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?
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.
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.