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?

  • Gilgamesh
    1·
    4 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: