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?
I don’t think each user being given a score is good, it makes sense to score posts and comments but I don’t see what scoring users adds. I don’t see how you can even calculate scores in a decentralised system, can anyone shed some light on this?
We removed showing the users post / comment scores from their user profile. Ya I agree in contrast to twitter / masto, we’d like this to be content / community-centric, rather than person / reputation centered.
I think that’s a good call. I am interested to see how you make Lemmy seem different from Reddit and have its own appeal outside of just the decentralisation which only woke people care about.