There is already a total count of up- and downvotes, but please never add karma to Lemmy. We don’t want to deal with karma farmers and minimal karma requirements to post. I don’t care about the moderation issues because karma brought more harm than good. Please never add that bloody dreadful thing to Lemmy. I already saw a bunch of people supporting adding karma to Lemmy, which will turn Lemmy into a cheap Reddit clone and karma-farming hell. Please, never add karma to Lemmy. I beg you. No more karma hell.

107 points

I’m gonna make my own instance with karma…once you hit a set limit your account is locked forever and your ip blocked for 30days…

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20 points

Soon: “Karma’s getting too high. Time to go a’trolling!”

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10 points

You’re banned after you get 300 positive votes, irrespective of how many negatives you have. Easy.

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3 points

In the board game “Gloomhaven”, you pick a character class until you achieve your characters assigned personal quest, at which point that character is retired, a new class is unlocked and you get to pick a new character. Starting a new character is sometimes tough if you were attached to the other class abilities and enjoyed the current team synergy, but the rotation is a key part of the game.

So like, that, but reddit-style

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8 points

That’s a great idea.

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4 points

Love this. It’s sort of the same principle as outlawing billionaires.

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4 points

Genius 🤯

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59 points

I’m a Reddit mod. I absolutely needed to filter users by karma AND account age. The amount of bot posts is exhausting and impossible to keep up with without a filtering method. If the fediverse continues to grow, something will need to be implemented here too.

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37 points

Have you ever thought that perhaps the reason that that there are so many bots posts on reddit is because of karma?

What exactly makes account with high karma trustworthy when we all know it can be easily botted and then sold?

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22 points

That could have been the reason there were so many bots though, every new bot account needed to karma farm in order to become useful.

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12 points

Why? You should let each post stand on it’s own merit.

First, account age is silly for Lemmy, as almost 100% of people on here will have an account creation date in June 2023 or later because this place was a ghost town before Reddit decided to kill the APIs. A month from now, is someone with an August 2023 join date automatically presumed to be a troll, or are they just someone making the switch from Reddit a month later than everyone else?

As for karma, neither negative karma nor positive karma really tell you anything about the poster:

For instance, people can make good faith arguments advocating for conservative political opinions, but because the user base skews pretty far left here, those arguments will be downvoted. A discussion forum that bans opposing viewpoints is useless, and the echo chambers on Reddit are something I’d love to avoid here.

Similarly, it’s also possible to effortlessly build positive karma. Simply copy/paste highly rated comments from the last time a common repost appeared on the feed, and chances are, your copy/pasted comments will get upvoted too. You can even automate it with a bot.

Karma meant nothing at Reddit, and moderators shouldn’t be using it for decisionmaking purposes. It’s useful for ranking posts and comments, but anything beyond that isn’t helpful.

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10 points

Karma is largely useless. As others have said. Let an accounts posts stand for themselves. Not their general popularity. Just because someone is downvoted on the whole doesn’t mean they’re a troll. It just means their ideas are unpopular. But not necessarily wrong.

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8 points

Kbin already counts upvotes and boosts, similar to reddit karma.
But it could perhaps be something that stays hidden for everyone but yourself and moderators (provided you are participating in their magazine, otherwise anyone could open a magazine to see everyone elses karma)

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7 points

I don’t see how filtering by karma combats bots whose whole job is to farm karma. Wouldn’t that just filter new bots until one of their posts takes off in some other community that does allow new accounts to post?

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1 point

Hard disagree. If bots are concern, bot detection tools are the answer, not karma.

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39 points
*

Can’t say I agree. I miss karma. Not because I want it, because I don’t care. But that imaginary internet point sure drives a lot of content - and even repeat content has a purpose to drive platform growth. I had like 1,000 subs and FREQUENTLY saw something for the first time that the tHiS iS a RePoSt people came out of the woodwork for.

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27 points

Don’t worry, reposting will happen with or without karma! 😜

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18 points

Not a bad thing imo. Not everyone spends all day on the internet. I probably spend more time than most people and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a meme that’s new to me and half the comments are bitching about it being a repost.

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3 points

Yeah, I recognized a lot of reposts, but also posts that apparently had been going around for months or years but it was my first time seeing them, even though I was on reddit for half of every day.

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16 points

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2 points

I also miss karma a bit. I can live without it but seeing a score is nice. I will behave the same with or without here on Lemmy though. For some reason, I’ve really found my voice here on Lemmy and am much more active then when I was on Reddit.

Still, that being said, I do feel a boost when I look at my comments and see that number lol.

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32 points

You know something? Until you mentioned it with this thread, I hadn’t even noticed that karma wasn’t a thing here. That is how useless the karma system is.

I say let the community mostly manage itself through the voting, so the mods can only step in for the really bad stuff.

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29 points

Maybe I’m missing something, but what was Karma more than upvotes minus downvotes?

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21 points

The votes were not equal to karma. Karma wasn’t just subtracting downvotes from upvotes. They made a function that not every up- and downvote changed karma. It was a weird mathematical function. Karma was also used to limit you from posting on some subreddits. That’s the reason why I heavily dislike karma.

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28 points

Karma was originally visible raw upvote / downvote tally. Reddit just obscured the upvote and downvote numbers to discourage manipulation for karma.

Limiting participation based on karma didn’t happen for a long time. By the time some huge subreddits took that step, it (or some other gatekeeping) was necessary to filter a lot of malicious users.

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4 points

Kiiinda… You were limited on the amount of karma a single post or comment could raise or lower your accounts score. It’s not a complex algorithm by any means, just slightly convoluted.

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12 points

It prevent things like mass-downvoting from counting much towards karma AFAIK, but that’s more/less the idea of karma. The exact way it was calculated had nothing to do with people trying to game it. Minimums to post in communities did mean spamming elsewhere just to be able to post where you wanted though and the economic worth of “trustworthy accounts” made karma a karma an issue. Upvotes - downvotes still functions for the latter purpose. If people decide the fediverse is worth scamming, then farming will be a thing. Right now, its a fairly small niche space with an average user who is more internet-savvy than most mainstream social media users, so its probably not worth the effort of trying to scam here yet…

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General Discussion

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