There’s some misinformation floating around regarding Lemmy not having a karma system. While many have discovered otherwise, this is for those who may not have.
While it’s not exposed in the Lemmy default user interface, Lemmy does have a fully functional karma system and it is visible in third party clients such as WefWef and Memmy.
Do with that what you will.
I think I will do nothing with that information.
Upvoted for visibility! 🤪
You have over 2000 points! Nice work bean!
Upbeans and downbeans…
I know I’m in the minority here, but I think the karma system has value and I’d like to see us keep it. I did time as a moderator on a fairly busy subreddit, and requiring accounts to be >30 days old and have >100 or so karma saved us a lot of work. E.g., it made ban evasion a little harder to do, and reduced brigading.
It also helped to keep folks fairly civil and promoted considering perspective when posting, which I think is valuable.
With that said, I’d LOVE to allow communities to disable down votes… it’s a missing feature in reddit, and if you are trying to promote discussion of a divisive topic, or to actively suppress an echo chamber, I think down votes are counter productive.
Voat had a system where you only had ten downvotes a day. Kept people in check
Karma is about which faction will turn hostile to you.
Upvotes are useful for determining what people like and dislike so you can sort posts and comments
Account karma is for narcissists to masturbate about how loved they are
But you have to consider the difference to Reddit’s karma system. If you have a high-karma account on Reddit, your comment or post trends much higher. That’s not the case with Lemmy, as far as I know.Apparently, I was mistaken. Sorry.
Here I see a new comment right above the top comment which is great because everyone has their comment up top at first. This might be a jerboa thing tho
Does it have any effect - e.g. on the visibility of posts? I don’t care about karma, but I do wish the web UI would hide comments with large numbers of downvotes.
I don’t. I have a lot of really unpopular opinions and it’s important to me that everyone knows about them.
If you’ve got a few minutes to chat I can give you the gist.
Honestly is it even worth anything? Even on reddit I didn’t really pay attention to how much karma a user had, maybe when I wanted to check if it was a bot or something.
When it comes to gauging advice, or doing something like buying or trading used goods it was helpful as a proxy for trustworthiness. Older accounts with good karma are a lot less sketchy than brand new accounts.
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Not talking about votes on specific comments. Talking about profile aggregation. I’ve done vinyl trades, clothing swaps, hired people to 3d print things, etc. For those kinds of interactions you aren’t looking at the quality of one specific post, but want to validate that it’s not a temporary account for a scam and that the user generally cares about the reputation of their name on the platform.
Honestly should be removed
I don’t think there is a way to remove that. “Karma” is just the sum of upvotes on all of a users’ posts/comments and that info is always accessible.
We could make the decision to not show that value in the front-ends of course but you’ll likely have very different opinions on that and some front-ends will inevitably show karma.
But if it wasn’t available in the API then apps would have to do a fetch of all the users posts to calculate it, possibly discouraging it.
With Reddit, though, some subreddits required a minimum amount of karma to post, whereas if you have access to an instance you can post freely.
So it’s more a user rating of “this was good/how have you survived until this point” than a gatekeeping device: you, as a poster, can freely ignore your points and the points of others if you don’t care.
