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 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.
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.
Counter-point: Requirements such as these were the reason repost/copy-paste bots were getting so rampant on Reddit.
Kinda, but not really… if you are a user who has had your account for more than 5 minutes and you’re not a troll, odds are you never run into those rules.
The repost / copy paste bots were mostly to build a believable strawman that could be sold for astroturfing / “viral marketing”, etc.
Should probably be a per-server karma system. Or else anyone could create their own instance and auto-give themselves enough karma to be “trustworthy” and set their account date.
Min account age / min karma are horrible for the new user experience though.
You sign up to say something only to find out you can’t.
I’d LOVE to allow communities to disable down votes…
Upvote-only system is bullshit and you also know it. How else would you motivate user to post a quality content? Karma should also exist for this exact reason.
I don’t want yet-another-facebook-or-youtube here. 🤷
People that post quality content don’t tend to care about internet points. People that care about internet points won’t bother to collect them via posting quality content.
Downvote systems can also discourage open discussion, as too many people can’t help themselves from downvoting dissenting views. Communities end up one sided hiveminds.
Maybe there is a middle ground, perhaps downvotes could be rationed instead of outright disabled.
Not every sub is for “quality content”, some subs are intended for debate / dialogue between people that disagree with each other, and use the downvote button to mean “disagree” … which means if you are coming for a quality dialogue, you tend to only see a quality monologue unless the user base is split 50/50 on the topic, which is rare.
So no free and open discussion then? Only approved group think will be allowed?
I understand the benifits of what you are asking, but those are the very things that lead Reddit to what it is now.
It was more of a response to the minimum account karma.
Account age is reasonable enough, after the service has grown a bit more.
However, if people start getting banned for the wrong reasons and have to create new accounts to be able to have discussion. It does create a barrier for that discussion to take place.
requiring basic levels of karma most certainly is. You have to say the right things first to get the group approval before you can contribute.
Voat had a system where you only had ten downvotes a day. Kept people in check
