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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

No karma!

I thought it did already. what are these voting buttons

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.

Is there a way to track it, but not show it? Does that makes sense?

To keep people from farming etc, but to also keep the discussion meaningful?

Tbh I'm also indifferent but I see where your coming from.

I'd like to foster a community where this isn't needed, but people are people.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

I say no, it was ripe for abuse, with karma farming bots which get sold to entities looking to influence and astroturf a platform.

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.

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.

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

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

Please no, no karma, nobody needs another dopamine addiction. Being able to positively mark good comments is helpful, but it shouldn't influence anything - only positive reinforcement.