It is nice to know your comment/post are appreciated!
Well if you had karma, it definitely would be dropping lol. The karma system was a mistake because it incentivised spam and karma-whoring.
It feels like 90% of Reddit is Karma farming bots (posts and comments) to resell those accounts. Throwing in chatGPT bots & astroturfing and you probably reach 95% of Reddit.
r/place is a perfect demonstration that Reddit is dominated by bots (and admins).
I’ve noticed that Lemmy feels more natural and less inflammatory. I stopped voting or commenting on Reddit so as to avoid giving them free content and curation. Not long after, I started seeing a huge uptick in inflammatory posts and comments, almost as if the algorithm was trying to bait me into participating again. Joke’s on them though, it just pushed me to browse Lemmy even more.
Enjoy it. Lemmy, unfortunately, will change as it grows, as any community has done in the past.
That"s the dark side of karma. I believe it have some good side too.
The good side is really small, in comparison with the bad side.
If you want to amass karma, it’s better to pump out low-effort content, that users see and upvote out of habit. If however you want to contribute with a community, high-effort content is generally preferable; specially reposts of highly upvoted posts. As such, even if karma promotes activity, it’ll promote the sort of activity that ends as noise, for most people in the community.
The above will need to be addressed by moderators, who have a bigger pressure to implement rules against low-effort content. That means that non-mod users need to follow bigger rulesets, and increases the workload for the mods.
Karma reinforces echo chambers, as users with more karma are seen as “more authoritative”. As such, it has a chilling effect on divergent opinions - because people don’t want to lose that façade of authoritativeness. And this snowballs really fast because people voicing those divergent opinions will get lower karma, and be seen as less authoritative, thus the opinion is seen as less trustable than the one promoted by the echo chamber. (Note that this affects even fluff opinions like “it’s fine to say ‘animes’” or “I like pineapple on my pizza”.)
In a certain defunct site, karma raised concerns about moderators misusing their mod powers to remove posts from other users, and then repost them to amass karma. Or users spamming a legit post with reports, through bots, to get rid of it. This can be generalise into “once you set up karma as a goal, some people will use shitty ways to reach that goal”.
Specially assumptive = stupid moderators are prone to assume too much out of karma. Low karma should mean only “people in general don’t like what this person posts/comments”; and yet those assumers often treat it as “low karma = troll” or “low karma = shitposter”.
In another comment, you said:
But ir might be concerning that Lemmy doesnt incentive activity somehow .
I don’t think that encouraging activity is “bad” (far from that!), but that karma is the wrong way to do it.
If you want to amass karma
The good in karma depend of how many people have such objective. I dont think they are so much of them. As long people dont make a carrier of amassing karma , the incentive is usefull.
I’m glad we all want to encourage activity. Karma is probably a wrong way, but lemmy must implement something to drive some user engagement.
I have a solution: Just put a max karma: at 10000 karma you won Lemmy, and cant get any point anymore. NB: that solution would also solve inequality in the world if used on bilionaire
Karma was never what made me want to post. It was seeing people’s reactions to my project/thoughts.
I get it. But dont you think lot of people appreciate having a number go up, when they participate. Isnt that the whole economy of “Like, follow, subscribe”. I dont say it is good or worthwhile, I say it drive more activity (which make a more living lemmy)
Intentionally, Lemmy itself doesn’t total your upvotes and downvotes. You can go to your profile and see them for a given comment or post, but not an overall total. Some apps do show it.
Most of us agree that Reddit karma caused people to post and say things just for the karma, which was an overall negative. People put too much value in the score. So while we have upvotes and downvotes, they’re deemphasized, and that’s on purpose.
My post was mostly lighthearted. But ir might be concerning that Lemmy doesnt incentive activity somehow . Aggregators are as good as how many people participate
I’m not sure there’s less incentive to post generally, but there’s less incentive to repost old stuff, misleading headlines, etc.
fair enough
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God no
Karma doesn’t exist here.
We don’t do karma here, one of Lemmy’s major improvements over Reddit.
This isn’t really true, Lemmy does keep track of the amount of upvotes you get some of the mobile apps display it.
The total is just not displayed on the websites.
it is left to see if this is an improvment.
I’ve been here a month after 15 years at the other place, and it’s an improvement.
Sorry you got clusterbombed, though. You asked a fair question, something I wondered too when I first got here.
Same profil : 15 year in reddit, and I feel it is bad since 10 year. I’m here since yesterday and Lemmy is not an improvment. Of course a smaller community make everything more comfortable. But today I already see a repost from yesterday. The same content cluter the front page. I got timed out. And seen more pussy pics in 2 days than in my whole reddit carrier (ok that might be a plus)
My point is: The community need to grow. encouraging participation help with that. And the concept of instance seems to already dilute the feeble engagement
There’s no karma, only post/comment score.
Karma is often a perverse incentive; in theory it’s supposed to encourage good quality content, but in practice it encourages unnecessary reposts + barely acceptable (but easy to judge) content.
If you’re serious some of the apps track vote counts though it seems like it resets every once in a while.
There seems to be two bugs with the calculation. First of all the count doesn’t sum properly, secondly it resets to 0 when you delete a comment.
This message is to inform you that your account will not be able to post/comment in the next 24 hours due to the negative karma accumulated from this post:
This is a cool-down period to allow you to think how your future contributions will be constructive and positive.
Repeat infractions may escalate to a permanent ban!
Bad bot. OP is a newbie asking an honest question, and for that they get booted by a bot?
It would make sense to notify a human mod when a post is drowning in downvotes like this one, but it’s a mistake to trust the bot to hand out suspensions.
That’s obviously someone making a joking point about karma.
such a welcoming communities
Accumulated karma is not officially tracked. You can however see how many up votes and down votes you have on your posts and comments in the profile section.
Is that value stored on the home instance of the user? I think summing karma is a terrible measure of an account. So if it’s stored in the instance, I’ll update mine to be a large random value.
Maybe we can have the admins of all instances update the value for all users to a random value to make it worthless.
