No Stupid Questions

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

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.

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.

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Fake internet points is an outdated idea that imho, has shown itself to ultimately be bad for communities.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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

No thank you.

Why? They are useless and some people go crazy about them.

Why should we copy the bad if we are trying to build something better

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

No. We don't need to make Reddit again. Let's do something else.

It leads to garbage tier repost trash.

No

No

No Karmq ＝ No Karma farming...

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

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

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.

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.

Hard no on karma.

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

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.

Please, don't

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.

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.

No, because karma's a bitch.

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 don't think it would serve any purpose

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'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.