Another Reddit refugee here,
I think we’re all familiar with the Karma system on Reddit. Do you think Lemmy should have something similar? Because I can see cases for and against it.
For: a way to tracking quality contributions by a user, quantifying reputation. Useful to keep new accounts from spamming communities.
Against: Often not a useful metric, can be botted or otherwise unearned (see u/spez), maybe we should have something else?
What do you all think?
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.
How would it track positive contributions by a user? You can do that by seeing their comments and the individual upvote/downvote.
Karma is just going to ruin this place.
The karma system, as we former redditors know it, is susceptible to abuse (especially on a decentralized platform), results in a drive to repost popular content repeatedly, and is a poor representation of quality contributions. My vote would be no.
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.
Pretty sure someone who owns a server could just give themselves reputation points.
Which is why the reputation system can’t be based on something the user’s server says, but must be based on third parties the person checking the reputation trusts.
To give an example, @zaktakespictures@social.goodanser.com might claim to be a member in good standing at /c/photography@lemmy.world, having first posted 8 days ago, last posted today, posted 4 times in total.
You can check that manually by looking at the user page on lemmy.world and see that the posts were not removed by the community’s moderators, but you cannot check that the account is not banned as far as I know. What I have in mind would let your server query that sort of thing automatically and set up lists of communities you’ll trust to vouch for users.
There could be several options to deal with a user who doesn’t have reputation, such as not letting them post, holding their posts for moderation, or having a spam filter scrutinize their posts.
There have been efforts to build reputation systems that don’t rely on central servers, like early day bitcoin’s Web of Trust, which allowed folks to rate other folks with public key crypto, thus ensuring an accurate and fair trust rating for participants, without the possibility of a middle-man putting their thumb on the scale.
One problem with it is that it was still perfectly practical for bad actors to accumulate good ratings, then cash out their hard-earned reputation into large scams, such as the “Bitcoin Savings & Trust” (for $40 million in that particular case), which quite possibly made it measurably worse than not having a system that induced participants into making faulty judgments in the first place.
I think the main practical value of something like reddit’s karma is an indication of age and account activity, both of which can probably be measured in other, if less gamified ways.
I Gota downvote this idea. Karma was my least favorite part about Reddit
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.
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.
I can definitely live without it, bit I do miss it a lot.
I liked my magic internet points number, man.
This. We can meme on them all day long, and we know they’re worthless, but they feel nice. Oldest account had 40k+ because of a sick quilt my grandmother made.
You know what’s funny? I think I voted more on comments here than my several years of reddit already. Having votes kept to individual comments instead of tallied up in your profile like this just feels better to me.
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.
What’s preventing GPT-based bots to earn karma by writing real-looking comments?
The future of the internet really seems like a dark one…
But programs are tasked by their creators, and if their long-term goal is spam, then we know what their tactics are.
A GPT-bot designed to have good discussions with the community would get upvotes and karma (at least, to the best extent that these programs can do). A GPT-bot designed to spam the community with links or shill a product would probably get downvotes.
So distinguishing between good-bots and bad-bots is still karma / reputation management.
A karma metric would just hasten the decline that happened to Reddit. People liked OG Reddit as a forum to connect with like minded people. The karma situation lead to karma farm tactics with the goal of selling accounts or promoting commercial or political content. The lack of karma will remove a reason for bad actors to do the same here. It also removes the karma motivation for low effort reposts.
Comments should be voted on based on their contribution to the discussion. That’s a natural way to guide the conversation in a productive direction.
I would prefer Lemmy et al to stay away from broad appeal BS like celebrity AMAs, and karma thirsty low effort people pleasers. It shouldn’t be a place for special events, it should be a place for productive community conversation.
“The karma situation lead to karma farm tactics with the goal of selling accounts or promoting commercial or political content.”
Without karma, they can promote commercial or political content without bothering with the karma farming. Is that really better?
Yes.
What differentiates these systems from more conventional forums is the karma and voting system. Imaginary internet points give people something to chase, and is no different from people playing Donkey Kong or pinball machines for high scores. It’s the same basic principle.
The function it ends up serving though, is to incentivize people to participate in whatever culture exists in that particular community. While not a strong incentive at all, even a small one is enough to push people to be more informative in educational communities, funnier in comedy communities, more understanding and empathic in support group communities etc etc.
By combining this basic high-score incentive with the standard voting-pushes-shit-to-the-top, you can create a system that naturally pushes communities to better and better content. This was a key to reddits success in eventually becoming a body of preserved information, not too dissimilar to wikipedia or quora. But funnier. And with more porn.
It was key to the early days of Reddit’s success, and the byproducts of this approach have produced effects that many view as a net-negative. Karma farming and copying content overall harmed the quality of content as time went on. While it was initially a successful engagement mechanism, in a more mature environment it will be counter productive, in my opinion.
That seems to discount the idea that new people are continuing to join the internet every single day, and will have never seen the older content.
It is inevitable that eventually their numbers will build to a sufficient degree that the content can, and should, be reposted to be brought to the newcoming audience.
To actually stop reposting, we would need people to stop having children, ultimately. Otherwise it is simply serving a necessary purpose.
