I am curious to hear opinions on the concept of user karma in general.
Do people miss it?
Are we better off without it?
From a technicial perspective, I don’t see why it couldn’t be implemented. I understand Lemmy doesn’t track this explicitly. However, using a users post and comment history you could come to a number pretty easily, right? I was considering making a toy app that would take a user and instance and spit out a karma score for post and comments, what would stop others from doing the same?
Will it be inevitably pulled into existence by Lemmy users as we mature the platform?
I don’t think that the concept of Karma should be implemented in the Fediverse. At least not, like we know it from Reddit.
Reddit’s Karma was handled like a currency, and in order to obtain such, the overall-quality of the content declined as a result of Karma-farming.
In my opinion, the fediverse feels so new, fresh and exciting, because there is no such thing as Karma. No barrier that hinders one to post someting, because a certian count of Karma - or Lemmy-Schmeckle, call it as you want - would be needed to post something. Yet.
I personally think karma is mostly harmless, much like the downvote. In practice it’s the way it’s used that kinda spoils it for everyone.
I hated the karma system. It led to people doing a whole bunch of stupid one-liners like out of a marvel movie and things like cake day posts.
Edit:spelling
…is it bad that I actually liked reading one-liners and “happy cake day” comments? _;;;; TBF it’s been a while since I watched a Marvel movie, so I don’t know if the ones you hated are the ones I liked. I suppose you must be right that a lot of people just said things for karma, but I always assumed they were saying it for the lulz. Stupid one-liners seemed to be the whole point of certain subs, presumably because at least some of the people there enjoyed them.
I feel like it led to a lot of toxicity I’d like to avoid here
I accumulated a good bit in a short time and didn’t care. If I was trying to decide if someone was a bot, a horrible person, or just clueless, I’d glance at post history. That seemed to work well. I assume you can do the same here, I just haven’t tried because I haven’t needed to. Yay for that.
There is a kind of subtle technical problem with karma, which is (technical) problem of trust. I haven’t looked at the Lemmy spec, much less the source, but decentralized systems always have an issue of, who can you trust?
Let’s say I want to have a user account with inflated karma for some reason. I can spin up an instance and simply assert what my karma is—and if I need to, I can create a bunch of fake accounts on my instance and create a bunch of fake posts and comments and assign fake karma scores to them, so that it can be audited.
Now if other instance owners get wise to what I’m up to, they can defederate me. But this creates a few immediate problems, including the problem of adding more administrative load to instance owners generally. The bigger problem is the witch hunting that could ensue, if a culture of karma were to develop as it has on Reddit.
That’s such a good point. There’s probably ways to get around that issue, but I take this as a sign we don’t need karma here
Yeah, it’s like the old saying: “on the internet, no one knows you’re a dog.” Some of the spyware-driven networks create a layer of verification by removing privacy, which we don’t want, but at least non-private networks make it easier to spot dogs.
That is fascinating, I never considered that.
I feel like karma is mildly useful to identify potentially disruptive users, but it’s so easy to abuse it that it isn’t worth the trouble:
- you can farm karma posting low-effort but still generally liked content (I did this all the time in another site; it’s damn easy). That negates any potential usage of karma to identify disruptive users.
- moderators start using karma as a low-hanging fruit way to discourage newbies from their communities.
- once you gamify the system, some people will game the game. You get for example mods removing content from users, just to repost it themselves for karma.
- accounts with a lot of karma become a commodity.
It’s theoretically possible that someone creates an add-on that tracks your karma. That’s fine - as long as it doesn’t become the default experience, its impact on the overall Lemmyverse environment would be almost nothing.
On your first point, I think that’s similar to a captcha. Captchas obviously don’t stop all bots. But they stop the vast majority. The fact that you can get cheap karma doesn’t negate the fact that it can still serve as a filter.
But I agree on the second point. I think karma shouldn’t be a hard barrier to contributing somewhere. It should instead be a factor in anti spam measures. Eg, automation can be more suspicious of comments from people with no karma and we can do stuff like require manual approval for really questionable comments.
IMO, the absence of karma has little impact on the third point. I think many people who want karma aren’t merely trying to get a big number on their profile. They want attention in general. They want things they post to get a ton of replies and lots of votes so it’ll be seen.
A system to boil down the “not-shittiness” to a single value isn’t the worst idea.
Currently, it’s really hard to distinguish an average user and a bona fide asshole and a bot account.
Now, if the reddit style Karma is the right tool, I’m not sure.
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I tried the thunder app for lemmy and was disappointed to see it showed a total “karma” number. I’d been enjoying not having a running total. I like seeing my comments and posts get appreciated but I see no need for it all to add up.
One of the things I liked about the fediverse was I was less likely to be told I’m farming karma. I just like posting things that I think will promote a discussion.
I don’t want people to claim I’m trying inflate my imaginary internet number again.
I agree. It’s the one thing that puts me off about Kbin. Socialising shouldn’t be a popularity contest.
I think these are the 5 things we can all agree to never add in Lemmy:
- Restrictions on posting based on Karma.
Abusive powermods once claimed they allowed people to post on subreddits but they completely lied and made hidden rules on Automod. This should never be allowed again. Just so we are clear, it’s both thread posting and commenting that abuse mods removed.
- Karma power
We know Reddit has done something to allow people with unrealistic karma to get special things. I say that should not be allowed. It creates bot accounts and black markets.
- No fake Karma
I know some Lemmy severs will try to cheat and make fake Karma numbers. Reddit made everyone believe your Karma had validity. Instead we should be allowed to know information on Karma. Something like a name list or API account check for developers to verify accounts. Reddit never allows anyone to check Karma, it should be a thing in case of propaganda, sellouts, farming and more.
- Mods should not get Karma
Super simple problem, fixes the issue of mod stealing Karma for themselves and stops Automod Karma problems that people finds ways to beating it. Also, no theses mod accounts can’t be posted in other places, it stays in the community. New nicknames will be needed, it’s not the user account, it’s a mod nickname alias. Something like email where you have 2 accounts and only used business for business.
- Mods that are abusing their community should be kicked out.
The community by vote should kick out the mod, it should not be the admin or other members. The community who were in for 1 month or more. If things are crazy because of admin or mods then that will make people mad and leave the community. Just like Reddit because the fedverse is not Reddit anymore.
I can’t say I ever thought much about karma. I was on the site for long enough that I never had to worry about if I had enough, and I always judged other people on their comment history rather than their karma. It seems like people who did think about it mostly had negative experiences, which I think is typical when you’re evaluating people with numbers, and especially when the numbers are public.
It’s certainly not something I personally miss, and not something I consider particularly useful or important as part of an online forum. If other people really do want it, I’ll go with the flow, but just as a matter of personal preference, I would say no. Whether or not it presents technical difficulties, implementation would take time and effort, and I am sure there are more important features or issues to work on right now.
On kbin there is “karma” although not really working correctly. Maybe make a karma and a bad karma. That will balance out the karma farmers, since it doen’t matter that you harvested 20k plus, since.the 10k minus is shown as well. With one counter you would be 10k good karma.
This is an excellent idea, just show the sum of both upvotes and downvotes, best of both worlds.
IIRC, boosts increase it and downvotes decrease it. Last time I checked I was minus 5. Thus I think of it as a QI score.
That’s a poor way to measure karma since people downvote significantly more liberally than they boost, and boosting isn’t a thing on lemmy.
It does make a positive score far more meaningful, given that no only does someone have to post quotable content, but it’s also really easy to lose.
I think it might be too skewed to the negative this way, though. I’d support it if boosts were positive but there either was no negative, or the negative score was tied to the number of people who have blocked you, somehow.
l liked reddit best before the points mattered.
meta-moderation is a questionable system at best (with more real research needed not admins playing with it like kids) however it works ok enough until the points matter, then they become thier own distorting effect and it starts eating itself.
the meta-mod system on reddit ate itself years ago, its why mods have so much power now.
Karma was a sytem used by bots and powermods, it’s easily abusable and honestly doesn’t really helps much (gatekeeped subs, but that’s where bots and subs that were karmafarms/reposts became useful and abused).
Karma is only sometimes a measure of the overall quality of a poster.
Often (more often?) it’s just a measure of how aggressively they’ve farmed it, which ironically sort of makes it an inverted measure of quality.
Personally, on Reddit, the only times I ever really noticed it was when somebody had wildly gigantic numbers, which often just led to me checking their profile, discovering that yes indeed - they did get those numbers by (re)posting an endless stream of pabulum - then blocking them.
