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?
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.
This is an excellent idea, just show the sum of both upvotes and downvotes, best of both worlds.
IIRC, boosts increase it and downvotes decrease it. Last time I checked I was minus 5. Thus I think of it as a QI score.
That’s a poor way to measure karma since people downvote significantly more liberally than they boost, and boosting isn’t a thing on lemmy.
It does make a positive score far more meaningful, given that no only does someone have to post quotable content, but it’s also really easy to lose.
I think it might be too skewed to the negative this way, though. I’d support it if boosts were positive but there either was no negative, or the negative score was tied to the number of people who have blocked you, somehow.