Not sure if this is a showerthought, but it popped into my head randomly due to anothe member’s comment that “karma farming isn’t a thing here.” It kinda is…just not as blatant and open as Reddit. If the instances grow in size and number it could become a real thing, we’d have the same issues as Reddit with huge numbers of bots, shills, and karma whoring users.
What if every year we zero out Lemmy points but replace them with a [insert thing here: colored bars?] that maybe qualitatively show positive post and comment levels and sort of show “years of service”?
Get rid of the incentive for points accumulation, but denote consistent positive contribution?
Edit: or leave the comment/post points as the are, but make them only tally a rolling 365 day count and participation in the last 30/60/90 or similar. Continued participation would be obvious, but no substantial amount could ever be collected.
If the points aren’t worth anything, then why would it matter if they change or go away?
E2: welp. People think it isn’t a problem, and they say it will not be. Can’t argue with a position that demands Lemmy/fediverse remain static in its present form. Discussion closed, I guess.
Lemmy doesn’t have karma farming because it doesn’t have karma.
Accounts earn their reputation based on name recognition, not some artificial score.
Yet that’s all karma is. And I tap on a member’s name and I can see their “score” here.
Believe it or not, some do place value on quantity, and some do so without checking quality.
This might just be a feature specific to the app you’re using; it isn’t displayed publicly on web, at least on any instance I have an account with.
Are you sure? I just tried a regular browser and went to Lemmy.world, tapped a random username, and was able to see their post/comment count, and tried a second app and found the same.
E: you might be confusing my comment about score with a total number of points of upvotes. That isn’t what I meant. I was only suggesting that to some people the total comment and post score might equate to karma.
Here’s what I see for you in a browser:
Here’s what I see for myself:
No karma. No points. Just raw post count and comment count.
Oh, we can see post / comment count, but that’s a meaningless statistic, no? The whole point of karma - the whole thing that makes karma toxic - is that it’s based on farming upvotes; it’s why Reddit is a cesspool of low-effort meme comments that’re engineered to gather those upvotes. Post / comment numbers can’t really be hidden anyway, unless you’re also proposing hiding a user’s comment history… you could get a quick rough total just by checking how many pages of posts and comments there were and doing some quick multiplication.
You trying to make me delete my acct?
Are you talking about looking at a user profile and seeing the number of posts and comments they made?
Yep.
But you don’t see those numbers when you’re looking at a post or comment, so it isn’t like Reddit karma.
That is true. You do have to tap/click through to see it. But those numbers are there.
But why do the numbers you can see on Lemmy matter?
Karma is the ratio of upvotes vs downvotes you get. It has nothing to do with the number of posts or comments you make.
There is no karma or points and I can’t figure out why you would call a raw count that. The count means absolutely nothing. I could make a board and post “lol” a thousand times to drive up that number. And if you reset it after a year I could just do it again.
If you care how many times someone has commented and feel like you’re winning or losing anything based on that, that’s pretty weird. You’re asking why people are so opposed to this change if counts aren’t important, but why is the impetus on someone to defend the status quo when your only reason for wanting to change it is some people might be weird about it. Show me weird behavior. Demonstrate how it is a problem without referring to Reddit which is a completely different system with no relevance.
Show a need for a change and we can talk options and tradeoffs. That’s a reasonable conversation. This… isn’t. But that’s okay. I’ve posted dumb shit before and it turns out regardless of up or down votes, it’s still just one comment.
Yeah, as the other people here pointed out, there is no such thing as karma here on Lemmy. So your post is a bit pointless. In fact they tried not to include too much gamification, in a deliberate attempt to address a few issues with how it works on Reddit.
And showing the number of posts a user posted isn’t the same thing. You sometimes want to know if someone is active, or a regular, or a lurker or a new account. And getting that info requires a few clicks and a deliberate attempt. Not something people are going to brag with. It doesn’t even tell much. Could be 100 low-quality posts. Or 100 posts done in 5 minutes in a private community that no one ever read.
And I mean even if there were Lemmy points and you’re zeroing them out and introduce a “years of service”… Isn’t that going to be the next toxic metric people are going to brag with? And it’ll incentivise people to create some empty accounts, so they have something ready in the future, should they need it. Or they’re going to look down on other people and say “yeah, but I have 2 years of service”… So I’d argue if you want to get rid of farming points, you have to get rid of them, not introduce a different one.
introduce a “years of service”… Isn’t that going to be the next toxic metric people are going to brag with?
looks at Steam account
I feel personally attacked 😂
Profiles have karma here, idk what you are saying. Maybe your client hides it?
Mind posting a screenshot? I see it like in the screenshots by the other commenters… No karma anywhere…
I mean there are apps who do things differently, and they can go ahead and compute something, add up the votes and display that. But it’s not in Lemmy itself. Not that I’m aware of.
deleted by creator
No such thing here. It’s literally impossible for it to be a problem.
There’s nowhere where Lemmy shows a total karma for a user, is there? You can see their post/comment history how much each post/comment is upvoted/downvoted, but not any “total” karma score, right? (At least not without going through all of a user’s posts/comments and manually adding up the score. Or am I missing something obvious somewhere?)
So, what points are you proposing we “zero out?”
I doubt I’d be for any change like that no matter your answer, but wanted clarification anyway. Honestly I feel like what we’ve got here is pretty great and I’m not really interested in a lot of changes to what we have here myself.
Sure, you don’t get a total of upvotes the way that other site does, but like you said, you do get points for participation.
To some people those “points” matter. Same as karma.
And why would you be against such a change? Not trying to be argumentative, but if the points don’t matter, why would it matter then if they go away or are replaced with a yearly form “well done” symbol?
I mean, you don’t get karma. Content does. And some of my posts/commenta have a net positive score and some have a net negative score. But I don’t have a karma score.
And, yes, the points do matter to me. But honestly I get emotionally invested in seeing that my comment was controversial. (I don’t think I really want my posts to have net negative scores, but if a post has a lot of interaction but a net close-to-zero score, that’s often interesting to me.)
And why would you be against such a change?
I mean, first off, I don’t feel you’ve even explained it well enough for me to get what you’re even going for, and that makes me worry that you haven’t even thought it through for more than 10 seconds. Would these “well done” symbols be associated with users or posts/conments? (I’m guessing posts/comments because how would they prevent so-called “karma whoring” if they were associated with users?) What do you mean by “once a year?” (Do you really mean “once a year” or more like “any post that’s over a year old”?) Would the “well done” be just another way to represent the now-abstracted-away net score? Would upvoting/downvoting be disabled for posts/comments that have made the switch?)
And that’s not to even mention the more technical considerations like “would this involve the creation of a background job subsystem in Lemmy to update the data behind the scenes?” and “how would the data in the database change when this once-a-year switchover happens?” and “how would this feature be rolled out to ensure continuous full functionality for users on both apps and LemmyUI?”
But beyond that, even if we worked out the details of the design, making such a change has a cost. A cost in cognitive load for newcomers. A cost in maintenance for the developers (both core developers and app/client developers.) A cost in day-to-day usage. A cost in user base, because no change is going to be universally popular (maybe excepting bug fixes and invisible changes) and for some pretty large user-facing change like this, some folks are going to leave over it.
Simplicity/elegance is a strength. New feature ideas are a dime a dozen. The best software projects are those that don’t adopt new features without a damned good reason.
Edit: Oh, Jesus. I just read other comments you’ve made in this post and you’re talking about the number of posts/comments count, not karma. Yeah, you definitely weren’t explaining what you were going for well.
The chief difference between here, and Reddit, is that there is no accumulated tally of votes here. Someone can “karma farm” all they want here, and they will have exactly nothing to show for it. Their account doesn’t have a number going up, there is no final score that marks them out as any kind of special.
Adding any kind of system to denote “consistent positive contribution” as you mentioned, or any kind of actually accumulated score, regardless of rolling delay, would only provide incentive for “karma farming” that does not currently exist.
Your proposed solutions would create the problem you’re trying to solve, a problem which does not currently exist.
Why does it matter?
Karma doesn’t give you any advantages.
If Lemmy had karma, karma farming would matter because it encourages people to submit content that is less relevant, less genuine, and less effortful.
Yeah points do not matter, they ain’t that prominent and many instances don’t even tally them.
There is no karma court or an exclusive karma whore community.
So why care about that meaningless number in the first place?
IMO it’s not about what metric is used, but how it is used. The current approach, completely avoiding any karma like mechanism, solves the farming issue, but IMO does not cater to the needs of every user.
For example, I have ADHD and if accumulating karma gives me much needed motivation and feel good chemicals, I am going to take them.
At the same time, holding a user to a higher regard because of their karma is stupid, it’s better to build real connections with usernames you recognise through continuous communication.
Personally, karma was an easily digestable piece of information about how my outreach into the social media is performing. Accumulating karma helps me feel connected with the community, feel accepted.
Haha, I recognise myself in OP’s comment, I think. I was soundly downboated for my comment. 😄
Internet points are the objective for some people, regardless of the platform or meaning. I’m usually reluctant to tell someone they’re having fun the wrong way - whatever floats your boat - but I’d much prefer some kind of reputation based on quality rather than the groupthink “hur hur, that made me spit out my drink” system that Reddit and Lemmy use.
But what do I know. I’m just some Internet rando with opaque motives, just like the rest of us.
Edit: For the ideologues spouting the tired “Lemmy doesn’t have karma!” party line, the number alongside your username is what people are taking about, not what we call it. FFS.
the number alongside your username is what people are taking about
Are you talking about on a comment? This?
Because if I open your profile, there is no number next to your name.
If you want to eliminate the display of upvotes that’s a completely different thing. Like why would we talk about resetting that yearly?
I’m not OP, of course. I think the point is that some people seem to really care about how many upvotes they get for a post (or comment) based upon the type of post they make. I get that it doesn’t get accumulated against the user profile.
Internet points is the only/main explanation I can think of for the repeated low effort/value “questions” that people post. The “what was ‘the incident’ at your school?” one I moaned about yesterday is something I’ve seen posted many times to Lemmy, and is a good example.
If this were Reddit, we’d put it down to karma farming for an account that would eventually become a spam, scam or porn bot, or something like that. But I struggle to understand why it happens here.
That’s the gist of my involvement in the topic, anyway.
Fair enough. I think there’s a fair bit of everyone talking past each other. Yeah, I can see your point about chasing upvotes on posts. I mostly post whatever I’m going to post without regard to votes, but I do enjoy making a popular comment and when I get lots of downvotes I do a quick check if I’m the asshole (sometimes yes, sometimes no). I can see where you’d want to disincentivize low quality shit-posting for upvotes. I’m pretty sure I’d shit-post anyway, though.
But consider: sometimes funny content chains of everyone joking around release tension and provide a way to engage with a post when I don’t have anything of value to say. Engagement is what drives social media. Am I going to comment if I get no engagement? A vote at least says someone saw it and I’m not shouting into the void. And if no one votes or comments my post, how do I know anyone has seen it at all?
If this place were nothing but high quality serious content, I feel like it would be closer to Wikipedia than Reddit. Of course, you’re free to disagree if you find none of this persuasive. I say all that because OP invited folks to explain why they disagreed. I’m not trying to come across as an argumentative prick, I just feel like folks are using words that clearly mean different things to different people. Like I don’t think you and OP are thinking of the same thing. I’m not even sure OP was talking about the same thing at the end as he was in the beginning.
Being able to quantify reach and count likes or upvotes or good stats has been a feature of social media forever. Mastodon doesn’t have or display upvotes, you just get notified when a post is favorited. It works there. But I engage way less there. But what soaks to me might not speak to someone else.
Anyway, that’s all. Thanks for the response.
I agree with a lot of what you’ve said, and am starting to think I may just be being cantankerous about something for no good reason.
I’ve no issue with shitposts nor trying to get All The Upvotes (nor, I guess, All The Downvotes) here. I think it’s just that lazy and transparent “This is a real question?” type of post - repeated over and 'cking over - that makes my teeth itch for some reason. 😅
The web version screenshot you provided was interesting when compared to the Voyager mobile app view of a profile:
It’s possible I was being lazy or stupid (they’re not mutually exclusive) in misreading the Comment Count metric as something else, like “karma”, rating, or whatever. It’s definitely not that. Either way, you and others are right in saying there is no karma here (for that I apologise to all). I still have doubts whether the people doing the above kind of posts understand the - literal - pointlessness of doing it for any kind of account cred.
I dunno. Anyway, I’ve had a day to reflect on it, and I’m wrong. So it goes… 🙂
This is really why I come here. Real talk. Whether it’s serious or funny, it’s nice to be able to feel like I’m interacting with real people like we’re just hanging out, challenging and affirming one another and appreciating different perspectives. You didn’t have to agree with me, though I’m gratified we could come to an accord. Deep respect, my friend.
Likewise. I much prefer the sitting around the table and discussing differences approach to the alternatives.
Life’s too short. 😊
Pretty much what I was trying to get at. Everyone’s fixated on “but it isn’t karma…” while rejecting out of hand that people can place value on post/comment count, and at some point the idea of point “totalizer” could become a thing.
The fediverse isn’t static, and if it grows it will only require someone to desire that change and the knowledge implement it.
I simply thought of cutting it off before it could ever go that way with and that it might be worth considering. A mechanic that would offer a cake day yearly cumulative “badge” that showed sort of service to the communities and longevity without any avenue to amass points - other than a rolling 1-year trend to show post/comment contributions as individual numeric values. Make it community controlled? If you participate in a Linux community your badges show up as a bunch of Linux Tux penguins with “thumbs up” or some such.
Someone’s post count does not influence anything about their experience with Lemmy.
I hope Lemmy doesn’t bow to the I want reward, I need my shiny recognition ribbon trend.
That’s 100% infantilization of participants. Even on the few reddit subs I’m subbed to (on average, those have real high value content), I can see a few people focusing on that karma thing and that’s sad to watch and, well, not flattering for them. It’s also a lot of useless work more to do for those mods that try to maintain a certain level of quality, which is not a great thing.
Imh(and admittedly naive)o, people should post based on what they’re interested in and based on what they think they can bring to the discussion and not in exchange of a tap on the shoulder, or some good grade — unless they’re still kids going to school, doing homework and passing exams but even there… maybe one day, we will realize focusing our attention on grades more than on understanding/learning was a huge and costly mistake.
Edit: mistakes and clarifications.
I hope Lemmy doesn’t bow to the I want reward, I need my shiny recognition ribbon trend.
That’s 100% infantilization of participants.
Agreed. Have some Lemmy gold! 🪙
All aboard the gold train!
What does karma even do?
