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?

  • Maya
    2·
    5 years ago

    I’ve just had the thought that it might be nice in the absence of displayed karma to make it possible for an instance admin to automatically send a message to users when they would hit a certain amount of, say, post karma. (A thank you? A secret password to a secret chat server? A reminder that there is life away from the keyboard?) Maybe karma could be API visible so this could be botted onto the side or something.