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 think I will do nothing with that information.
Upvoted for visibility! 🤪
You have over 2000 points! Nice work bean!
Upbeans and downbeans…
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.
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.
Requiring basic levels of karma or age is not “group think.”
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.
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.
Again, I disagree. You can say the “right things,” certainly, or you can say “neutral things.” Really anything short of overt hostility would be acceptable.
I think that is too idealistic. It could very easily go into a downward spiral that a community could never get out of. It happens already on several subreddits already. You may not have experienced it, but I can say it for certain happens. There have even been scifi series written about it that have taken the concept to the extreme.
I think that is too idealistic. It could very easily go into a downward spiral that a community could never get out of. It happens already on several subreddits already. You may not have experienced it, but I can say it for certain happens. There have even been scifi series written about it that have taken the concept to the extreme.
I’m familiar with some of the subreddits, but I believe you’re taking the spiral too steeply and too quickly.
The “don’t be a dick” philosophy will get you more than enough karma to comment on whatever subreddit you want to participate in, outside of some super niche ones.
But not ‘being a dick’ is far too subjective in a global village… The world does not beat to one drum.
I have to stand on eggshells with my language around USamericans as an example.
Voat had a system where you only had ten downvotes a day. Kept people in check
Thanks, I hate it. Promotes gamesmanship and super douches like Gallowboob.
Yeah if people start going for Karma we’ll be plagued by “this” and stupid puns. Yesterday I saw a reddit post where the guy misspelled WiFi as Wife when explaining his problem, and then the top 10 comments were “omg dude you can’t just get a new wife” or “I wouldn’t come to Reddit for a problem with my wife”
The actual solutions to the problem were rubbish too
Yup, there’s a lot of hurrrr hurrrr hurrr stuff on reddit. Which isn’t inherently bad…but they often just keep pushing it ad nauseum. There’s no such concept as “OK, enough already” on there.
A bit of humour is fine, but when it drowns out the actual information it’s frustrating.
Karma is about which faction will turn hostile to you.
What Lemmy does with that score is ultimately instance-specific. Over time I expect we’ll see more differentiation between instances in terms of how they treat things like that.
I think I am the only one that finds karma useful. Albeit my experience is based on Reddit, but I found it handy to check out who are the serial reposters that have huge submission karma and very low comment karma. My RES filter was getting… large.
Lemmy? I dunno. I’m still pretty new here.
Upvotes are useful for determining what people like and dislike so you can sort posts and comments
Account karma is for narcissists to masturbate about how loved they are
Let’s not make Lemmy Reddit, or at least can we label this feature Anti-Karma?
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Does it have any effect - e.g. on the visibility of posts? I don’t care about karma, but I do wish the web UI would hide comments with large numbers of downvotes.
I don’t. I have a lot of really unpopular opinions and it’s important to me that everyone knows about them.
If you’ve got a few minutes to chat I can give you the gist.
Upvotes are useful for determining what people like and dislike so you can sort posts and comments.
Karma is just a bad way to have someone crucified for expressing an unpopular opinion… anyone remember COVID?
Whatever your opinion (and mine was unpopular - still is, as many Thai’s STILL wear masks in the street - even if they’re walking down the middle of an empty street FFS) a recent study has proven me right - the lockdown did sweet FA (maybe a 1% reduction in deaths from COVID, but an increase from 1.5% to 40% in mental disorders reported in 18-45 year old people and MASSIVE economic and educational damage.
Pretty sure this is just the apps adding up all the upvotes/downvotes you receive and not an actual Lemmy feature.
It’s right in the API: https://join-lemmy.org/api/interfaces/PersonAggregates.html
Returns: comment_count, comment_score, id, person_id, post_count, post_score
Honestly is it even worth anything? Even on reddit I didn’t really pay attention to how much karma a user had, maybe when I wanted to check if it was a bot or something.
When it comes to gauging advice, or doing something like buying or trading used goods it was helpful as a proxy for trustworthiness. Older accounts with good karma are a lot less sketchy than brand new accounts.
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Not talking about votes on specific comments. Talking about profile aggregation. I’ve done vinyl trades, clothing swaps, hired people to 3d print things, etc. For those kinds of interactions you aren’t looking at the quality of one specific post, but want to validate that it’s not a temporary account for a scam and that the user generally cares about the reputation of their name on the platform.
But you have to consider the difference to Reddit’s karma system. If you have a high-karma account on Reddit, your comment or post trends much higher. That’s not the case with Lemmy, as far as I know.Apparently, I was mistaken. Sorry.
Here I see a new comment right above the top comment which is great because everyone has their comment up top at first. This might be a jerboa thing tho
With Reddit, though, some subreddits required a minimum amount of karma to post, whereas if you have access to an instance you can post freely.
So it’s more a user rating of “this was good/how have you survived until this point” than a gatekeeping device: you, as a poster, can freely ignore your points and the points of others if you don’t care.
Honestly should be removed
I don’t think there is a way to remove that. “Karma” is just the sum of upvotes on all of a users’ posts/comments and that info is always accessible.
We could make the decision to not show that value in the front-ends of course but you’ll likely have very different opinions on that and some front-ends will inevitably show karma.
But if it wasn’t available in the API then apps would have to do a fetch of all the users posts to calculate it, possibly discouraging it.