this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
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I don't get the karma hangup thing. Like.. Lemmy does have Karma, but we just don't culturally make it a priority.
The fact that it's not designed to notify you every time you get 5 upvotes changes the game. Also low Karma accounts can post in Lemmy as opposed to Reddit.
Exactly - Reddit specifically and intentionally uses dark patterns to reinforce the importance of karma at every turn. The first interaction that someone has with Reddit is usually "you don't have enough karma to post/comment/vote in this subreddit." There are secret communities and public awards for high karma earners. There is a frontpage dedicated to rapid karma-earning posts. There is no disincentive for karma farming reposts, and subreddits are actually punished for reducing reposts. Karma is commoditized.
Here the votes still matter, but the algorithm is public and users can and do sort in a variety of ways to discover new and relevant content. There is no single "front-page"
Unfortunately, on reddit - when subreddits restrict new posters or low karma commenters, they're just trying to mitigate the impact of trolls and bots and people making new accounts. It's not about being elitist.
Yeah because reddit (and Lemmy) are different to what a lot of people are used to. Users coming from things like tiktok or Facebook need to lurk a bit before posting so they get a feel for the culture.
It is gatekeepy but its nessesary in my opinion. However I can see how the karma restrictions are super jarring for new users since it takes a while to get especially if your comments are always buried.
There used to be a saying on early image boards that have helped me more times than I can remember. "Lurk moar", it has served me well. Even getting used to office culture. It helps to not make any faux pas that would make it harder to get along.
The karma restrictions seems at first a good idea but can be bypassed very easily. The bots steal older popular posts or pictures and repost them.
Sure, but it offers at least some protection.
But should they?
One of the things I miss about reddit (and slashdot before that) was that if you got downvoted/downmodded a lot in a short amount of time, it would tell you to slow down (, cowboy). It helped to limit the damage when someone would go on a troll spree before they got banned.
Some subreddits did implement a "you must have x karma to post" rule, or account age, which I wasn't always a fan of, especially if it was karma within a certain subreddit. I understand the logic, that it was intended to make people read the community before posting, but I'm not sure if it hit the mark. But it did limit brand-new spam accounts, which are already here on lemmy.
I believe it's an unhealthy habit, silencing unpopular people. Some of us low profile oddballs like to share our thoughts too
That's true, but it's gotta be balanced by limiting the fallout of extreme cases on other users
I do like the slow down, cowboy think and I'm pretty sure reddit had that extremely early on as well
Some communities use a "santabot" to auto-ban accounts with more downvotes than upvotes. I've never seen it happen to someone who didn't deserve it.
This may not be an inherently bad thing given that low karma accounts tend to be trolls.
I'd argue that low karma accounts tend to be new people or lurkers.
By low karma I mean -100 types.
I call that negative karma. Low karma is 0-200. 200 because that is a limit that at least some subs would use to limit new accounts from posting.
I always like forum setups where you had limited posting privileges until you'd had a couple of posts. Usually, they'd have an introduction category where you could post, and then comment on some other users' posts, to get your post or reputation count high enough to unlock the rest of the board.
Most Lemmy sites are small enough to have a local introduction community or other 'free' communities for newbies to dip their toes and acclimate. They'd be good places to centralize posts on how all of this works, too.
Wouldn't scale to large servers, though.
Good moderation eliminates trolls pretty quickly. Admins are incentivized to respond to users' concerns rather than a profit motive. Some communities do have a minimum account age for certain actions, and some instances require a real email address and IP address to join/participate.
Trolls are bots are rare on Lemmy. They are the norm on reddit.
The traffic on Reddit is massive for highly populated subreddits. And these subreddits that restrict low karma account activities aren't doing it for any profit motive.
I understand Lemmy isn't really big enough for this to be a concern here.
If/when it does get big enough, what would be a good solution? It would be possible to do the same as Reddit
wat
Is that a new thing? I'm pretty sure it didn't do that before I left.
It doesn't accumulate and display anywhere though, does it?
I think there might still be one or two apps that show a total.
Doesn't show your total on the Eternity app
It doesn't have karma in the sense that there is a publicly displayed total of every post and comment you made so you can point at your profile and be like "look how much karma I have!"