No Stupid Questions

I think Karma was responsible for people always trying to make a witty comment and made them way to attached to their account. I don't think that it's a healthy system an can live good without it.

NO

We don't need that trash

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.

No.

But if it did I'd prefer if it was divided into categories of some kind. Like, people often downvote content when they disagree, even if the content itself is good quality, or they might be posting legitimately funny/topical meme/jokes in a community where joking is discouraged.

It might be interesting to have a few options for votes, like agree/disagree, high-quality/low-quality, appropriate-forum/inappropriate-forum, or something that that effect.

So I could vote a post that is well-written and on-topic but that I disagree with as disagree, high-quality, appropriate. Or I could vote a joke reply that is on-topic and funny, but in a serious-only community as no-vote, high-quality, inappropriate.

Honestly, that would probably be a disaster in practice, but it might at least be a fun disaster!

In any case, I agree with others who suggest that vote tallies should be attached to posts, not users, at least publicly. There might be some utility to allowing mods or admins to see tallies for users.

Oh, and it seems to me that whatever system is used Lemmy-wide should provide some freedom for instances to handle user/post karma in the ways that they prefer and in a way that works well with federation. Like if my 'FunDisasterLemmy' instance allows voting like the above, when that data is federated if it isn't relevant to another instance it should be handled gracefully.

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.

No, karma is a big contributer to the lesser experience that Reddit offers, while giving nothing useful in return

I feel like karma is a bad metric to track quality contributions, especially if it is global to all communities. It's far too easy to farm. People that make useful contributions in specific communities will be known over time by other members of said community anyway.

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.

Lemmy actually already has something called "reputation". You have -3 sorry.

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

Definitely against karma. Some retard can say something smart once in a while, would you dismiss what he says based on his karma. Opposite is true, a smart ass can be completely wrong and yet have huge karma.

User karma on comment, not on people.

No.

I worked for a couple of years in the Tech Startup space not long ago and in little companies like that everybody does kinda work with everybody else, so I did work together with the Digital Marketing side too.

Anchored in what I learned there I have a feeling that Karma is often used as a sort of buy-in and gamification strategy.

On the first part (not sure if buy-in is the right expression but stay with me here), it gives people something that feels like a personal asset: you've put time into making posts and you got this "stuff" from it, which intellectually is just a number by emotionally is something that is "yours" and you got by putting time and work into it, and this "stuff" is non-transferable so you're less likely to leave because you don't want to loose it.

On the second part it's all part of a game loop to incentivise posting: you post, people read it, they like it, so you get karma, which feels good so you post some more to get more karma in turn resulting in more of the pleasure of recognition and that "score" going up. Whilst it's really up-votes that do most of the "pleasure of social recognition" side, karma amps that by adding a score and all the game-like elements of it, such as competitiveness between "players". (Also note that this whole game-loop is why many social media sites don't have or removed down-votes - with only up-votes pretty much everybody no matter how shitty their content gets at least some of that sweet positive social-feedback, which feels good so they'll make more posts so there's more content on the site which attracts more people spending more time there, yielding more eyeball-hours for advertisers hence more $$$).

Karma does make sense in a purelly expert context to allow people to recognize those with somewhat more expertise (though it really doesn't measure that with a correlation of 1, as people get karma for sounding right, which is not the same as knowing what they're talking about), but in a system like in Reddit it doesn't work like that because one can gain far more karma from just saying something which is "popular" and "aligns with the groupthink" in some political-heavy sub or making interesting posts in the "relax" subs (say, posting jokes, memes, cat-pics) that you can by providing genuinelly knowledgeable expert advice on expert subs, as do it with a lot less effort, so people's karma doesn't really work well at showing expertise, unless, maybe, if karma was per-sub.

No. This isn't reddit. Want Karma? Go to reddit.

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

I couldn't really see the point at Reddit (seemed like an idea someone has once early on that got stuck) and I don't think it'd be that helpful here. If we are looking for ways to differentiate ourselves from Reddit, then that'd be one.

Let the quality of someone's account be measured by the quality of the posts they make.

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 don't see what problem it solves. You can already look at your posts and comment history and see what got upvoted, if that's something that you care about.

NO.

No. There would be so many reposts and low effort posts and those annoying ''funny'' comments.

No

I pay attention to individual comments, as feedback from people. Bathe karma total, though, I never think about it at all. I started just deleting my reddit accounts every 2-4 months anyway. Pretty meaningless to me. We could have it on Lemmy or not. I’d be just as interested in all-time word count.

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.

No internet points, please!

Nope, it's fine the way it is right now. if its on the front page good. if not people gotta earn there upvotes. Karma whoreing makes it a competion for everyone. Everyone will be out for themselves and it will turn into reddit.

No

No, because karma's a bitch.

No. It just leads to people gaming the system. I also think that counting upvotes but not downvotes is also a good idea, when ranking which posts show first. Too many people use downvote for "I disagree", which means a true idea with less than 50% popularity gets buried.

Been on Reddit for years, honestly never cared for karma. It's just there for me. I barely look at my own or other people's profile page anyway.