A bit of a tangent, but I liked one aspect of the lobste.rs karma system where downvotes require a selecting a reason from a list of:

off-topic
incorrect
me-too
troll
spam
unkind

I find this helps with discourage using downvoting simply as an indication of disagreement.

Hrm. I’m torn.

One side of me hates the way reddit and twitter obscures or hides votes, whether to protect their blue checkmarks, or potentially lie about popularity. I definitely want popularity to be a transparent thing, and I really don’t like the way mastodon hides that.

But yes karma farming is annoying. I want lemmy to be more content-centric, and less people-centric, so I spose I have no problem with not showing total karma on user pages. There’s also the debate on whether karma farmers are really bad at all, since they’re just posting popular content.

I know a lot of the hatred around karma farming is really a hatred of bots, which I’d be more interested in protecting against, than hiding a user’s contribution numbers.

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?

I made a long post and I lost it. :person facepalming:
Long story very short: I feel this is harmful design and makes the environment ableist for people with a “social media gambling” problem.

I would like my karma to be permamently set to 0.

Or infinity. :)

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.

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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…

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Whatever the implementation may be, unless it is meant to completely remove the scoring system, there will be someone trying to achieve a higher score in the sense whatever that score is and thus wind up abusing the scoring system as you had mentioned in your post.

In my opinion, removing the score completely without having something encouraging more posts to be written is nothing but disadvantageous to the future adaptation of Lemmy as a mainstream alternative to Reddit, or to social media in general.

What the developers can do to reduce the amount of abuse which could arise from such actions is nothing but to have Karma farmers be farmers of Karma, where Karma is nothing but a point that represents people’s agreement or disagreement with the content made available for the public to read.

I might add more to this comment if I ever find a more suitable way to adapt a point system without having the users to abuse it. Otherwise, good luck to whoever solves this issue! :slightly smiling face:

I think that the “karma score” is used in two ways. On a community basis it measures how many positive contributions were made. In this case a simple role system, where these are distributed by votes/decisions, would be much more humanistic and less easier to cheat. On the other hand in interpersonal relations this score measures how important a post/comment should be for me personally. For that each pair of users should have a dedicated score, which indicates how easily both are reached by upvotes of posts or comments. A more simpler algorithm would give a user a list of trusted members (e.g. friends and me), from whose upvotes the personal “karma score” is calculated. You could also limit the number of hops you are taking in the social graph.

Copy Netflix

Every post should have a different score per reader, not per author, prediction-driven, based on how a reader has voted in the past and weighing in votes from others based on the extent by which the reader’s past votes align with other voters.

Complex? yes, but if you ignore complexity this is what best serves the community. I want posts I’m most likely to find insightful to rise to the top of my own view. Posts I’m unlikely to draw value from should be folded (click to expand).