You must log in or register to comment.
I didn’t hate the system but how it encouraged mindless reposting. I kinda liked seeing big number go up, yanno? Kinda miss that but also glad that we don’t have it here.
You’re going to get a lot of agreement here: Lemmy decided not to implement it for users. We still use votes on posts and comments, and you can sort by them, but no one gets scored by his many they have, and I think that’s a good thing. Lots of folks on Reddit modify their behavior specifically to generate karma, and often not in good ways.
This isn’t universal, and any client can implement it if they really wanted to.
The one good thing about karma was the ability to quickly tell who was likely around just to fuck with people. If you peek at their profile and see -100 karma, you know they are just a troll and can be ignored.
Other than that, yeah the system was pointless beyond “look at me my number is bigger”
It was also annoying how much it drove some people to make one line jokes or recycled copypasta in every single thread, looking for the quick upvotes. It made some threads unreadable.
I think that karma is an extremely poorly thought system, because it worsens every single issue with content voting system, such as:
- fluff principle - content that is the easiest to judge takes over, unless you take specific measures to prevent it
- subjectivity - what’s “good” for a user might be rubbish for another, and vice versa, so the content surfacing will be the lowest common denominator
- undue reposting - since content already highly upvoted will be likely highly upvoted in the future
- demographic concentration - people hang around larger communities because they post more in those, since those will yield more upvotes
- hivemind - more popular opinions are made even more visible than less popular ones, discouraging people from speaking their minds; etc.
because, even if the karma score means jack shit, people will feel encouraged to hoard karma instead of posting what would be more to the spirit of the relevant communities that they participate on.
Another issue of a karma system is that it enables that idiotic mod practice of gatekeeping communities behind karma points. I could go on a full rant about this, but let me not.
