No Stupid Questions

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.

I don't think we need it.

You can already see which posts are up/down voted. You can already check a user accounts age and post history.

I don't need more than that.

The only instance I can think of Karma being beneficial is in highly specific forums where user reputation could be an important metric for new users, or those seeking info. Very limited.

When it gets to something as general as this it just becomes popularity/feel-good points. Not necessarily evil, but no real benefit. Upvotes are still a thing for that social media dopamine hit.

No on karma but I would like to be able to buy and give awards as a way to support this

I can definitely live without it, bit I do miss it a lot.

I liked my magic internet points number, man.

I would say something akin to what the name "karma" implies, but not something that can be farmed or botted. Almost like a rating that could factor in multiple different stats; like age of account, posts and/or comments per day, the overall positive/negative rating of said comments, post size, etc... And, it could all be consolidated into some sort of percentage and history graph or something. It would have to be actively developed and debated on to what works and doesn't work.

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.

Yes.

What differentiates these systems from more conventional forums is the karma and voting system. Imaginary internet points give people something to chase, and is no different from people playing Donkey Kong or pinball machines for high scores. It's the same basic principle.

The function it ends up serving though, is to incentivize people to participate in whatever culture exists in that particular community. While not a strong incentive at all, even a small one is enough to push people to be more informative in educational communities, funnier in comedy communities, more understanding and empathic in support group communities etc etc.

By combining this basic high-score incentive with the standard voting-pushes-shit-to-the-top, you can create a system that naturally pushes communities to better and better content. This was a key to reddits success in eventually becoming a body of preserved information, not too dissimilar to wikipedia or quora. But funnier. And with more porn.

Nah, we don't need that here. Karma has always been senseless IMO. I always hated when I wanted to post, or even comment on a certain sub and I couldn't because I DiDn'T hAvE eNoUgH kArMa.

Mfers arguing whether reddits equivalent of a captcha will affect social interaction.

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.

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?

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.

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.

I Gota downvote this idea. Karma was my least favorite part about Reddit

I think it should, but perhaps it shouldn't be as prominent as on Reddit, and maybe it should be called something more boring, like "post vote sum" or something, to make people place less importance on it.

Edit: would love some input as to why this suggestion is being downvoted. ^Or is this just an example of the circleherky behavior you were all convinced was because of karma...?^

It's already exposed in the backend, so apps can display it if they want.

No. I think the numbers game lowers the level of discourse.

Karma was always so irrelevant for me, I won't miss it.