Personally, I prefer Lemmy over Kbin because I hate karma and reputation points. I do not want to worry about downvotes, and Lemmy feels so fresh. I can post things that will receive lots of downvotes and not need to worry about losing karma.
Reddit karma is a self-perpetuating problem. Karma being used as an indicator of an account’s quality and trustworthiness incentivizes karma farming, effectively turning fake internet points into real money. This spurs the development of bots whose sole purpose is to farm karma by reposting old content from humans (and more recently using ChatGPT to generate comments) which then spurs the rise of human “bot hunter” accounts whose sole purpose is to detect and report bots “stealing” content. At some point reddit turns into bots acting like humans vs humans acting like bots.
I really wish the karma didn’t come with the downsides of bots. I wouldn’t be opposed to a system like the one reddit had with awards where the instances can take a cut of the award purchases. It’s nice to have a way to promote good OC on a platform and it solves a lot of what I don’t like about the karma.
Technically, lemmy does actually track a user’s karma.
It’s- just not exposed via the user interface… as of right now.
Kinda of like how kbin displays who upvotes and downvotes. Lemmy also tracks this data too, and can easily report on exactly who is upvoting and downvoting.
In the case of this post, for example-
In the case of karma- Its all there too.
Comment Karma
Comment Negative Karma.
And- post karma exists too.
Oh dear. I am disappointed to see that. I can understand the point of scoring posts and comments, but what’s the point of keeping a score for the user? Is there a use for it now, or is it being kept just in case there’s a use for it later?
Hopefully it will not get exposed in the UI.
For votes to work, the data of who voted where has to be tracked.
Karma is just a matter of adding numbers together.
I think the data can be useful for anti spam reasons
I am disappointed by this. Karma ruins whole discussions, and I hope the devs never add something bloody dreadful like that.
I don’t really care about karma or reputation points. However, I really enjoy having a community where you can upvote and downvote.
Upvoting and downvoting is fine, because it’s different than having a profile-wide “score”, which provides an incentive that transcends making quality posts, and instead encourages shit like reposts in order to farm points. It also perpetuates a fear of making “hot takes” and other crap because you might lose your precious points. It leads to echo chambering.
I think it can encourage unintended behaviors like karma farming.
I’ve seen similar trends in some FPS games in which during immediate game play your kill to death ratio is hidden to keep people engaged with the main loop instead of getting worked up over their stats.
Just like on Reddit, I don’t care. As long as it’s not tied to my ability to interact with the community then let them have their silly internet points.
But it influences the community itself, doesn’t it? If you have a bunch of parrots saying what they think others want to hear suddenly you have a lot less real interactions and way more “reddit moments”… I like how mastodon did it and maybe lemmy should also provide the option to hide likes/dislikes alltogether.
And the window of correct opinion keeps getting narrower. Any time there’s a chance to gatekeep morality, someone out there wants to prove they’re the most <whatever>.
On any of the popular subs, no one’s going to read your comment in good faith. They’ll see what they wanted you to say and just reply to that.
One annoying thing on some subreddits was moderators auto-removing your posts unless you had a certain amount of karma.
