It looks like this was a larger decision from the lemmy development community in an attempt to eliminate karma farming. They say it’s psychologically damaging, and as someone who looks at them a lot, they may be right.
Here’s a GitHub thread discussing it where our Voyager dev weighs in:
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3393#issuecomment-1779400639
That sucks, I really enjoy when apps have more data to show.
I do like the data. If the app could compute it independently at least for myself, it would be interesting still as a feature.
I would too, but it would undoubtedly be much more resource intensive and so probably not feasible for a free app.
And even if they charged users for it, doing it at the app level would be challenging and inefficient. It’s the kind of thing that really has to be cached, so voyager and any other app that wants the feature would have to independently calculate, store, and recalculate for each lemmy user periodically. Having multiple apps doing this would put more strain on the public api than storing it centrally, and that unwanted strain would most likely cause conflict from the devs that wanted the karma score removed to begin with.
Well each user is running an app, they can each computer for themselves at the very least
As far as other users go, when you open a user and you see their comment history, the app can certainly sum up the votes of the comments displayed without doing any extra queries. That ratio may be useful to identify trolls, or good actors
If each user is caching it, that would be even more resource intensive on the API than if the app was storing it somewhere and serving it to users. It would mean each time that a user clicks on another user’s profile for the first time, the app would need to pull all of their comments in order to calculate their score. If it were cached on servers at the app level, then you and I requesting the same user profile in a short period would only require api requests to pull all of that user’s comments once.
Storing it centrally means one repository making calls for scores. Storing at the app level means there are N repositories for N apps making calls. Storing it at the install level for each app instance means that you’d have astronomical amount of calls to the API to calculate this number. It would be incredibly expensive to do it that way and could be a behavior that may slow all API response to a crawl.
Voyager could probably add a hidden feature, like long press post count label to switch to karma and compute karma, maybe for last 500 or so posts & comments (10 total requests).
Because it would be a hidden feature requiring manual activation I doubt it would add server load. And being hidden means it also wouldn’t be an issue with karma farming.
I‘m frankly not sure what I should think about that. I get the argument of chasing points being harmful, but I would imagine that it also drives interaction and gives some motivation to participate – and Lemmy definitely benefits from participation. I also like myself some reports and statistics.
