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?
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.