I am curious to hear opinions on the concept of user karma in general.
Do people miss it?
Are we better off without it?
From a technicial perspective, I don’t see why it couldn’t be implemented. I understand Lemmy doesn’t track this explicitly. However, using a users post and comment history you could come to a number pretty easily, right? I was considering making a toy app that would take a user and instance and spit out a karma score for post and comments, what would stop others from doing the same?
Will it be inevitably pulled into existence by Lemmy users as we mature the platform?
On your first point, I think that’s similar to a captcha. Captchas obviously don’t stop all bots. But they stop the vast majority. The fact that you can get cheap karma doesn’t negate the fact that it can still serve as a filter.
But I agree on the second point. I think karma shouldn’t be a hard barrier to contributing somewhere. It should instead be a factor in anti spam measures. Eg, automation can be more suspicious of comments from people with no karma and we can do stuff like require manual approval for really questionable comments.
IMO, the absence of karma has little impact on the third point. I think many people who want karma aren’t merely trying to get a big number on their profile. They want attention in general. They want things they post to get a ton of replies and lots of votes so it’ll be seen.
I think that it’s a weak filter and, more importantly: botting is an instance-wide issue, so it needs to be addressed by the admins, not by the mods. The mods were only doing it “in certain site” because the admins are outright incompetent and malicious.
Fair point on the third one. Thinking about it this way, yeah the impact should be small.