Yes. It can also trick you into thinking a reactionary opinion is actually a popular one. For example in my country, ireland, there's been a few incidents were people of different nationalities have done unsavoury things caught on camera. This usually results of the comment section of the ireland sub to have a debate about whether there's too many immigrants in the country. Whichever side gets more upvotes is widely perceived to have "won" and bystanders will in turn adopt that position.

I don't think I've ever changed an opinion of mine to go along with the hive mind but the karma system has definitely discouraged me from commenting things because I would been downvoted into oblivion. It's not worth getting into arguments when you can clearly see people not siding with you.

The biggest issue in some places was, even if your opinion is valid, if it didn’t fit the group speak, it would be downvoted regardless.

It wasn’t really a great indicator if your opinion was popular or not, it was more if it got that groups niche.

Yes, and there's a bit of psychology at play

Reddit just shows one score on the post, it doesn't show the exact upvote/downvote number. It's easy to just say "Well everyone else voted this up/down, so I guess I will to", it encourages group think, by design it's meant to be an echo chamber.

Imagine you have a divisive opinion, at the end of an hour you have 9 upvotes and 11 downvotes, so it's at negative one. You're gonna think you're being ignored, and others will think you're unpopular and just downvote you not reading it because it's "What the group is doing"

Reddit is fucking nightmare

They are talking about karma as a thing you could collect, point totals for all posts added together displayed on your profile. Not the voting mechanism itself.

Negative karma doesn't necessarily indicate a troll, any unpopular opinion can get down-voted to hell while similar but differently expressed ideas get up-voted in the same thread. I'm not against karma system though, just think it's quite useless in most cases.

I like being able to say what I want without being banned by a power-tripping mod

There's currently nothing stopping a mod from creating a bot that deletes comments below certain threshold or that bans users for commenting on communities they don't approve like they did on Reddit. Only site policies can prevent that.

The upvote/downvote system by itself is really just a human powered sorting algorithm that uses consensus to move the most relevant comments up where they can be seen, and to hide unproductive comments at the bottom.

So if all you have is an upvote/downvote system, that's all it is. Note that it doesn't matter that much, with a simple up/down system, if you got a bunch of downvotes. Your comment got buried, but that's kind of the end of it.

Karma is a score attached to individual users that probably sounded like a good idea at the time, but it tallies whether you have more upvotes than downvotes, and probably some other mess under the hood. It was supposed to be a measure of how often a given user provides relevant and helpful feedback to others. In practice, it's a social credit score like the one being developed by the Chinese government.

Even worse, karma got used as a metric to aim for, and it's what you used to make sure that your accounts were marketable to buyers, who wanted lots of positive comment karma on accounts, so they could post where they liked once they bought them.

When Reddit was born it was even techy-er than it is, now. So there was a lot of discussion about programming, and programming problems, similar to what happens on Stack Overflow these days.

Imagine I've asked Reddit a programming question of some sort, and soon, some comments reply.

User A, first on the scene: Idunno, man this looks like a tough one (doesn't answer the question, not really relevant)

User B, who showed up later: Ah yes, that's a bitch [proceeds to answer the question in detail, very helpful to OP and everyone else].

So, as a user, even a spectator, you were supposed to upvote User B, and maybe downvote A. Upvoting B was more important than downvoting A, since the upvotes would bring B's answer up to the top, anyway, while A's answer would fall down without anyone downvoting them on purpose. You were supposed to be hesitant to downvote, because of this. The poor answer essentially downvotes itself, no need to dogpile on User A.

Without a karma system, that's the end of it. User A's poor answer has no bearing on their treatment anywhere, their performance is not recorded and shown to the public at all, and User B may develop a reputation as a helpful person by name alone, but there's no karma, there, either. The whole thing stayed within the context of that post. User B's helpful post floats to the very top of the thread on a wave of upvotes, the end.

With a karma system comes a new dimension.

User B, who provided the great answer, would begin to accumulate positive comment karma, and in theory this would help you to judge B's answers in the future, just like you check the reviews on an Amazon listing. Remember that B might be answering a question on which you were ignorant, so you depend on karma to see if this person gives good answers, usually, or if he's just troll noise.

Reddit was born in the era of people asking a computer question and getting, "oh, yeah, just delete system32" as an answer. For the record, that is a very important Windows system process you must never delete, so that's just troll shit, trying to fuck an ignorant person over for lulz.

Reddit was trying to thwart that with the karma system, they needed people to be able to ask questions and get good faith answers. If a user provided lots of troll answers and lies, that should mean lots of downvotes from other users, negative karma. People know not to trust this person's answers, at least not easily. If they have tons of positive karma, shit man, that might be The Woz answering you for all you knew, a good sign.

It was entirely up to you, the user, to be very high-minded about this. So, even if User Z said something that you didn't like, but it added important information to the conversation, you would still upvote that comment. That kinda sorta worked, but then the Great Digg Migration happened, and a flood of normies came on board.

Normies all used the downvote button for what it was obviously for, it's a fuck you go away I don't like you button. It was pretty naive to think it would be anything else, but the founders had high hopes.

Now you can start accumulating negative comment karma from saying or doing things other people don't like, it doesn't take much, and automated moderation systems will start doing things like blocking you from joining communities because you have too much negative comment karma. It is assumed that you would have better karma if you weren't a shitty person. However, it's easy to abuse. If a bunch of fashy people downvote the everloving shit out of somebody for saying something like "black lives matter" now the wrong damn person ended up with lots of negative comment karma.

The fash can also open lots of extra accounts and upvote the hell out of each other and themselves, so they have lots of positive comment karma while being literal practicing Nazis at the same time. It's pretty easy to game the karma system and not very useful anymore. In practice, your karma score just records how often you comment things that the Reddit hive mind agrees with. The highest karma points probably belong to bots.

It's problematic, to say the least.

So it's possible to ditch the karma system entirely while still using upvote/downvote, they're actually two separate things. Since we are no longer all that worried about a solution to programming questions, and since the idea of karma got corrupted and stepped on pretty bad, it would be nice to leave it the hell behind with Reddit, where it belongs.

That is what OP is arguing for. Perhaps on the Fediverse we can forge ahead with new approaches, and let this Reddit-like situation be a springboard to something better in the future, something more unique to Lemmy itself.