I don’t think it necessarily needs karma like Reddit, but I think a reputation system of some sort is going to be required for open federation to remain viable as federated systems grow. Just looking at account age and post history isn’t good enough if the bad actor owns a server and wants to put some effort into spamming or harassing people.

Nope, no need for karma whores.

Edit to explain: The karma system reddit has, is obviously detrimental to the quality of content. Some people see it as a game, and play for karma, rather than actually posting something that is meaningful to them.

Others put to much significance into it, and get bummed if they are not upvoted, because they think karma equals popular.

I'd say no, I think adding a incentive metric will just cause posted to be reposted and beat to death. Original and thoughtful discussion is better without it IMO

I like it for filtering out low quality posters, but as we learned at /r/, that just led to the bots re-posting top posts for karma so they could then be used for spamming.

I think our society is likely better off without a persistent cumulative score next to our names, though.

Nope, it's fine the way it is right now. if its on the front page good. if not people gotta earn there upvotes. Karma whoreing makes it a competion for everyone. Everyone will be out for themselves and it will turn into reddit.

Been on Reddit for years, honestly never cared for karma. It's just there for me. I barely look at my own or other people's profile page anyway.

No karma!

NO

I had an 8 year old account on reddit (deleted today) and had accumulated a decent amount of karma. that being said I didn't even notice there wasn't any karma here. the voting system is nice to see which comments are popular but there's no need for it sitewide.

No internet points, please!

We absolutely need a trust system. I don't know if it should be a Karma system.

Spam-bots are taking up hundreds-of-thousands of usernames across the federation. It is clear that they cannot be trusted.

ChatGPT and GPT4 has made it easier for bots to automatically write comments as well, a few groups with money can make realistic-looking accounts with different posting patterns / writing styles automatically.

The problem of spam and automated-comments will only get harder moving forward. I don't know if Karma is a good enough system for us, but its better than nothing.

Upvotes and downvotes are nice in that they suggest that I'm not posting or commenting into the void.

I'm not overly interested in my grand total.

Definitely against karma. Some retard can say something smart once in a while, would you dismiss what he says based on his karma. Opposite is true, a smart ass can be completely wrong and yet have huge karma.

User karma on comment, not on people.

Lemmy actually already has something called "reputation". You have -3 sorry.

I couldn't really see the point at Reddit (seemed like an idea someone has once early on that got stuck) and I don't think it'd be that helpful here. If we are looking for ways to differentiate ourselves from Reddit, then that'd be one.

Let the quality of someone's account be measured by the quality of the posts they make.

I don't think so. I never payed attention to karma or gold or gifts at all. Tbh I never understood them and personally don't feel a need for any of it.

I'm a bit confused on this. We do need a way to filter spammers and bot accounts but karma didn't completely work on reddit.

I personally feel like community karma is a useful metric for quickly evaluating someone's presence in a specific community. Site-wide karma is far too easily-gamble to be a useful metric, though, and whether you had a post go crazy on a big sub means nothing in evaluating whether you're a good contributor to a small sub

No. There would be so many reposts and low effort posts and those annoying ''funny'' comments.

Please no. Posts upvotes/downvotes are more than enough. we don't need tiered users.

I don't want Karma, but I'd really like to get notifications when a post or comment of mine hits certain vote thresholds, e.g. 5/10/50/100/... upvotes/downvotes. I think this would help me get a feel of how my posts are received. Currently, if a post of mine gets 50 upvotes, I most likely won't ever notice unless I actively monitor all of my posts.

But with the notification I'd get a nice dopamine rush as reward for posting good content ;)

kbin has karma. i actually really like that i don't see my karma here. on reddit i became too focused on it, and so wasn't my True self.

I worked for a couple of years in the Tech Startup space not long ago and in little companies like that everybody does kinda work with everybody else, so I did work together with the Digital Marketing side too.

Anchored in what I learned there I have a feeling that Karma is often used as a sort of buy-in and gamification strategy.

On the first part (not sure if buy-in is the right expression but stay with me here), it gives people something that feels like a personal asset: you've put time into making posts and you got this "stuff" from it, which intellectually is just a number by emotionally is something that is "yours" and you got by putting time and work into it, and this "stuff" is non-transferable so you're less likely to leave because you don't want to loose it.

On the second part it's all part of a game loop to incentivise posting: you post, people read it, they like it, so you get karma, which feels good so you post some more to get more karma in turn resulting in more of the pleasure of recognition and that "score" going up. Mind you, up-votes also do work a lot like this (not the score part but the pleasure of social recognition) and karma just amps up that a bit, so this second part is not as important as the first. (Also note that this whole game-loop is why many social media sites don't have or removed down-votes - with only up-votes pretty much everybody no matter how shitty their content gets at least some of that sweet positive social-feedback, which feels good so they'll make more posts so there's more content on the site which attracts more people spending more time there, yielding more eyeball-hours for advertisers hence more $$$).

Karma does make sense in a purelly expert context to allow people to recognize those with somewhat more expertise (though it really doesn't measure that with a correlation of 1, as people get karma for sounding right, which is not the same as knowing what they're talking about), but in a system like in Reddit it doesn't work like that because one can gain far more karma from just saying something which is "popular" and "aligns with the groupthink" in some political-heavy sub or making interesting posts in the "relax" subs (say, posting jokes, memes, cat-pics) that you can by providing genuinelly knowledgeable expert advice on expert subs, as do it with a lot less effort, so people's karma doesn't really work well at showing expertise, unless maybe its per-sub.

Karma is just a drug for Reddit addicts. Just let each post stand on its own regardless of who posts it. We don't need that extra layer of crap. I always disliked that.

Id say no. Karma leads to gamification and gamification leads to enshittification.

I’d rather have lower traffic and higher quality. Karma is of real benefit only to commercial owners, not users.

No. I think the numbers game lowers the level of discourse.

Karma was always so irrelevant for me, I won't miss it.

The only instance I can think of Karma being beneficial is in highly specific forums where user reputation could be an important metric for new users, or those seeking info. Very limited.

When it gets to something as general as this it just becomes popularity/feel-good points. Not necessarily evil, but no real benefit. Upvotes are still a thing for that social media dopamine hit.

No need. New users can be kept in check simply by being new, as in age of account. Active users can determined by their history.

Adding a point system inherently makes it a game.

Unless its like Whose Line is it Anyway, where the "karma" points shown are random for each user, each day. That could be funny.

No

We don't need people Karma Whoring.

Karma is a great indicator of the popularity of what you're posting to help you post more excepted things. There's no reason for us to bring the reddit pissing contest here.

I thought it did already. what are these voting buttons

No.

Glad to see how many folks are against it. Karma would not bring any value to Lemmy.

Well, karma itself isnt a bad idea in my opinion, but making it visible to others isnt. Making it hidden will stop the karmafarming.

No.

I think it's good for dealing with communities that don't want newly created users to interact, or even limit the appearance of how much karma you can do X thing.