Too many people are confusing the two. Whenever lemmy.ml or its devs do something stupid, people go “Lemmy is getting worse and worse,” or “I’m leaving Lemmy,” or worse, “I’m leaving for Beehaw.”
If you’re using Beehaw, then you’re using Lemmy. Lemmy is the software these instances run on. If you don’t like lemmy.ml, join another instances that have rules that match your philosophy. Some instance hosts authoritarian or fascist shit? Turn to another Lemmy instance. Lemmy.ml is not even the biggest instance. People who just joined and are unfamiliar with the platform will just think the entire Lemmyverse is run by autocratic admins if we don’t get our terminology right.
Karma is important? The only “use” for it is to do what? users farm it so adding karma or something similar would just make this place worse
Now, that said, there are ways to game those things too, but that’s the concept and some of the bigger benefits.
I still receive PMs every once in a while from random people on Reddit thanking me for comments that I’ve posted years ago. Those comments have less than 20 karma combined. I also have a comment saying “Nice.” which contributes nothing and is sitting at almost 3000. Karma is meaningless.
Nice.
Have an internet point
Nice.
A picture of a kitten in the appropriate general forum or a statement agreeing with the general opinion on a top comment on some politcal forum will get many times more Karma than a post on an expert forum that took 30 minutes to validate and write and is anchored on a decade of domain expertise.
Beyond it’s utility (for commercial social media sites) as a gamification element (a score, which incentivises people compete with each other in producing easilly digestible content that pleases the general population in a forum - which, note, doesn’t mean its correct, well researched or anchored in genuine domain knowledge), Karma, at least as done in Reddit, is near useless.
Maybe some kind of per-forum Karma or just a per-forum summary of the reception of past posts for a user might be useful, but “score”-Karma just indicates the ability to produce lots of content (so, produced quickly, hence almost certainly not validated) which is popular in large forums (which are invariably the generic ones).
I’m new and know nothing, but doesn’t not having karma make it less attractive to bots? If there’s nothing to farm…
Bots farmed karma on reddit because mods on some subs tied rights to participation to minimum karma. So bots were sent elsewhere, where mods were more relaxed, and farmed until they reached the target sub’s karma requirement. Then the accounts were sold to advertisers and astroturf campaigns to sway posts or sell up/down votes.
Without karma there’s no incentive to do any of this. I’m sure there are spammers and farmers thinking how to exploit lemmy right now. But just not having karma is a massive advantage. I still think that admins and mods should be able to see some user stat that aggregated bad behavior. Like number of removed posts, removed comments, downvotes, blocks from other users and bans from communities and instances. That way they could decide their actions based on the user reputation, as trolls and spam accounts would accrue a bad reputation really fast, and would encourage users to engage in the moderation process.
In the r/CRSRacing2 sub (which I mod, kinda, until I can’t anymore) the karma is used to stop new joiners to ask the standard questions that are answered in the 1st post the get to see… (pinned)
But that’s about the only use I can think of. (other then useless bragging rights)
Yeah but this could be solved with a slightly more complex bot that tries to determine if a post is a question from the FAQ instead of just blocking new users.
I’m not a karma whore, otherwise I would not post on Lemmy. But when you post something and you see that people agree with it is nice to see. I do not see the problem with karma.
I think there’s a difference between upvotes and karma. Seeing upvotes on a particular post is nice. Having a score of the sum of all your upvotes and having it displayed to everyone is a different matter, in my opinion. I feel like it gets taken as a gauge of the quantity/value of a person’s contributions, when there are low-effort ways of gaining karma, hence the problem some may have.
Its a gamification tactic to keep people addicted to Reddit. It’s definitively not a good thing, in my opinion
I agree!
This is aggravated on Reddit by karma based moderation, e.g. minimum karma to post. This resulted in bots that repost popular content and / or copy popular comments to farm karma so they can bypass these tools.
Having moderated on Reddit, there’s a good reason for min karma to post. It cuts spam account posting massively.
I have no doubt it used to work, but if you’ve ever browsed /popular or /all, it doesn’t work any more. Bots farm karma for a few weeks, then hits 30 or 40 different communities with the same crypto spam. The bot gets banned, and another takes it place.
Doesn’t seeing upvotes on a certain post, as it is now, give you that feeling?
It does. But as I said it is not a really important feature for me. It is ‘nice to see’ but nothing more than that.
User engagement is important, and karma is one way of driving that engagement. Pretending something’s not important from your high horse because you don’t understand it just makes you look like a spez.
gamification does drive engagement, though not necessarily the right kind.
User engagement is important, yes, but since we do not have ad targets here, I think most people are okay with less content as the cost of the overall quality being higher. At least that is my hope.