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Sure, you don’t get a total of upvotes the way that other site does, but like you said, you do get points for participation.
To some people those “points” matter. Same as karma.
And why would you be against such a change? Not trying to be argumentative, but if the points don’t matter, why would it matter then if they go away or are replaced with a yearly form “well done” symbol?
I mean, you don't get karma. Content does. And some of my posts/commenta have a net positive score and some have a net negative score. But I don't have a karma score.
And, yes, the points do matter to me. But honestly I get emotionally invested in seeing that my comment was controversial. (I don't think I really want my posts to have net negative scores, but if a post has a lot of interaction but a net close-to-zero score, that's often interesting to me.)
I mean, first off, I don't feel you've even explained it well enough for me to get what you're even going for, and that makes me worry that you haven't even thought it through for more than 10 seconds. Would these "well done" symbols be associated with users or posts/conments? (I'm guessing posts/comments because how would they prevent so-called "karma whoring" if they were associated with users?) What do you mean by "once a year?" (Do you really mean "once a year" or more like "any post that's over a year old"?) Would the "well done" be just another way to represent the now-abstracted-away net score? Would upvoting/downvoting be disabled for posts/comments that have made the switch?)
And that's not to even mention the more technical considerations like "would this involve the creation of a background job subsystem in Lemmy to update the data behind the scenes?" and "how would the data in the database change when this once-a-year switchover happens?" and "how would this feature be rolled out to ensure continuous full functionality for users on both apps and LemmyUI?"
But beyond that, even if we worked out the details of the design, making such a change has a cost. A cost in cognitive load for newcomers. A cost in maintenance for the developers (both core developers and app/client developers.) A cost in day-to-day usage. A cost in user base, because no change is going to be universally popular (maybe excepting bug fixes and invisible changes) and for some pretty large user-facing change like this, some folks are going to leave over it.
Simplicity/elegance is a strength. New feature ideas are a dime a dozen. The best software projects are those that don't adopt new features without a damned good reason.
Edit: Oh, Jesus. I just read other comments you've made in this post and you're talking about the number of posts/comments count, not karma. Yeah, you definitely weren't explaining what you were going for well.