I definitely prefer no overall karma count. Facebook does a thing with a top contributor label next to peoples' name in groups which could work. Maybe something fairly easy to attain such as 'Active in community' might be useful.

I think the less competitive the incentives the better as it just drives behavior that negatively impacts groups as a whole.

The last thing I would want is for Lemmy to turn into the karma whoring shithole we just left.

Karma should definitely be used as a metric to get rid of troublemakers, but hidden from regular users. However, I would argue that without a public display of karma there's also no incentive to farm downvotes, so maybe we could stop using it all together?

The way I see it, we are here to enjoy ourselves and discuss topics with people all around the world. We don't need a metric or competition for that.

I know that people are wary of the idea of karma counting because they don't want it to become a performative karma farming dance like you often got on reddit.

For the first few months, I don't see how bad it could be. But rather than implement it and have to remove it later, maybe just set up a competition of number of communities started, and/or posts/comments made.

I know it's not ideal but you could probably make a shortlist of super active users and then manually comb their posts as a quick quality check. It wouldn't be fully objective, but my point is you can pretty much do what you're suggesting without counting karma.

And I do love that it's impossible for people to show off their point/karma total on this platform. The reward should come from the enjoyment of contributing and helping others, not from a trophy sitting on your mantelpiece.

But that being said you make a good point. I'm also worried about losing momentum here when the honeymoon period dies down. Just mentioning some counterpoints you might not have considered.