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?
There is a kind of subtle technical problem with karma, which is (technical) problem of trust. I haven’t looked at the Lemmy spec, much less the source, but decentralized systems always have an issue of, who can you trust?
Let’s say I want to have a user account with inflated karma for some reason. I can spin up an instance and simply assert what my karma is—and if I need to, I can create a bunch of fake accounts on my instance and create a bunch of fake posts and comments and assign fake karma scores to them, so that it can be audited.
Now if other instance owners get wise to what I’m up to, they can defederate me. But this creates a few immediate problems, including the problem of adding more administrative load to instance owners generally. The bigger problem is the witch hunting that could ensue, if a culture of karma were to develop as it has on Reddit.
That’s such a good point. There’s probably ways to get around that issue, but I take this as a sign we don’t need karma here
That is fascinating, I never considered that.
I hated the karma system. It led to people doing a whole bunch of stupid one-liners like out of a marvel movie and things like cake day posts.
Edit:spelling
…is it bad that I actually liked reading one-liners and “happy cake day” comments? _;;;; TBF it’s been a while since I watched a Marvel movie, so I don’t know if the ones you hated are the ones I liked. I suppose you must be right that a lot of people just said things for karma, but I always assumed they were saying it for the lulz. Stupid one-liners seemed to be the whole point of certain subs, presumably because at least some of the people there enjoyed them.
I feel like the only real use of it was to allow boards that really needed it a “Must have X karma to post” minimum to weed out bots, and after that there was no point to it.
What boards really needed it?
I know the hololive board needed it as an “official” subreddit, they would often get people trying to intentionally antagonize people, especially a few years back when they were getting bots from china constantly harassing them on reddit, twitter, and youtube anytime any of their talents tried to do anything.
It’s not as bad now, but for subreddits like that, they’d much rather you build up some karma first somewhere like virtualyoutubers where those kinds of bots wouldn’t bother posting to anyway, and any non-bots would more than likely get downvoted and not get karma if they were that kind of negative.
