Did people actually change what they’d say based on whether or not they thought they’d get upvotes? I always just said what I wanted and used the karma to determine how popular of an opinion it was, so pretty much exactly how Lemmy works now. I don’t think I ever looked at my overall account karma on Reddit.
Yes. It can also trick you into thinking a reactionary opinion is actually a popular one. For example in my country, ireland, there’s been a few incidents were people of different nationalities have done unsavoury things caught on camera. This usually results of the comment section of the ireland sub to have a debate about whether there’s too many immigrants in the country. Whichever side gets more upvotes is widely perceived to have “won” and bystanders will in turn adopt that position.
I don’t think I’ve ever changed an opinion of mine to go along with the hive mind but the karma system has definitely discouraged me from commenting things because I would been downvoted into oblivion. It’s not worth getting into arguments when you can clearly see people not siding with you.
How does this system solve that? Comments still have vote counts and reactionary comments still make it to the top of threads, there’s just no visible count of total aggregated votes.
You’re correct, the entire system is already in place. The only thing that is currently missing is adding up all of someone’s ‘karma’ from their their posts and having it shown on their profile. Some of the apps already have this implemented since it’s easy to incorporate.
That’s not the only thing that’s missing. A total upvote count on my profile page wouldn’t be the problematic element that Reddit has. I would welcome a total upvote count on my profile page.
I’m fine being downvoted to oblivion by some anti-good astrotufing campaign, but it’s getting honest, legitimate opinions slid down and out of discussion that feels risky
I’m definitely anti right wing, but that doesn’t automatically make the left right about everything.
What is true about both sides is that some people just wanna look for a fight/argument and dehumanize their political ‘other’. It’s easy dopamine and righteous rage that drives engagement in every human.
Any good faith comment that points this out in an argument and has credible examples is always worth its salt.
I actually like finding out I’m wrong or my information is incomplete/outdated. I don’t care for unfounded opinions in myself or others regardless of how they make me feel!
It did the opposite for me. I see those threads in r/canada or other posts and I’d comment trying to get downvoted because I hated the circle jerking and manipulation of threads with cliché comment chains intent on being dog whistles. I hated karma and somehow ended up with a stupid amount of it.
The big thing for me is that I’ve seen a lot of people say they’ve had their accounts stalked and harrassed for saying really mild things. With how many times I’ve read “I read your post history and…” over even the most mild disagreements, I absolutely believe this happens on a regular basis. Dropping an obviously unpopular opinion feels like an easy way to become a victim.
I’ve had my account stalked! Right in the middle of it I switched from Kbin to Lemmy (so I could try out the apps) and had to inform my stalker about the new account.
Frustrated and annoyed at having to look for my posts in many different places, they seem to have given up 🤷
This is a clear win for the Fediverse! I was able to switch instances and get subscribed to all my previous communities in no time at all while this doubled up stalking efforts 👍
Whenever someone said they checked my post history I immediately considered it a victory and moved on.
Yea there’s some psycho’s out there. I picked a few up. Nothing really crazy from them and surprisingly most of them had poor infosec so I was never too concerned that they were anything to worry about. Really emotionally invested people who don’t like when they read things they disagreed with
That’s how I lost my three accounts and I have completely given up
100%. I’d even be ok with getting rid voting mechanisms all together. The comment and responses to it should be indicative of it’s quality instead of some vague numerical value which somehow makes it better than the other because more people voted for it based on their own understanding on how a vote works.
Discussions shouldn’t be about what’s popular. Social media has corrupted our ability to have intelligent discussions because non popular viewpoints aren’t entertained anymore and people with non popular viewpoints don’t want to contribute due to the retaliatory nature of likes/votes.
It’s eroding our ability to reason and we need to stop it.
That and the “hivemind” mentality Reddit encoruages often means you get power-tripping mods banning people, not for doing anything wrong, but for “Dissenting with the group”
The average user is probably banned from a quarter of the site over shit like this.
Interesting. How do you know this? That the bystanders looked at the upvotes and decided their opinion on immigration based on this? Were there polls or something?
I agree
Ah, c’mon downvoters…gotta keep some sarcasm alive at the same time!
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I mean, it kind of does mean something small, which is credibility. Karma wasn’t ever a flawless way to determine credibility, but it was a decent first pass, like an online ocular patdown.
Uh, no. Lol
It maybe showed popularity. But it was frequently manipulated.
Example: replace this entire comment with a portion of a highly upvoted comment below from this same thread, combine that with an official experience that only shows one or two top level comments and those copies can also get lots of upvotes. Reddit was rife with these kinds of bots.
In ideal situation downvote should not be used for disagreeing but topic relevant and quality. In ideal situation…
Bro I’ve never for a second thought that gallowboob had any credibility whatsoever and the motherfucker had like, all the KARMA
You’re completely missing my point. I’m not saying you should worship the guy, but he has more credibility than a troll with negative karma or a 3 month old tshirt bot with a few hundred karma from plagiarized comments.
Both those cases have 0 credibility from any sensible person as they are functionally equivalent
Hi I’m necrocommenting this old comment, sorry.
You’re conflating post karma and comment karma. Post karma is shit and almost everyone on reddit with super high post karma is awful. Comment karma however is often a decent measure of credibility. The problem is people conflate the two, or worse, inappropriately value post karma over comment karma.
The biggest issue in some places was, even if your opinion is valid, if it didn’t fit the group speak, it would be downvoted regardless.
It wasn’t really a great indicator if your opinion was popular or not, it was more if it got that groups niche.
wasn’t really a great indicator if your opinion was popular or not, it was more if it got that groups niche.
… That’s called popular opinion lol.
Of course it matters where you say something. It’s literally no different than IRL.
If I’m on Reddit it’s to Reddit, it’s not to change my vocabulary and content to fit each individual subreddits niche.
Imagine being in a country bar and a table only wants to talk about and listen to rap music. The rest of the place shouldn’t have to bend to their will or create some safe place for them.
There’s an old saying to “read the room”. It’s the same online and offline. The reaction you get depends entirely on the audience present.
Reading the room is about the tone you set, not the words you say.
People just don’t like hearing that they’re wrong, or that popular opinion is wrong. Questioning themselves makes people uncomfortable.
The tone you set is dictated by the words you say.
And the words you say are dictated by others potential opinions on what you said and the tone you said it
Yes, and Reddit as a whole should be the audience, not the Emos in the corner…
Yes, people definitely did. Maybe not a majority but a lot
That and also many subs wouldn’t allow people to participate if they didn’t have a high enough karma
That was used as a crude spam filter against bots and new accounts
Karma did limit where and how frequently you could post
And that makes sense to some degree. I used to mod a large community on re**it and usually rage bait/flaming/troll accounts got filtered out by our automod which was set to 50 karma iirc. Most communities that use a karma filter have it set really low so farming a lot of karma is really unnecessary
Y’all act like that can’t happen on Lemmy. The total score is already visible via API. Nothing’s stopping a community from running a bot that auto removes anyone below a threshold. It’s entirely possible right now to write that code.
I didn’t. If anything I enjoyed the downvotes sometimes. Your downvotes mean nothing
I always thought it was amusing if I got into an argument with someone and they downvoted each of my comments before replying as if that meant something. Dude, I already get that you don’t agree with me. Why are you bothering?
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/5XtAHOepH94
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
That Rick quote is like the wojak where he’s got the smirking mask but is crying behind it. It always cracked me up when I saw people use it. If the downvotes mean nothing, why mention them at all?
Good to remember I guess
Did people actually change what they’d say based on whether or not they thought they’d get upvotes?
I’d argue anyone who did that probably had nothing interesting to say and/or didn’t actually care about what they were saying. Same with the people who complained about downvotes.
/me watches some dude post hateful contrarian bullshit on a light hearted comic.
"It’s not even funny and this shit comic comic has been done before. Quit self promoting on reddit removed!
Edit: Why am I being down voted!? Fuck you know it’s true! Mods temp banned me apparently. I don’t care I’m never going to block her so I can always down vote!"
Somehow everyone who commented on his parent comment has every comment in their profile down voted for the last 50 comments…
Oh I remember those, wasn’t that the brigading train?
I think you are envisioning something a little more intentional/thought out than it is. We do this socially all the time. You gauge the audience and you adjust what you’re going to say to better fit it. Or to upset them if you’re trolling but that tends to be more deliberate.
I bet if you took your comments from a hobby sub/forum/group/etc. you frequent, and then one from a meme community, you will find your tone and rhetoric are very different. And again this is not a bad thing! You are doing and saying what is appropriate for the context. It is very natural to do. But the point is you probably don’t sit down and calculate your exact wording. We just sort of do it, and our goal is generally to “fit in“ or get some affirmation from the community we are participating in.
Yep. I remember someone asking on a hiking sub about a backpack. It was a very fashionable and heavy canvas pack. I hike a good bit and have never seen a pack like that being used by others in the trails, so I said that I wouldn’t recommend that pack. I think it had like 30-40 down votes. I never gave my opinion on a pack again.
Bro you are welcome to elaborate here I mean what can be so controversial about a fucking backpack
Yeah right. I learned my lesson the first time. No more opinions from me.
:)
: C
Genuine question, and I don’t mean any disrespect, if down votes are intended to mean people disagree with you, and you don’t know these people, why did you care so much that you won’t share your opinion on things again? I’ve never understood this way of thinking. Maybe I’m just weird but I for the life of me can’t imagine caring that much about what strangers think.
The amount of deleted downvoted comments makes me think most people at least change their minds afterwards. Which to me is the real weird part, you hide your opinion so you don’t lose useless internet points…
I think the karma system on reddit had a real effect on behaviour. What you often found it did was cause people to write comments for the audience of voters instead of for the person they’re responding to. This eliminates personal interaction between users and turns everything into soapboxing. You stop having real conversations with each other, instead it becomes about pandering to votes.
This then also causes people to vote based on this as well. “You’re not saying what the group wants to hear” downvote is the voting behaviour it creates.
This so frigging much. People are not having conversations, they are posturing.
It’s like going into a debate prepared for discussing ideas, and the other debater is going for discussing emotions.
Truly fucked up and patently divisive
Yeah it’s annoying. Things are far more pleasant when people are actually talking to one another, it creates a more human interaction and you don’t get the kind of bad-faith engagement associated with trying to pander to votes. People self-censor far less as a result as well, aside from instance rules.
The weirdest part is the interactions, I swear to God people is hell bent on their conversations being pre-tainted with assuming the worst possible take on the others side.
It’s like people can’t no longer have different thoughts on the matter without going full civil war in the comments
To be honest I’ve gotten used to that and have had that here with “you glorify Lenin blah blah blah 100gorillion deaths gommunism no food”. I think that’s a specific type of person issue.
:/
Guess it’s gonna take a while. I think it’ll never get used to it haha
I certainly never have changed what I said based on popular opinion. If someone convinces me I’m wrong, I’ll admit it, but just people downvoting me because they don’t like what I have to say? Fine. That’s their prerogative.
I agree but when a sincerly comment does not strive how I expected i delete it and take the thought about it to myself.
Obviously I am wrong, then.
You are right.
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Yes, and there’s a bit of psychology at play
Reddit just shows one score on the post, it doesn’t show the exact upvote/downvote number. It’s easy to just say “Well everyone else voted this up/down, so I guess I will to”, it encourages group think, by design it’s meant to be an echo chamber.
Imagine you have a divisive opinion, at the end of an hour you have 9 upvotes and 11 downvotes, so it’s at negative one. You’re gonna think you’re being ignored, and others will think you’re unpopular and just downvote you not reading it because it’s “What the group is doing”
Reddit is fucking nightmare
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Pretty sure karma isn’t properly federated since nobody cares about it
You are correct. The calculation itself is bugged, and any time you delete a comment it resets to 0.
That’s what I fucking did. Reddit was shit not because of karma, but because of hivemind and owners. Lemmy is not protected from that either, but at least users potentially have more power here
You can, but there’s absolutely no reason to think the community population will ignore it, once it has its own value the karma removed will arise. People literally sell high karma accounts for real money. You can’t ignore the karma farmers when they are all around you and you can’t ignore the fact that it shapes real user behavior toward hive-mind dribble. Keep karma to the Gods, it is not for mortals to toy with.
Literally seen 0 people asking for karma system
Also karma on Reddit is basically irrelevant. The only place it matters is in automoderation removing posts and comments for users under a certain level of karma.
It is not irrelevant. It increases dopamine, which is highly addictive.
People will do strange things rather extensively to watch arbitrary numbers go up. Especially children.
Watching numbers go up is basically the whole gameplay loop of an ARPG. It’s fun.
Getting upvotes maybe, but nobody pays attention to their aggregate karma.
Not to be mean but, ritch folk dont watch their bank account directly, they have analog wasy of mesuring, like if they can buy “X” without renting.
Sure, that’s what I’m saying though. Anyone who posts regularly has enough karma that it makes no material difference. It’s one of those measures with high specificity when you have negative or low karma and almost no specificity once you get beyond some arbitrary minimum.
Karma’s return diminishes almost completely after you hit the bare minimum required not to get automoderated.
Really good response, i just relized we were never in disagreement
Posting comics on Reddit, I found it a quick way to see how well I made something and what people generally liked. Eventually though I started to become a little skeptical of the numbers, and hated having to play this game where those numbers might be better when posting at different times and different days. I couldn’t help but feel like some of them were bought initially to heat, or boost their posts.
I started to absolutely loathe those numbers, but I don’t know what you can do to replace them.
Which is honestly freaking dumb. Sure you can do it with a big community but it will speed up the hivemind and alienate new users and frankly did nothing to curb bots because bots just farmed karma elsewhere on a sub where it was open by spamming posts and comments. And then went right back on the “threshold” subs.
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I once wanted to post a meme on r/memes. My post got removed because I needed a lot more karma (my estimation was that I needed 1k each for both comments and posts but it wouldn’t actually tell me how much I needed). I REALLY hope that doesn’t appear here. It just blocks people from making and sharing content with others.
Why are u getting downvoted?
Probably people from Reddit defending the idea of a karma system, they always say that they’re made up internet points but the fact that Karma restrictions exist and are enforceable proves that wrong.
I mean, upvotes are counted and tracked so how is that different than karma?
Shhh let them just enjoy it for now
On reddit, if your karma is too low you’re not allowed to participate in most communities.
I mean, it’s a super low bar.
If i was, say interested in r/choosingbeggers, id annoy the crap out of any small ungated sub with “I agree” till I get my 100 karma.
Update: i don’t remember writing this
There’s currently nothing stopping a mod from creating a bot to do the same. Maybe it’s already a thing.
You don’t have a score.
I guess it depends on what interface you’re using.
Doesnt lemmy have a karma system already? I can see up votes on my posts, and a sum total on my account page.
Or do you mean something else by “karma”?
some third party clients sum up the upvote count of your posts to make a countturns out the lemmy api does send it to youbut lemmy itself will never get a proper karma system in the ui as has been said by the main people working behind it multiple times
The apps aren’t “summing it up”, while the lemmy webUI does not display it, it’s perfectly accessible via API.
Wow you’re right. I’ve gotten so used to Memmy and Wefwef that I didn’t realize the main site didn’t have it lol
Kbin has “reputation” unfortunately. I like Kbin enough to ignore it and I’m hoping others will do the same.
I use it the same way I did on Reddit; it’s a decent gauge in how willing I am to engage with that person. If their history is littered with downvoted posts, then I’m less likely to engage because it’s more likely they’re being inflammatory on purpose.
Karma systems don’t make places worse; the value placed upon them by the users does. It’s not meant to be a counter for how liked you are, it’s supposed to be representative of how you interact with the community; bad karma for bad interactions. But people use downvote as a disagree button, and people spam posts cause “big number make feel good”. Good idea, difficult implementation given how humans work.
I agree that’s what it supposed to be, but nobody really treats it like that. Downvotes are treated as a “dislike” button, despite the fact that it should be “this does not contribute meaningfully.“
Regardless of what we want, that’s just how people operate.
If it weren’t for the humans, humanity would be pretty cool.
Karma usually doesn’t work because it is used, as you said, a like button and not a quality button. Disagreeing with the majority is considered a violation.
hmm, checked the API documentation of lemmy itself, this seems able to get a person comment/post score data https://join-lemmy.org/api/interfaces/PersonAggregates.html
Reddit has a karma sum which is used to deny access from posting altogether. Here if you say something unpopular, you don’t get the dopamine hit from upvotes, but you’re also not silenced, unless the mod explicitly bans you.
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Yeah, I found people always made a bigger deal out of that than it really was. I think folks just assume other people are having trouble even though they didn’t personally.
Some places had a thousand karma before being able to comment or post, that’s not an easy hill to climb, especially if you say the wrong thing somewhere and people take offense to it for no reason.
I love how in these examples it’s always “for no reason“ and yet we never see the context.
Well it’s for no real good reason I should say, why is it always just the fourth comment in a chain that gets downvoted, because of the tropes and circlejerks.
Sorry I’m having a little trouble following. Are you asking me or are you stating that?
Expanding on some needed context I thought. Or were you agreeing that sometimes there is seemingly no reason?
Now I’m confused.
While I agree unpopular opinions often get shouted down, i think people often forget that sometimes what they consider an “unpopular opinion” is unpopular because it’s abhorrent or just wrong lol. Not every comment/idea is valid and deserves to be entertained.
Being anti-vax is unpopular in a lot of circles and I am perfectly happy with seeing those comments downvoted/ removed and the users banned.
Why banned? The downvotes are definitely deserved but why TF ban them on a sub about a topic not related to vaccines or medicine?
Why are you changing the parameters of my example lol
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I understand what you’re trying to do, but I am not interested in playing this game.
On a sidenote: I saw Oppenheimer recently as well, but let’s not shoehorn quantum physics into a discussion to make your point seem more elevated than it is.
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Nah fuck antivaxers. Cry about it
Nah fuck brainwashing. You won’t cry about it.
Yeah, and what else did the voices in your head say?
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I’d argue you still can get that dopamine hit.
Even if the numbers don’t carry elsewhere in a meaningful way, seeing the high positive number next to your post still means that other people agreed with/liked what you said on that particular post/comment. And that alone can give a mild dopamine hit.
Less useful for bots trying to farm rep for nefarious reasons, more useful for real people who can feel the joy of a moment.
Where does it show the sum total? I don’t see that in my profile or yours. Maybe it’s instance-dependent?
Either way, upvotes serve the same purpose here so I think the incentives are the same.
Lemmy doesn’t but Kbin does.
Color me confused …
I’m on connect for lemmy and also have a total count on my profile page.
Actually, isn’t it up to the client? The dev can decide what to feature in the profile page. The fact is, every user has points for posts and comments. Maybe they are just adding the numbers up? Afaik Reddit had some other maths behind the karma count
Are you using a third party app?
I’ll dissent. I like the karma system. It gives me a quick read out of who’s a troll and who isn’t.
I don’t care about post karma so much, but the comment karma was an interesting stat.
Edit: An important caveat. We MUST keep downvotes visible. MUST. Having just a positive score breeds absolute insanity.
I marked your name.
This ain’t a shit post.
Once there is a karma system in place I’m gonna vote you down to oblivion.
deal
Is that like the new “cope”? I can’t keep up with you young wipper snappers and your hip lingo
It means “it’s a deal”, and I’m pretty sure it’s been around for a long time.
Some mighty big words for someone with only 97 karma
Connect for Lemmy on Android has the karma system in place already
Give me the IP of the provider and i’m make him disappear. Thanks.
127.0.0.1
Man, he’s behind a firewall. Can’t get past it.
He backattacks immediately and my pc turns off.
How so? I use connect and wasn’t aware of a karma system
Not one time on reddit did i consider or care about my karma
Karma was pointless. Nobody cared at all. Upvotes and downvotes are fine and useful to be able to see both. Karma is a worthless system and encourages spamming low-effort garbage memes and endless reposting of the same shit.
I’m against any sort of gamification on social media. Not even achievements/badges or awards. That is the start of dark patterns and addictive design.
I agree. The karma system really pushes group think.
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It’s one of the more annoying things I hope we don’t inherit from reddit for that exact reason. Even worse when the joke isn’t even funny.
This.
This. So much this.
Tell my you’re X without telling me you’re X
What a strange way to admit you’re insert unpopular political axis
While the comment can be funny. It’s not funny every time on every post.
“This. So much this” and “take all my upvotes” are the two worst in my opinion. They both literally add nothing to the conversation, they are not funny and they are certainly not original. If you agree with a comment just use the fucking the upvote button.
I feel like the only time “this.” is reasonable is when you add something meaningful after that statement. Whenever I say “this.” under a comment, I don’t just leave it by itself. I add some extra stuff that I think would be useful or important to the conversation, or I expand on the previous commenter’s point. Never say “This.” by itself.
God I just got flashbacks to “edit: thanks for the gold, kind stranger!”
Did karma ever stop anyone from posting their racist, hateful shit on the other site?
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Jeerybooree intensifies
I like being able to say what I want without being banned by a power-tripping mod, or downvoted into irrelevance by a circle jerk. We need to be able to point out that the Emperor isn’t wearing clothes.
Does karma change that? We still have upvotes and downvotes, and you can sort comments by how well they do, and mods can still ban people not only from a community, but from a whole instance.
Abolitely 100%. This is not R and people should stop talking about R and stop fucking trying to make it more like R was.
R still exists, anyone who wants that can go back to that shithole.
This is the weird web. A return to a time before it was taken over by 4 major corporations.
Fuck R, fly your freak flags, people!
Imagine being so addicted to social media you let a number change his you act. Absolutely sad.
