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.

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.

I don’t think that the concept of Karma should be implemented in the Fediverse. At least not, like we know it from Reddit.

Reddit’s Karma was handled like a currency, and in order to obtain such, the overall-quality of the content declined as a result of Karma-farming.

In my opinion, the fediverse feels so new, fresh and exciting, because there is no such thing as Karma. No barrier that hinders one to post someting, because a certian count of Karma - or Lemmy-Schmeckle, call it as you want - would be needed to post something. Yet.

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

A system to boil down the “not-shittiness” to a single value isn’t the worst idea.

Currently, it’s really hard to distinguish an average user and a bona fide asshole and a bot account.

Now, if the reddit style Karma is the right tool, I’m not sure.

l liked reddit best before the points mattered.

meta-moderation is a questionable system at best (with more real research needed not admins playing with it like kids) however it works ok enough until the points matter, then they become thier own distorting effect and it starts eating itself.

the meta-mod system on reddit ate itself years ago, its why mods have so much power now.

I dont LOVE user karma bc then people karma farm and do gimmicky stuff tryna become popular and reddit famous to get a ‘high score’ (or ig it’d be kbin famous if that applied here) and i didnt like those posters that much bc it was like all their posts are gimmicky

I prefer if it wasn’t there. Scoring people always felt very dystopian to me

I personally think karma is mostly harmless, much like the downvote. In practice it’s the way it’s used that kinda spoils it for everyone.

On kbin there is “karma” although not really working correctly. Maybe make a karma and a bad karma. That will balance out the karma farmers, since it doen’t matter that you harvested 20k plus, since.the 10k minus is shown as well. With one counter you would be 10k good karma.

I accumulated a good bit in a short time and didn’t care. If I was trying to decide if someone was a bot, a horrible person, or just clueless, I’d glance at post history. That seemed to work well. I assume you can do the same here, I just haven’t tried because I haven’t needed to. Yay for that.

I never cared about someone’s karma. I enjoy not even knowing mine, I guess. I guess the only reason I would want karma would be for hiding users with negative karma from conversations but…

1. Since I’m all in for not having downvotes, this is a moot point
2. Probably neonazis don’t have negative karma because some people would still downvote them. So hiding users with negative karma would not help much

I thought it was kind of fun. I just posted when I felt like it and had a “score” that tracked it.

I tried the thunder app for lemmy and was disappointed to see it showed a total “karma” number. I’d been enjoying not having a running total. I like seeing my comments and posts get appreciated but I see no need for it all to add up.

One of the things I liked about the fediverse was I was less likely to be told I’m farming karma. I just like posting things that I think will promote a discussion.

I don’t want people to claim I’m trying inflate my imaginary internet number again.

Karma is only sometimes a measure of the overall quality of a poster.

Often (more often?) it’s just a measure of how aggressively they’ve farmed it, which ironically sort of makes it an inverted measure of quality.

Personally, on Reddit, the only times I ever really noticed it was when somebody had wildly gigantic numbers, which often just led to me checking their profile, discovering that yes indeed - they did get those numbers by (re)posting an endless stream of pabulum - then blocking them.