This is something I wanted to bring up for a while now, so here we go.

If you use Reddit, you are probably familiar with the “karma score” that it displays on user profiles, based on the points from all of the user’s posts and comments. Lemmy also has this for now, but I think it is bad and should be removed.

Having a global score like that makes sense from the perspective of a company like Reddit, because it encourages users to post more, which increases “engagement”, giving them more money from ads and investors.

But from the community perspective, such a score has a lot of negative effects, like users (or bots) posting low quality content with the only goal of increasing their karma score.

Mastodon has given a good example for how to do it differently. For the most part, numbers are hidden (like boost or fav count), and only visible for a single post at a time. I saw a lot of comments that this helped to create a healthier discussion culture because people are encouraged to look at the actual content, and not on some numbers.

So what do you think about this? Any thoughts or suggestions?

  • k_o_t
    2·
    5 years ago

    I propose to use this simple formula to calculate karma (similar to what reddit does), where x is the number of comment points and y is the number of days ago the profile has been created:

    btw, it would be super cool to integrate LaTeX support :)

    seriously though, I think it should be

    total points = post points + comment points

    because I think taking away karma completely is not a good way of fighting karma wh0r1ng (c’mon, this word is not allowed, wut?), because the content posted with intention of karma wh0r1ng it either low-effort, in which case the post will simply be downvoted, or it’s not low-effort, in which case there’s nothing wrong about it…

    but partly hiding scores locally, especially in comment sections, might be a nice way to promote content-centric discussion…

    • bytesnake
      1·
      4 years ago

      shouldn’t be too hard, you basically just have to add mathjax in you header and then you can write latex equation. This becomes very complicated though if you want to support static rendering without javascript

    • AgreeableLandscape
      1·
      5 years ago

      it would be super cool to integrate LaTeX support

      It’s a good idea, but we have to be careful with this and limit it only to a few math and text formatting commands. Latex is Turing complete and could be used to inject malicious scripts.

      • Gilgamesh
        1·
        4 years ago

        Witnessing how other websites, which among those is GitLab, have chosen to use KaTeX as standard math typesetting library and having interacted with KaTeX myself, can I say that the implementation does not reduce performance.

        Taking that aside, I am not very familiar with the inner workings of a website which could cause malicious risks and thus can I only recommend you to have a look KaTeX.

    • DessalinesA
      1·
      5 years ago

      hehe, that’s the way karma is currently calculated on user pages, just adding the post and comment points.