No Stupid Questions

I'd rather not have karma at all; or at the very least they should try something different instead of just copying what reddit did.

Some servers already decided to disable either the system completely or just the downvotes.

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.

We don't need that trash

No on karma but I would like to be able to buy and give awards as a way to support this

The only instance I can think of Karma being beneficial is in highly specific forums where user reputation could be an important metric for new users, or those seeking info. Very limited.

When it gets to something as general as this it just becomes popularity/feel-good points. Not necessarily evil, but no real benefit. Upvotes are still a thing for that social media dopamine hit.

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

I liked my magic internet points number, man.

I would say something akin to what the name "karma" implies, but not something that can be farmed or botted. Almost like a rating that could factor in multiple different stats; like age of account, posts and/or comments per day, the overall positive/negative rating of said comments, post size, etc... And, it could all be consolidated into some sort of percentage and history graph or something. It would have to be actively developed and debated on to what works and doesn't work.

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.

No. There should be no fake internet points at all.

How would it track positive contributions by a user? You can do that by seeing their comments and the individual upvote/downvote.

Karma is just going to ruin this place.

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.

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.

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.

The only use for karma is filtering trolls

Lemmy hasn't gotten a large enough population to need that kind of filter yet, and it would require an automod capability to use anyway.

So, no, fuck the entire idea of it otherwise. Fuck the algorithm behind it, fuck the hidden nature of it.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Definitely against karma. Some retard can say something smart once in a while, would you dismiss what he says based on his karma. Opposite is true, a smart ass can be completely wrong and yet have huge karma.

User karma on comment, not on people.

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.