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 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.
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.
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’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.
While I hear what you’re saying, it’s really not as complicated as you’re making it out to be.
Voat had a system where you only had ten downvotes a day. Kept people in check