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?

  • DessalinesA
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    84 years ago

    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.

    • @nutomicOPA
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      64 years ago

      I’m not saying hide votes completely, but one thing we could do is not display points on the overview pages (like /c/asklemmy), but only showing them once you open a specific post. That would remove them from the focus a bit.

      Karma farmers are a problem, because a lot of times they post low quality content (like reposting top posts from a few months ago, with no effort at all). That is not what we should encourage, and if we make points less important, hopefully people wont even bother with karma farming.

  • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆
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    84 years ago

    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.

  • @ster
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    54 years ago

    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?

    • DessalinesA
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      24 years ago

      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.

      • @ster
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        24 years ago

        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.

  • @diorama
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    44 years ago

    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.

    • @bytesnake
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      14 years ago

      for me too, had to rewrite it oO

      • DessalinesA
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        14 years ago

        I’d fixed this in v0.7.2, but for some reason it downgraded. Refresh the page and it should be fixed.

  • @Panzerfaust
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    34 years ago

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

    Or infinity. :)

    • @nutomicOPA
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      24 years ago

      We removed the karma counter from the user profile, so this is basically resolved.

      • @Panzerfaust
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        34 years ago

        Just put the nick of a person you want to check into search and karma points will pop out like this: Panzerfaust - 161 comment karma

        • @nutomicOPA
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          14 years ago

          Thanks, I didnt even know that. Will open an issue to remove it.

  • Maya
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    24 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.

  • @k_o_t
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    4 years ago

    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…

    • @AgreeableLandscape
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      14 years ago

      it would be super cool to integrate LaTeX support

      It’s a good idea, but we have to be careful with this and limit it only to a few math and text formatting commands. Latex is Turing complete and could be used to inject malicious scripts.

      • @Gilgamesh
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        14 years ago

        Witnessing how other websites, which among those is GitLab, have chosen to use KaTeX as standard math typesetting library and having interacted with KaTeX myself, can I say that the implementation does not reduce performance.

        Taking that aside, I am not very familiar with the inner workings of a website which could cause malicious risks and thus can I only recommend you to have a look KaTeX.

    • @bytesnake
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      14 years ago

      shouldn’t be too hard, you basically just have to add mathjax in you header and then you can write latex equation. This becomes very complicated though if you want to support static rendering without javascript

    • DessalinesA
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      14 years ago

      hehe, that’s the way karma is currently calculated on user pages, just adding the post and comment points.

  • @Eli
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    3 years ago

    deleted by creator

  • @bytesnake
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    14 years ago

    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.

  • @Gilgamesh
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    14 years ago

    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:

  • @worldCritic
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    4 years ago

    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).

    • @dead10ck
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      64 years ago

      Oh goodness, please no. This is not a media site where a recommendation engine is appropriate. Only showing people what they want to see is what makes Facebook such a toxic echo chamber. Machine learning is not the answer to everything.

    • @SirLotsaLocks
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      54 years ago

      That would be a cool idea for a different network but I don’t think that’s right for lemmy