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?
“The karma situation lead to karma farm tactics with the goal of selling accounts or promoting commercial or political content.”
Without karma, they can promote commercial or political content without bothering with the karma farming. Is that really better?
I think karma was used as a way to indirectly help their promotions. High karma accounts would have higher prominence on big subreddits, so their posts were more visible and thus more profitable. Reddit (company) wanted big communities, so the problem was a non-problem to them because it drove fake engagement and made their metrics look more valuable from a sales perspective.
Why wouldn’t it be better? The focus should be on the content of the posts and their validity, not based on an accumulative metric that is mistaken for credibility.