Another Reddit refugee here,
I think we’re all familiar with the Karma system on Reddit. Do you think Lemmy should have something similar? Because I can see cases for and against it.
For: a way to tracking quality contributions by a user, quantifying reputation. Useful to keep new accounts from spamming communities.
Against: Often not a useful metric, can be botted or otherwise unearned (see u/spez), maybe we should have something else?
What do you all think?
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.
Perfect description, hands down.
Also, “Karma” isn’t always a good metric for the quality of a post. On the contrary, even. At least in the subs I was a regular in, posts about in-depth guides, interactive maps, actually useful explanations etc. usually recieved very little recognition compared to (pardon my language) lazy, no-effort shitposts, reposts and memes.
Maybe, only maybe a “comparison” system could work, something like an upvote-to-downvote ratio without raw numbers (“username’s karma is 98% positive and 2% negative” instead of “user has 45,992 Karma”) so there is no real incentive to amass meaningless internet points but others could still see whether they’re dealing with a troll if the “negative” side is noticably bigger.
…in the end, I’d still prefer a no-karma-at-all-system over anything else. Creating content for the sake of offering good content to the community, that’s the best approach IMHO.
An alternative would be to move toward a flag system instead of up/down votes. Funny, Insightful, Helpful, Unhelpful. Then the users could choose if they want the funny shitposts or the useful comments.