Another Reddit refugee here,

I think we’re all familiar with the Karma system on Reddit. Do you think Lemmy should have something similar? Because I can see cases for and against it.

For: a way to tracking quality contributions by a user, quantifying reputation. Useful to keep new accounts from spamming communities.

Against: Often not a useful metric, can be botted or otherwise unearned (see u/spez), maybe we should have something else?

What do you all think?

  • Wolf Link 🐺
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    61 year ago

    Perfect description, hands down.

    Also, “Karma” isn’t always a good metric for the quality of a post. On the contrary, even. At least in the subs I was a regular in, posts about in-depth guides, interactive maps, actually useful explanations etc. usually recieved very little recognition compared to (pardon my language) lazy, no-effort shitposts, reposts and memes.

    Maybe, only maybe a “comparison” system could work, something like an upvote-to-downvote ratio without raw numbers (“username’s karma is 98% positive and 2% negative” instead of “user has 45,992 Karma”) so there is no real incentive to amass meaningless internet points but others could still see whether they’re dealing with a troll if the “negative” side is noticably bigger.

    …in the end, I’d still prefer a no-karma-at-all-system over anything else. Creating content for the sake of offering good content to the community, that’s the best approach IMHO.

    • @WetBeardHairs@lemmy.world
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      11 year ago

      An alternative would be to move toward a flag system instead of up/down votes. Funny, Insightful, Helpful, Unhelpful. Then the users could choose if they want the funny shitposts or the useful comments.