual posts and comments referred to as "Karma", just upvotes and downvotes. In my experience Karma is exclusively used to describe the total on peoples profiles. "Karma farming" is increasing that number by posting lots of different low effort posts, not when someone posts something because they think that one post will get many upvotes, as an example.
It's a genuine question, because I still check my comments and their scores. Big numbers make me feel good, small numbers make me feel bad. (Not losing any sleep over it or anything.) So I could still see people who make posts they know will get a lot of points being referred to as "farming karma." The same way you might accuse someone of "fishing for compliments" on social media. If that makes sense.
I never paid attention to the karma and would say what I fucking wanted to anyway. The votes mean nothing to people who don't sort by the dumb shit algorithms.
I love that this was the first comment for me even though it had -1 net votes
Sort by New FTW
Reddit new update will trade karma for food
Right now you have 13890 reputation points
Whats the going exchange rate in karma bucks?
10239 post score 540 comment score https://old.lemmy.world/u/awesome_person@lemm.ee
idk, I say the same stuff regardless. Sometimes people like what I say, sometimes they don't
Bravo
Karma needs to stay on reddit
But I want my sweet sweet pointless internet points
If saying what you want to say tanks your karma, the problem might be you and not the karma system.
Kbin already has something called reputation buried in the profile.
I agree but my dude this meme format is for being intensely sarcastic about things you hate, not saying how much you actually love something
It's cool though
I can finally denounce the lizard people conspiracy to steal my catfood!!! Damn you lizard people! Buy your own cat food!!! This is mine to eat!!!
It's also here. Just hidden normally.
No karma system, no karma whore.
Fork the code, add Karama, and run an instance.
"Shitty dick triples, triple dipped in shitty applesauce" could not exist in karma world. Really think about that.
Oh I thought this was talking about videogames.
You always could do that.
Other than karma to post limits, I've never understood why people gave a shit about fake internet points.
I think it was always the same psychology of making a number go up makes people get dopamine or something. Otherwise, it was a system to try and filter out bots used for astroturfing that I felt didn't really do a good job. There were always plenty of karma farming bots that would literally just copy and paste a different comment to create a fake post history.
Its original intent was to filter good vs. bad content. Prior to karma/voting systems, message boards were just a list of the most recent posts by anyone. With a voting system, people can decide what content best fits the community's purpose. If I post a dog image on a cat forum, people can downvote the post so newcomers aren't seeing dog pictures on a forum about cats. Without karma, you're relying entirely on moderators to manage that. It's basically crowd sourced moderation.
Karma has other issues for sure. It can be manipulated with bots. People tend to use it to say "I don't like this opinion" and not to say "this opinion is within the domain of this forum".
All of that being said, I believe karma systems should be hidden from the users. Jerboa is an Android app for Lemmy and it shows the karma count. I don't prefer that. I like being able to vote, but I don't want to feel the bias of "big number == good opinion". But I think karma is a good system for helping moderate the content that shows up in a forum. It's a democratic way of managing content. But it probably has room for improvement.
Let's meta
We have one, it's just not visible on official clients.
You can still say what you want without karma...
Downvoted out of spite /s
While I don't need a Karma System I would like to have some statistics to brag about or at least to look at.