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?

  • Lvxferre@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I feel like karma is mildly useful to identify potentially disruptive users, but it’s so easy to abuse it that it isn’t worth the trouble:

    • you can farm karma posting low-effort but still generally liked content (I did this all the time in another site; it’s damn easy). That negates any potential usage of karma to identify disruptive users.
    • moderators start using karma as a low-hanging fruit way to discourage newbies from their communities.
    • once you gamify the system, some people will game the game. You get for example mods removing content from users, just to repost it themselves for karma.
    • accounts with a lot of karma become a commodity.

    It’s theoretically possible that someone creates an add-on that tracks your karma. That’s fine - as long as it doesn’t become the default experience, its impact on the overall Lemmyverse environment would be almost nothing.