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Sorry you got jumped on as a new user a bit.
The karma system on reddit encourages posting and reposting stuff that everyone has seen before to get fake internet points, and maybe what you win is a “more powerful account” for the algorithm instead of everyone getting a more or less equal voice.
You can still get people to follow you and build a tribe if you want without that, and you are also free to start any community you like, so a few mods don’t end up controlling all the online real estate and steer the conversation unfairly.
Plus its simpler. Sometimes simple is good.
So that you can ask stupid questions and not have repercussions hunt you til the days your account is deleted
Why should it?
We can see all the negatives every day with reddit.
What positive does a Karma system bring to the platform and discussions?
Because when you see somebody with -1000 karma, it’s a pretty good indicator that you shouldn’t waste your time engaging with them.
You can take a look at their post history and that will typically tell a lot more than a number next to their name
There were plenty of users with high karma that weren’t worth engaging with too.
It only helped with lbvious jerks that you could probably tell were terrible just by reading their post.
Usually you can get the same info just from looking at their last couple comments. Trolls don’t usually very much.
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Honestly, a person’s actual post history should be more relevant and indicative to whether they’renworth engaging with tham a single number.
Furthermore, aside from deliberate trolls, most comments or posts should be assessed on their own merits, irrespective of the poster’s history.
People are complex, and it’s possible that raving political idiots might have thoughtful opinions on their favourite video game or the aspects that make a perfect butt.
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Because lemmy is all about sharing and discussing contents, not collecting points. The Fediverse is also a decentralized network.
I don’t actually understand the purpose of karma on Reddit, beyond some sort of metric to feel good about yourself. It’s literally just a number and nothing else.
I’ve seen some people try to devalue what someone said because of “low karma”, so I’d say it’s a good thing Lemmy doesn’t have a karma system.
Karma has become a part of a measure to determine if an account is a human non-troll.
The first step in ban evasion is to create a new account and continue doing what you’ve done before. By requiring an account to be a certain age along with a certain amount of karma, it makes sure the account is less likely to be a ban evader.
That was the original intent. That it became a measuring contest is separate.
A raw number across the whole federation would be useless. Different instances have their own cultures, making a unified number worthless. People could also goose their numbers by creating an instance that gives their account unlimited karma.
Instance karma could be useful, but it is a design decision not to show it. I suspect that will continue until there is a need to use karma for moderation, but I suspect that defederation would be the lower lying fruit for now.
As others said it was a conscious decision of the developers, as it’s gamification of the system and they aren’t big fans of that.
I agree with this decision.
The Fluff Principle* makes easy-to-judge content get higher scores, and we do see it Lemmy. It isn’t a big deal because fluff ends on its own specific comms, but once you gamify the aggregation of score points, the picture changes - now you’re encouraging people to share content that they believe to score high over content that they believe to be contributive.
Additionally a publicly visible karma enables a bunch of poorly thought mod practices, like karma gating (“you need +500 karma to post here lol”) or automatically banning people with low karma (even if it might come from a single post/comment).
*“Hence what I call the Fluff Principle: on a user-voted news site, the links that are easiest to judge will take over unless you take specific measures to prevent it.” (Source)
Because it’s stupid and Lemmy is decentralized unlike Reddit so it wouldn’t make sense anyway.
Because karma ruins actual discussion.
There’s no real value to any of it.
Attach free beer to point levels and watch this thing explode.
I don’t care why, I just hope they never implement one.
Because it exploits how dumb the internet toy such as a karma system really is.
I like the Fediverse’s handling of it. Look, I can post however much I want. Unlike Reddit, where I got to storm to AskReddit because it doesn’t care about how much karma you’ve got, farm karma, wait for a period and then finally be able to post where I want to.
People have sadly tied their existence to this system. I mean, the higher a karma count is for someone, I’ve noted how much of a snobbish bastard people love to come off as. Like as if it makes them superior, regardless of the shit takes and awful arguments they project.
Karma systems invalidate thought and discussion. Do you really mean to say what you’ve said because you mean it? Or did you say it because you know it’ll garner the most points? Quite frankly, I’d rather be saying what I want to say because some of the time, I do mean it. On Reddit, I always have had to fake myself and say stupid shit just so I can have enough points to finally post elsewhere. So many people on Reddit will say anything and do anything to make themselves feel better about themselves by phoning in thoughts, opinions and expressions. But I doubt they actually believe into half of the shit they say or do.
And when you get downvoted? Welp, be prepared to karma farm again because some subreddits will not allow you to post or just throw you into the spam filter bin because you get prompted by a 9 minute timer before you can post again. It’s just an atrocious system all around that has bastardized the way people communicate with eachother. So, Fuck Reddit’s Karma system, it doesn’t belong here.
That’s mostly true I think, but it is a really useful resource for mods and I completely understand why they use min karma limits. ( On Reddit I just have a min 5 karma requirement (posts only) and a larger range that just triggers modmail - filters out 90% of bot posts and I can manually address the false positives. I would hate to have to manage a larger community)
Because it’s not fun
It is fun when I see a big number and it fuels my ego, though!
If you’re craving some gamefication we have posts/comments numbers
The more you contribute, the bigger the number gets!
It is by choice. Prominent developers made that choice because they thought it might eliminate a lot of the popularity incentives reddit creates.
Now I don’t agree with that choice, but many others here do. I don’t think this solves the incentive issues but just makes instances a bit more of a wild western and requires moderators to do more work figuring out what to make of an account.
Maybe it would be great if this is still an option you could turn on / off per instance or something.
