Ask Lemmy

Lemmy doesn't have karma farming because it doesn't have karma.

Accounts earn their reputation based on name recognition, not some artificial score.

There is no karma or points and I can't figure out why you would call a raw count that. The count means absolutely nothing. I could make a board and post "lol" a thousand times to drive up that number. And if you reset it after a year I could just do it again.

If you care how many times someone has commented and feel like you're winning or losing anything based on that, that's pretty weird. You're asking why people are so opposed to this change if counts aren't important, but why is the impetus on someone to defend the status quo when your only reason for wanting to change it is some people might be weird about it. Show me weird behavior. Demonstrate how it is a problem without referring to Reddit which is a completely different system with no relevance.

Show a need for a change and we can talk options and tradeoffs. That's a reasonable conversation. This... isn't. But that's okay. I've posted dumb shit before and it turns out regardless of up or down votes, it's still just one comment.

Yeah, as the other people here pointed out, there is no such thing as karma here on Lemmy. So your post is a bit pointless. In fact they tried not to include too much gamification, in a deliberate attempt to address a few issues with how it works on Reddit.

And showing the number of posts a user posted isn't the same thing. You sometimes want to know if someone is active, or a regular, or a lurker or a new account. And getting that info requires a few clicks and a deliberate attempt. Not something people are going to brag with. It doesn't even tell much. Could be 100 low-quality posts. Or 100 posts done in 5 minutes in a private community that no one ever read.

And I mean even if there were Lemmy points and you're zeroing them out and introduce a "years of service"... Isn't that going to be the next toxic metric people are going to brag with? And it'll incentivise people to create some empty accounts, so they have something ready in the future, should they need it. Or they're going to look down on other people and say "yeah, but I have 2 years of service"... So I'd argue if you want to get rid of farming points, you have to get rid of them, not introduce a different one.

No such thing here. It’s literally impossible for it to be a problem.

There's nowhere where Lemmy shows a total karma for a user, is there? You can see their post/comment history how much each post/comment is upvoted/downvoted, but not any "total" karma score, right? (At least not without going through all of a user's posts/comments and manually adding up the score. Or am I missing something obvious somewhere?)

So, what points are you proposing we "zero out?"

I doubt I'd be for any change like that no matter your answer, but wanted clarification anyway. Honestly I feel like what we've got here is pretty great and I'm not really interested in a lot of changes to what we have here myself.

The chief difference between here, and Reddit, is that there is no accumulated tally of votes here. Someone can "karma farm" all they want here, and they will have exactly nothing to show for it. Their account doesn't have a number going up, there is no final score that marks them out as any kind of special.

Adding any kind of system to denote "consistent positive contribution" as you mentioned, or any kind of actually accumulated score, regardless of rolling delay, would only provide incentive for "karma farming" that does not currently exist.

Your proposed solutions would create the problem you're trying to solve, a problem which does not currently exist.

Why does it matter?

Karma doesn't give you any advantages.

Yeah points do not matter, they ain't that prominent and many instances don't even tally them.

There is no karma court or an exclusive karma whore community.

So why care about that meaningless number in the first place?

IMO it's not about what metric is used, but how it is used. The current approach, completely avoiding any karma like mechanism, solves the farming issue, but IMO does not cater to the needs of every user.

For example, I have ADHD and if accumulating karma gives me much needed motivation and feel good chemicals, I am going to take them.

At the same time, holding a user to a higher regard because of their karma is stupid, it's better to build real connections with usernames you recognise through continuous communication.

Personally, karma was an easily digestable piece of information about how my outreach into the social media is performing. Accumulating karma helps me feel connected with the community, feel accepted.

I hope Lemmy doesn't bow to the I want reward, I need my shiny recognition ribbon trend.

That's 100% infantilization of participants. Even on the few reddit subs I'm subbed to (on average, those have real high value content), I can see a few people focusing on that karma thing and that's sad to watch and, well, not flattering for them. It's also a lot of useless work more to do for those mods that try to maintain a certain level of quality, which is not a great thing.

Imh(and admittedly naive)o, people should post based on what they're interested in and based on what they think they can bring to the discussion and not in exchange of a tap on the shoulder, or some good grade — unless they're still kids going to school, doing homework and passing exams but even there... maybe one day, we will realize focusing our attention on grades more than on understanding/learning was a huge and costly mistake.

Edit: mistakes and clarifications.

Haha, I recognise myself in OP's comment, I think. I was soundly downboated for my comment. 😄

Internet points are the objective for some people, regardless of the platform or meaning. I'm usually reluctant to tell someone they're having fun the wrong way - whatever floats your boat - but I'd much prefer some kind of reputation based on quality rather than the groupthink "hur hur, that made me spit out my drink" system that Reddit and Lemmy use.

But what do I know. I'm just some Internet rando with opaque motives, just like the rest of us.

Edit: For the ideologues spouting the tired "Lemmy doesn't have karma!" party line, the number alongside your username is what people are taking about, not what we call it. FFS.

Someone's post count does not influence anything about their experience with Lemmy.

What does karma even do?