Should Lemmy have Karma?

whileloop@lemmy.world to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 43 points –

Another Reddit refugee here,

I think we're all familiar with the Karma system on Reddit. Do you think Lemmy should have something similar? Because I can see cases for and against it.

For: a way to tracking quality contributions by a user, quantifying reputation. Useful to keep new accounts from spamming communities.

Against: Often not a useful metric, can be botted or otherwise unearned (see u/spez), maybe we should have something else?

What do you all think?

157

Not just no, but heck no, and no algorithm either. Karma at a glance doesn't tell you anything about quality. High karma users can be anything from insightful posters to inflammatory shitstains to literally not even human. It's not useful for keeping new accounts from spamming - new accounts are created every single day en masse for the sole purpose of accruing karma by any means for the distinct purpose of being sold to spammers.

Karma also tanks discussions - every slightly big Reddit post is flooded with people repeating the same stupid "in"-jokes and puns that were funny 7 years ago by people and bots trying to boost their karma. The first few comment threads in every post become absolutely useless at best, and at worst, bots and bad faith actors clog up the pipes with ongoing spam efforts and purposely deceitful and manipulative misinformation campaigns that are demonstrably harmful to society.

Fake internet points is an outdated idea that imho, has shown itself to ultimately be bad for communities. I personally think that while Lemmy acts as a great alternative to Reddit there's no compelling argument for trying to make Lemmy an exact copy of Reddit. Lemmy doesn't need to be a one-to-one mirror image of a website that we're all literally fleeing because it's a giant shit pile. IMHO.

A karma metric would just hasten the decline that happened to Reddit. People liked OG Reddit as a forum to connect with like minded people. The karma situation lead to karma farm tactics with the goal of selling accounts or promoting commercial or political content. The lack of karma will remove a reason for bad actors to do the same here. It also removes the karma motivation for low effort reposts.

Comments should be voted on based on their contribution to the discussion. That's a natural way to guide the conversation in a productive direction.

I would prefer Lemmy et al to stay away from broad appeal BS like celebrity AMAs, and karma thirsty low effort people pleasers. It shouldn't be a place for special events, it should be a place for productive community conversation.

"The karma situation lead to karma farm tactics with the goal of selling accounts or promoting commercial or political content."

Without karma, they can promote commercial or political content without bothering with the karma farming. Is that really better?

I think karma was used as a way to indirectly help their promotions. High karma accounts would have higher prominence on big subreddits, so their posts were more visible and thus more profitable. Reddit (company) wanted big communities, so the problem was a non-problem to them because it drove fake engagement and made their metrics look more valuable from a sales perspective.

Why wouldn't it be better? The focus should be on the content of the posts and their validity, not based on an accumulative metric that is mistaken for credibility.

No, karma turned Reddit into a hive mind. Everyone knew what everyone expected in each community and would push people to stay in line in order to not get downvoted.

Absolutely NO. Karma farmers were always annoying af, and it also makes people mean and annoyingly circle jerky about stuff.

I agree with you 100%, we don't want to make the same mistakes twice.

Personally, I like that the individual posts and comments have up/down votes. That allows the community to self moderate to some extent. That lightens the load on moderators to police bad content, while simultaneously promoting good content. It also means that the community rules do not need to be so heavy handed as to suppress dialog - take /r/conservative as an example.

But I do not believe that those votes should carry over to any kind of metric that affects users or communities in other ways. Perhaps a hidden metric available for moderators is useful for identifying problematic posters. But any kind of publicly visible metrics turn into some obnoxious internet point scoring game that invites shitposters and spammers and bot farmers.

That's a hard no from me too.

Upvotes and downvotes exist to filter bad content. Anything that tracks points per user will just lead to toxic karma whoring and bots, as demonstrated by Reddit.

In my opinion, Lemmy shouldn't turn into a Reddit clone, it should learn from Reddit's plethora of mistakes.

You know what's funny? I think I voted more on comments here than my several years of reddit already. Having votes kept to individual comments instead of tallied up in your profile like this just feels better to me.

I am personally indifferent. Never really cared on all my accounts on Reddit.

I'll admit that I had a bit of pride in my 550k+ karma on my main reddit account, but I'm quite open to sacrificing this for less toxicity.

Why were you pride about it if you allow me to ask.

No OP but number goes up equals dopamine rush. Same reason I played RuneScape for so long.

It was proof that people liked what I had to say, and that I'd been funny and interesting for at least twelve years running.

Definitely no. In addition to the downsides you mentioned, I feel like the redditor's desire for karma is what causes these hiveminds/echo chambers and cliché comments that are so typical of many subreddits.

Edit: Thank you so much for the gold kind stranger!

I like the current system, you upvote/downvote posts and comments and that should be enough. No points attached to a user only to what they post.

No, absolutely not. It's too easily abused for people who cares about it, doesn't add any value to people who don't.

You can easily accumulate karma just by saying what everyone obviously wants you to say. I have 4 Reddit accounts with 6 figure karma and trust me, unless it's about a topic I am familiar with, what I have to say isn't any more insightful than some other person who has no or negative karma.

So you're one of those Reddit 'comedians' who post the puns and get upvoted to the top of threads?

Sometimes lol. But like I said it's more that the karma I do have comes from the following topics: cooking, pool (the game not the hole with water), engineering, and Ted Lasso. If you get me too far away from those topics, or too far out of my specific expertise in engineering, then looking at my karma to gauge my level of authority on the topic would lead you wrong.

It shouldn't. Karma encourages the vices we've seen on Reddit like karma farmers, hive minds and threads full of unfunny jokes.

Couldn't agree more. I also feel people just say shit that they don't believe in just because it's the popular opinion.

Site-wide karma is easy to game and not particularly informative. Community karma can be a good measure of how involved an account is in a specific community

Karma ends up being the reason people post content - just look at Reddit and you see it; repost bots, people karma-whoring in comments, posting the same tired shit over and over just because it gets upvotes, etc.

We shouldn't need gamification to drive engagement. We're not a single corporate entity trying to drive profits. Early internet forums managed for a long time to get people participating because they wanted to participate, not because they felt the need to make an ultimately meaningless number go up.

Personally, my favorite thing about Lemmy (vs. Kbin specifically) is that there's no account-level karma equivalent. I would be very disappointed if it was ever added.

You said it better than I did.

In my humble opinion: Karma (mainly slashdot onwards, even though some Usenet groups had it) and other "Internet points" originally were meant as weeding tools to reassure other readers/commentators that the poster or commenter was respected/reputable and not only a troll/shill/other-individual-gain. This went haywire along the way (not only on Reddit, but much more aggravated on Reddit) leading to karma-farming accounts who gained more reach and lead. Such as the corvine posting guy who finally was banned by Reddit admins when he used alt accounts to upvote his and his ingroups comments, and downvoting every critics comments.

Alt-accounts and shill voting has been rampant, and you could even buy upvotes from karma farms or sell your karma-rich account to karma farmers or indirect advertisers. It has become a whole economy.

My silly cat, funny and gif photos on Fediverse are not intending to farm karma for myself, it's to increase content in subs, and just like on Reddit, the longer I'll be here the more I will lurk and less I will post.

I truly hope karma doesn't become a thing in the Fediverse. But I would ideally like a system where we can ignore or ban trolls, while rewarding content creators, level headed moderators and sound and just instances.

Maybe it has to come down to gold. The servers cost money to run, and people come here to share. So those who share get gold and those who do not must purchase gold. It may even be that the amount of page views per some unit of time must be paid for with gold, whether gifted or purchased.

I am afraid that the fediverse will be taken over my moneyed interests who can afford to run the servers indefinitely and promote content that no one wants. This would at least allow the user driven servers to survive.

Then instead of using up/down votes, we could use flags. Flags for "Funny", "Insightful", etc, and one of those flags could be "Gild" that must be purchaseable. Those flags could be used in a similar manner to up/down votes, but with more granularity. Certain communities could automatically sort by "Helpful" or "Funny" based on their desires. Communities could even create their own custom flags.

Perfect description, hands down.

Also, "Karma" isn't always a good metric for the quality of a post. On the contrary, even. At least in the subs I was a regular in, posts about in-depth guides, interactive maps, actually useful explanations etc. usually recieved very little recognition compared to (pardon my language) lazy, no-effort shitposts, reposts and memes.

Maybe, only maybe a "comparison" system could work, something like an upvote-to-downvote ratio without raw numbers ("username's karma is 98% positive and 2% negative" instead of "user has 45,992 Karma") so there is no real incentive to amass meaningless internet points but others could still see whether they're dealing with a troll if the "negative" side is noticably bigger.

..in the end, I'd still prefer a no-karma-at-all-system over anything else. Creating content for the sake of offering good content to the community, that's the best approach IMHO.

No. Karma leads to all sorts of dumb behavior like reposting the same 5 videos every day, bots farming karma, hivemind because people are afraid to be downvoted into the negative, etc.. I've actually been thinking about creating a Reddit alternative that doesn't have voting at all, or at least not visible voting.

The karma system, as we former redditors know it, is susceptible to abuse (especially on a decentralized platform), results in a drive to repost popular content repeatedly, and is a poor representation of quality contributions. My vote would be no.

I'd rather not. You'll have people farming the garbage and selling accounts a la gallowshill.

Lolz that's crazy... we should only take good ideas from Reddit.

I'm happy that most folks (in this thread, at least) seem to be of a similar mindset.

I struggled with Karma for a month, then I jumped on a few new 'DadJokes' and copy pasted a couple of puns - masses of Karma meant I could carry on trolling.

Votes are the way to push good/relevant comments upwards or downwards - and without value outside the thread, they'll only be used for that... as it should be.

Problem with a karma system, especially as it is handled over on Reddit, is that it will stifle dissent and promote circle jerking. You can vote controversial opinions out of sight even if they are totally valid but simply run contrary to popular opinions. If Lemmy got a karma system, it would have to work differently and allow for a healthy discourse.

That is a good point. I put a long indepth and very heavily researched post with a heap of links to sources on one of my local subs on there. It was downvoted to oblivion because people didnt like it. You have changed my mind as I was about to say I was in favour of the karma system, but you are right, it does need to work differently

I worked for a couple of years in the Tech Startup space not long ago and in little companies like that everybody does kinda work with everybody else, so I did work together with the Digital Marketing side too.

Anchored in what I learned there I have a feeling that Karma is often used as a sort of buy-in and gamification strategy.

On the first part (not sure if buy-in is the right expression but stay with me here), it gives people something that feels like a personal asset: you've put time into making posts and you got this "stuff" from it, which intellectually is just a number by emotionally is something that is "yours" and you got by putting time and work into it, and this "stuff" is non-transferable so you're less likely to leave because you don't want to loose it.

On the second part it's all part of a game loop to incentivise posting: you post, people read it, they like it, so you get karma, which feels good so you post some more to get more karma in turn resulting in more of the pleasure of recognition and that "score" going up. Whilst it's really up-votes that do most of the "pleasure of social recognition" side, karma amps that by adding a score and all the game-like elements of it, such as competitiveness between "players". (Also note that this whole game-loop is why many social media sites don't have or removed down-votes - with only up-votes pretty much everybody no matter how shitty their content gets at least some of that sweet positive social-feedback, which feels good so they'll make more posts so there's more content on the site which attracts more people spending more time there, yielding more eyeball-hours for advertisers hence more $$$).

Karma does make sense in a purelly expert context to allow people to recognize those with somewhat more expertise (though it really doesn't measure that with a correlation of 1, as people get karma for sounding right, which is not the same as knowing what they're talking about), but in a system like in Reddit it doesn't work like that because one can gain far more karma from just saying something which is "popular" and "aligns with the groupthink" in some political-heavy sub or making interesting posts in the "relax" subs (say, posting jokes, memes, cat-pics) that you can by providing genuinelly knowledgeable expert advice on expert subs, as do it with a lot less effort, so people's karma doesn't really work well at showing expertise, unless, maybe, if karma was per-sub.

kbin has karma. i actually really like that i don't see my karma here. on reddit i became too focused on it, and so wasn't my True self.

I had an 8 year old account on reddit (deleted today) and had accumulated a decent amount of karma. that being said I didn't even notice there wasn't any karma here. the voting system is nice to see which comments are popular but there's no need for it sitewide.

I'd say no, I think adding a incentive metric will just cause posted to be reposted and beat to death. Original and thoughtful discussion is better without it IMO

I think it's good for dealing with communities that don't want newly created users to interact, or even limit the appearance of how much karma you can do X thing.

Yes, because it can be an indicator of reputation of someone.

No, because of the ease of getting it, as well as it can be a basis of someone's ego.

Actually, any number that is attached to person has the same set of pros and cons, except of the ease, persumably. This includes SO's rep system, Reddit's karma system, YouTube subscriber/view/video count, Twitter followers/post count, etc. Adding karma system to Lemmy may have its side effects, but even there isn't one, it may not matter since Lemmy has post and comments counts.

EDIT: In the end, when I'm reading Reddit or Lemmy, I gave no attention to the karma, and instead the vote count of the post/comment itself. Call me ignorant, but whatevs.

Karma made Reddit toxic and limited the amount of conversing people did on the site. Here we can have conversations without worrying about down votes and Karma.

Glad to see how many folks are against it. Karma would not bring any value to Lemmy.

I have over 350k karma on reddit. They are magic internet points worth exactly nothing, we don't need that here. Though I wouldn't mind being able to award people if they say something super cool. Maybe an award a day or a week to give away might be fun. They're still worth nothing, but sometimes a post deserves a little bit more than just an upvote and a little internet sticker on the post is just the thing.

They aren't exactly worth nothing. If you have too low karma (in a subreddit), your comments will be hidden etc. I uttered an unpopular opinion in a sub once, got downvoted to oblivion for it, and since then every single one of my comments is hidden. You always need to carefully judge how many unpopular opinions you can say in a subreddit until your karma falls below the threshold.

I like it for filtering out low quality posters, but as we learned at /r/, that just led to the bots re-posting top posts for karma so they could then be used for spamming.

I think our society is likely better off without a persistent cumulative score next to our names, though.

Agreed. I think we need to start fostering this type of thought process, where people want to engage because they want to engage, not for points or money or anything.

Ideas = currency

I don’t think it necessarily needs karma like Reddit, but I think a reputation system of some sort is going to be required for open federation to remain viable as federated systems grow. Just looking at account age and post history isn’t good enough if the bad actor owns a server and wants to put some effort into spamming or harassing people.

Pretty sure someone who owns a server could just give themselves reputation points.

Which is why the reputation system can't be based on something the user's server says, but must be based on third parties the person checking the reputation trusts.

To give an example, @zaktakespictures@social.goodanser.com might claim to be a member in good standing at /c/photography@lemmy.world, having first posted 8 days ago, last posted today, posted 4 times in total.

You can check that manually by looking at the user page on lemmy.world and see that the posts were not removed by the community's moderators, but you cannot check that the account is not banned as far as I know. What I have in mind would let your server query that sort of thing automatically and set up lists of communities you'll trust to vouch for users.

There could be several options to deal with a user who doesn't have reputation, such as not letting them post, holding their posts for moderation, or having a spam filter scrutinize their posts.

There have been efforts to build reputation systems that don't rely on central servers, like early day bitcoin's Web of Trust, which allowed folks to rate other folks with public key crypto, thus ensuring an accurate and fair trust rating for participants, without the possibility of a middle-man putting their thumb on the scale.

One problem with it is that it was still perfectly practical for bad actors to accumulate good ratings, then cash out their hard-earned reputation into large scams, such as the "Bitcoin Savings & Trust" (for $40 million in that particular case), which quite possibly made it measurably worse than not having a system that induced participants into making faulty judgments in the first place.

I think the main practical value of something like reddit's karma is an indication of age and account activity, both of which can probably be measured in other, if less gamified ways.

For the use cases I have in mind, it's not necessary to make gaming the system impossible, only expensive. Manually banning one spam account is easy. Manually banning ten thousand spam accounts is overwhelming.

I never saw the point, all it ever did was make people karma farm.

I'm a bit confused on this. We do need a way to filter spammers and bot accounts but karma didn't completely work on reddit.

Karma never achieved any of those on Reddit. You want a number? A useful one is "blocked/banned by X number of users/communities". That's a much more useful indicator of bad actors. A bot, or suspected bot flag as well. This things should only be visible to mods and admins, but by all mods and admins. This would filter the bad actors from the site more effectively.

A useful one is “blocked/banned by X number of users/communities”

That won't work at all because bot and spam accounts can constantly be created

A bot, or suspected bot flag as well

That also won't work for new bot and spam accounts.

This is why many communities in different platforms have the option to set minimum account age or karma in reddit's case. I guess they could introduce an invisible point system? I'm not sure and I can't think of a solution myself.

Nah, karma isn't important. If we want an indicator of reputation I'd lean more towards a flair that the community can award.

I feel like karma is a bad metric to track quality contributions, especially if it is global to all communities. It's far too easy to farm. People that make useful contributions in specific communities will be known over time by other members of said community anyway.

I don't think so. I never payed attention to karma or gold or gifts at all. Tbh I never understood them and personally don't feel a need for any of it.

Been on Reddit for years, honestly never cared for karma. It's just there for me. I barely look at my own or other people's profile page anyway.

I always liked having karma around as a personal metric, but I never actually looked at anyone else's or went farming for it. So I think it should be added but not made a determining factor by default. If someone wants to look at someone else's karma as an evaluation, that's their choice.

Probably more important than Karma, Lemmy needs flair or tagging for posts to help with categorization and searching.

In addition to that, Lemmy (and Mastodon) eventually needs algorithmic choice. This is one place where the Fediverse falls short compared to BlueSky. A chronological feed of everything is a good place to start but let me decide what I want to view and how I want to view it. For example, if I am person that cares about karma, let me weight that so people with higher karma show up higher on my feed.

I think Karma was responsible for people always trying to make a witty comment and made them way to attached to their account. I don't think that it's a healthy system an can live good without it.

I don't want Karma, but I'd really like to get notifications when a post or comment of mine hits certain vote thresholds, e.g. 5/10/50/100/... upvotes/downvotes. I think this would help me get a feel of how my posts are received. Currently, if a post of mine gets 50 upvotes, I most likely won't ever notice unless I actively monitor all of my posts.

But with the notification I'd get a nice dopamine rush as reward for posting good content ;)

I personally feel like community karma is a useful metric for quickly evaluating someone's presence in a specific community. Site-wide karma is far too easily-gamble to be a useful metric, though, and whether you had a post go crazy on a big sub means nothing in evaluating whether you're a good contributor to a small sub

No. There would be so many reposts and low effort posts and those annoying ''funny'' comments.

Well, karma itself isnt a bad idea in my opinion, but making it visible to others isnt. Making it hidden will stop the karmafarming.

Nope, no need for karma whores.

Edit to explain: The karma system reddit has, is obviously detrimental to the quality of content. Some people see it as a game, and play for karma, rather than actually posting something that is meaningful to them.

Others put to much significance into it, and get bummed if they are not upvoted, because they think karma equals popular.

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I don't think we need it.

You can already see which posts are up/down voted. You can already check a user accounts age and post history.

I don't need more than that.

Id say no. Karma leads to gamification and gamification leads to enshittification.

I’d rather have lower traffic and higher quality. Karma is of real benefit only to commercial owners, not users.

for what purpose?

i genuinly cant think of any reason other than encourage reposting bots

personally i dont care at all about karma.

so long as the upvote/downvote system works, regarding post (and comment) visibility etc.

No, karma isn't necessarily an indication of good quality. It's also easy to boost your karma on a decentralized social media by creating accounts on multiple instances and upvote your content

I couldn't really see the point at Reddit (seemed like an idea someone has once early on that got stuck) and I don't think it'd be that helpful here. If we are looking for ways to differentiate ourselves from Reddit, then that'd be one.

Let the quality of someone's account be measured by the quality of the posts they make.

I sure hope not. It makes people just say whatever is performative or popular instead of anything insightful.

Anyone here old enough to remember slashdot? I liked their karma system. The maximum a post could get was +5, and I think the minimum was -1. I don't quite recall the details, but it was pretty effective. People didn't shamelessly karma farm because there wasn't any point. If you are at +5 there's nowhere else to go.

Karma is just a drug for Reddit addicts. Just let each post stand on its own regardless of who posts it. We don't need that extra layer of crap. I always disliked that.

No, karma is a big contributer to the lesser experience that Reddit offers, while giving nothing useful in return

No.

But if it did I'd prefer if it was divided into categories of some kind. Like, people often downvote content when they disagree, even if the content itself is good quality, or they might be posting legitimately funny/topical meme/jokes in a community where joking is discouraged.

It might be interesting to have a few options for votes, like agree/disagree, high-quality/low-quality, appropriate-forum/inappropriate-forum, or something to that effect.

So I could vote a post that is well-written and on-topic but that I disagree with as disagree, high-quality, appropriate. Or I could vote a joke reply that is on-topic and funny, but in a serious-only community as no-vote, high-quality, inappropriate.

Honestly, that would probably be a disaster in practice, but it might at least be a fun disaster!

In any case, I agree with others who suggest that vote tallies should be attached to posts, not users, at least publicly. There might be some utility to allowing mods or admins to see tallies for users.

Oh, and it seems to me that whatever system is used Lemmy-wide should provide some freedom for instances to handle user/post karma in the ways that they prefer and in a way that works well with federation. Like if my 'FunDisasterLemmy' instance allows voting like the above, when that data is federated if it isn't relevant to another instance it should be handled gracefully.

It might even make sense to let communities have customizable voting. For example, a 'ChangeMyMind' community could have a 'Did Change My Mind' and 'Did Not Change My Mind' vote option (vs the practice in the Reddit sub of replying with a frustratingly-difficult-to-type character), or YTA, NTA, EAA, etc. (though in that case I suppose that's more of a poll option)

Mfers arguing whether reddits equivalent of a captcha will affect social interaction.

Karma ruined Reddit. Let's not repeat the same mistake here.

I Gota downvote this idea. Karma was my least favorite part about Reddit

I think instead of karma we should have an activity and age metric, a badge or something showing how many months/years your account has existed, and an activity metric like posts&comments/day so that it's easy to tell an old, regularly active account from a young account that is spamming a a bunch of comments per day.

We already have that. Just press a user's name and then you can see all that.

You, for example, created 3 posts, 31 comments and have been on lemmy for ~2 weeks now.

Upvotes and downvotes are nice in that they suggest that I'm not posting or commenting into the void.

I'm not overly interested in my grand total.

I think post karma and comment karma are very different things. Post karma is not as meaningful to me, because all it's really telling you is how badly someone wants to be a karma hog. But comment karma shows a little about someone's engagement and longevity. Only a little though. You can learn a lot more by interacting with users than by looking at their profiles.

Nah I dont even like visible upvotes/downvotes. Just incentives the complementary wrong mindset for healthy discussions.

Your reputation should be what people know of you not points.

I don't see what problem it solves. You can already look at your posts and comment history and see what got upvoted, if that's something that you care about.

How would this even be implemented? What's to prevent one user from generating massive amounts of karma on their own instance?

I don't think karma was ever particularly useful on Reddit. You can't really differentiate between someone with a lot of karma from a whole lot of low-effort posts and someone who has made fewer but higher-quality contributions just from karma scores. For that you really need to look through their comment and post histories

I like numbers and statistics so I'd be interested in seeing them here, but it's just a curiosity and not in any particular way actually useful.

ABSOLUTELY NO!!!

Other websites with karma are full of bots who repost, a few year later, the content that was popular in the past, in order to mine reputation.

Karma also creates an echo chamber with self censorship where people won't post anything unpopular out of fear of loosing karma.

I like diversity of opinion. I don't want facebook, I don't want to read my opinion with a different phrasing.

I pay attention to individual comments, as feedback from people. The karma total, though, I never think about it at all. I started just deleting my reddit accounts every 2-4 months anyway. Pretty meaningless to me. We could have it on Lemmy or not. I’d be just as interested in all-time word count.

There's already "Reputation Points" so don't we already have that, but by another name? I like this name much better than "karma" by the way. I'm kinda good with what we have. It feels like an echo of some things from Reddit are here without being a total clone. Hopefully it won't influence people toward bad/annoying behavior like on Reddit.

We do have a reputation system, but it is being changed. Personally, I think a points system for posts will bring us right back to what Reddit was.

You should post for the sake of engaging with the community you are posting to, but many accounts were repost bots because of the karma system.

I thought it did already. what are these voting buttons

Karma is tied to an account. Just up/down votes on posts does not stick with the account that posted it.

We absolutely need a trust system. I don't know if it should be a Karma system.

Spam-bots are taking up hundreds-of-thousands of usernames across the federation. It is clear that they cannot be trusted.

ChatGPT and GPT4 has made it easier for bots to automatically write comments as well, a few groups with money can make realistic-looking accounts with different posting patterns / writing styles automatically.

The problem of spam and automated-comments will only get harder moving forward. I don't know if Karma is a good enough system for us, but its better than nothing.

What's preventing GPT-based bots to earn karma by writing real-looking comments?

The future of the internet really seems like a dark one...

But programs are tasked by their creators, and if their long-term goal is spam, then we know what their tactics are.

A GPT-bot designed to have good discussions with the community would get upvotes and karma (at least, to the best extent that these programs can do). A GPT-bot designed to spam the community with links or shill a product would probably get downvotes.

So distinguishing between good-bots and bad-bots is still karma / reputation management.

I say don't bother - if it can be gamed by bots, it will. Even Slashdot's mod/meta-mod system could be gamed by the current generation of bots, because a lot of comments / reposts look fine out of context.

If you don't have karma there's nothing to farm, and that means fewer karma farming bots and better overall quality of content.

I can definitely live without it, bit I do miss it a lot.

I liked my magic internet points number, man.

This. We can meme on them all day long, and we know they're worthless, but they feel nice. Oldest account had 40k+ because of a sick quilt my grandmother made.

No, and I believe to encourage free expression of opinion, negative score on comments/posts should be hidden. minimum displayed score should be 1. internally it should have impact. Too negative comments/posts should be auto reported to mods to check if they break rules.

I dont care about karma but i do like to see a users history, something i apparently cant do on mlem. Not sure if thats site-wide or just this app. Without that i wouldnt be able to confidently use the buy-sell communities that i did on reddit like knife_swap or watchexchange.

It's just the app, profiles and history is definitely a thing on Lemmy UI (the web interface), plus definitely implemented into Jerboa.

Yes.

What differentiates these systems from more conventional forums is the karma and voting system. Imaginary internet points give people something to chase, and is no different from people playing Donkey Kong or pinball machines for high scores. It's the same basic principle.

The function it ends up serving though, is to incentivize people to participate in whatever culture exists in that particular community. While not a strong incentive at all, even a small one is enough to push people to be more informative in educational communities, funnier in comedy communities, more understanding and empathic in support group communities etc etc.

By combining this basic high-score incentive with the standard voting-pushes-shit-to-the-top, you can create a system that naturally pushes communities to better and better content. This was a key to reddits success in eventually becoming a body of preserved information, not too dissimilar to wikipedia or quora. But funnier. And with more porn.

Personally, I consider my comment being upvoted the incentive. I don't care about the running total.

It was key to the early days of Reddit's success, and the byproducts of this approach have produced effects that many view as a net-negative. Karma farming and copying content overall harmed the quality of content as time went on. While it was initially a successful engagement mechanism, in a more mature environment it will be counter productive, in my opinion.

That seems to discount the idea that new people are continuing to join the internet every single day, and will have never seen the older content.

It is inevitable that eventually their numbers will build to a sufficient degree that the content can, and should, be reposted to be brought to the newcoming audience.

To actually stop reposting, we would need people to stop having children, ultimately. Otherwise it is simply serving a necessary purpose.

That is a really good point, and I'm on the same page with you as far as reposting where credit is given. What I'm referring to on the concept of reposts is more akin to something posted by an originating author, which is neglected or ignored, until a high karma user simply reposts it and an engagement algorithm is tuned to float it in the feed based on karma and individual user-influence. The end result is that original content gets discouraged in lieu of limited gatekeepers of the "hive mind" nature of deigning what's "popular" vs the quality of content sorted by non-karma based metrics, if that makes sense.

To put it another way, it's just my personal preference after seeing the sheer amount of low effort karma farmers that recycle unoriginal content recently posted who are able to float posts to the top, as opposed to truly original or engaging ideas being encouraged.

That's for me at least why I'm so turned off to the idea of a user-centric reputation model as opposed to the content quality metrics, that being the individual upvote and downvote trends for each post. There won't ever be a perfect system, and I'm sure there will be reasons to attack that notion later.

I see. Thank you for clarifying, I'll need to consider this further.

You're a really pleasant person, and I'm also rethinking, it's such a mixed bag of a concept as to what's "better". Maybe what really matters is the overall oversight of the instance hosts and style of administration for these micro-communities. I really do appreciate the tone of discussion here and have to check myself as people here don't need to wear the "battle gloves" as it were.

No need. New users can be kept in check simply by being new, as in age of account. Active users can determined by their history.

Adding a point system inherently makes it a game.

Unless its like Whose Line is it Anyway, where the "karma" points shown are random for each user, each day. That could be funny.

I don't think we should. I think we should get rid of (visible) up- and downvotes all together. There are too many online spaces where you can get status from likes or upvotes. Let this be a space without all that.

I love the mastodon approach. Each instance is free to enable this numbers, but by default all numbers of up, down, likes, boosts or retweets is hidden. It makes for such peaceful interactions and stress free browsing. There's no number to track and cause anxiety or anguish.

We don't need people Karma Whoring.

Karma is a great indicator of the popularity of what you're posting to help you post more excepted things. There's no reason for us to bring the reddit pissing contest here.

No, it's not necessary. Who cares who contributes a lot? If a user cares about karma, then they should just stay at Reddit. We don't need this to be a Reddit clone.

No. It just leads to people gaming the system. I also think that counting upvotes but not downvotes is also a good idea, when ranking which posts show first. Too many people use downvote for "I disagree", which means a true idea with less than 50% popularity gets buried.

Similarly the most voted ideas does not mean they are good ideas, However, it is right that ideas that are too shitty go into the oblivion of downvotes.

No. I'd rather no up voting/downvoting on comments at all. It discourages discussion.