Hellos, so, like everyone else here I am a Reddit refugee with a particular and profound hatred for karma, and the idea of it, because I saw how Reddit karma made everything on that hellsite toxic. People’s self-worth became tied to it because it was a direct measure of other people’s approval of you, and so people did everything possible to maximize their karma, including making bot accounts that karma farmed and sold them to marketers. People would fly into a rage and refuse to listen to each other simply because their comments were getting downvoted, making civil debate impossible and causing destabilization everywhere. Reddit karma is double plus ungood.
From what I understand, Wefwef has a similar feature where it shows your total post and comment scores. That’s basically Reddit karma, and it needs to go, like now. Even if it’s client-side, it doesn’t matter, because it is tying a number to people’s self-worth and will cause the same toxic, mean-spiritedness, negativity, anger, vitriol, and corporate marketers exploiting the situation like vultures on a corpse that we saw the last time we migrated to a new site.
Please, PLEASE remove the comment and post scores from the app. PLEASE don’t let Lemmy fail like the other sites did. PLEASE don’t let that kind of hurt be allowed to spread through our communities anymore.
People don’t NEED to be rewarded or punished based on other people’s opinions of them and their comments or posts. They don’t NEED to see that shit. It only causes harm and pain.
PLEASE take it off.
For our sanity’s sake. For our people’s sake. For decency’s sake.
This isn’t specific to wefwef. There are plenty of other apps that do the same, i believe its tied to the actual lemmy api that keeps track of everything.
Ive never been a big fan of karma either, but just having post and comment totals doesn’t really bother me. As long as we as a community don’t glorify it. Even when i was on reddit i never cared about my karma.
Having said that, not everyone is of the same mind set and there will definitely be accounts trying to “farm” points. If one of them posts a lot that it annoys me i can just block them from my feed.
It’s not just a problem that can be ignored away. Troll and bot accounts that farm karma will ruin the site just as effectively as they did on Reddit regardless of whether people block them or not – their presence illegitimizes the site and ruins the atmosphere. No one wants to hang out on a site that is populated with them, they want a site with humans that want to talk to them for their own sake.
Like there are a myriad of reasons people need to be worried about this, and that people are being so flippant about it just because it points out something negative about Wefwef (not saying you are doing that) is deeply concerning.