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let's discuss "karma" (lemmy.one)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I am curious to hear opinions on the concept of user karma in general.

Do people miss it?
Are we better off without it?

From a technicial perspective, I don't see why it couldn't be implemented. I understand Lemmy doesn't track this explicitly. However, using a users post and comment history you could come to a number pretty easily, right? I was considering making a toy app that would take a user and instance and spit out a karma score for post and comments, what would stop others from doing the same?

Will it be inevitably pulled into existence by Lemmy users as we mature the platform?

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I feel like karma is mildly useful to identify potentially disruptive users, but it's so easy to abuse it that it isn't worth the trouble:

you can farm karma posting low-effort but still generally liked content (I did this all the time in another site; it's damn easy). That negates any potential usage of karma to identify disruptive users.
moderators start using karma as a low-hanging fruit way to discourage newbies from their communities.
once you gamify the system, some people will game the game. You get for example mods removing content from users, just to repost it themselves for karma.
accounts with a lot of karma become a commodity.

It's theoretically possible that someone creates an add-on that tracks your karma. That's fine - as long as it doesn't become the default experience, its impact on the overall Lemmyverse environment would be almost nothing.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

On your first point, I think that's similar to a captcha. Captchas obviously don't stop all bots. But they stop the vast majority. The fact that you can get cheap karma doesn't negate the fact that it can still serve as a filter.

But I agree on the second point. I think karma shouldn't be a hard barrier to contributing somewhere. It should instead be a factor in anti spam measures. Eg, automation can be more suspicious of comments from people with no karma and we can do stuff like require manual approval for really questionable comments.

IMO, the absence of karma has little impact on the third point. I think many people who want karma aren't merely trying to get a big number on their profile. They want attention in general. They want things they post to get a ton of replies and lots of votes so it'll be seen.