• DessalinesA
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    223 years ago

    You mean on user profiles? We used to have them shown but voted to turn them off, to prevent karma farming.

    But we also do show real scores, including the downvotes, for comments and posts.

    • Serge Tarkovski
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      3 years ago

      I thought only posts and comments get scores, don’t they?

      • DessalinesA
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        63 years ago

        Yes, but you can sum a user’s scores on all the posts and comments they’ve made, to get a user’s post and comment karma. Its available in the API but we don’t show it in the front end right now.

        • Serge Tarkovski
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          3 years ago

          Can’t quickly understand whether it has a meaning. Any point in the above summing, what does it mean? If I only downvote other people’s content, I get a negative karma? It’s rather “I’m a negativist”. On the opposite, if people only downvote my posts and comments, this is IMO closer to a concept of (negative) karma (but can quickly become a massive shaming “hey friends, let’s downvote his/her comments”).

          • DessalinesA
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            53 years ago

            A lot of the bigger reddit accounts do what’s called Karma farming, where they post really popular memes to a few big subreddits at specific times, and potentially have bots that upvote them, because early upvotes can boost a post.

            Then these popular accounts can be marketed and sold for their attention-grabbing value.

            Also a lot of people just obsess over their account karma in a really unhealthy way.

            There are troll accounts like you’re saying too, where the goal is to get a negative score.

            • Serge Tarkovski
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              33 years ago

              This explains why people use karma and maybe why Lemmy doesn’t have it visible. But actually I’m asking why karma is available via API, and why it’s a sum of user’s own votes instead of votes made against the user’s content?

              • DessalinesA
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                33 years ago

                Not sure why we still have it available in the API, might be useful for some thing we haven’t thought of yet.

                why it’s a sum of user’s own votes instead of votes made against the user’s content?

                Oh, it is the second one, the sum of votes against the user’s content.

                • Serge Tarkovski
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                  3 years ago

                  Got it. I’m too have no clear vision whether it can be of use. At least as FYI and maybe shown for admins/moderators only to keep in mind whether someone is a potential troll. I’m against China-like reputation systems.

                  Actually, I’ve got a question: any plans/ideas or already implemented stuff in Lemmy to prevent massive (and maybe even automated) trolls/bots accounts registration and further spamming?