I agree with what I just read. It should just be an instance setting and let admins choose. Mastodon can’t outcompete Twitter without an algorithm to easily find things you find interesting, and Lemmy probably won’t be able to outcompete Reddit without karma.

This is one of the features that made social media successful. Without the reward-dopamin loop, people have less incentive to generate quality content. Publicly showing karma is another thing. While it’s nice to be able to hide it, it’s one method of judging a user on reddit. In combination with other methods, it’s easier to spot trolls.

What’s wrong with “karma farming”? Disabling it, obviously doesn’t prevent spam/propaganda/bad quality content. Also, reposting is important for people new to the platform. (Who didn’t laugh at a joke on reddit which everybody seems to already know about?)

I think improving moderation methods would be way better to counter low quality content than radically concealing information that’s already there for the one in control of the instance.

— heeplr