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That"s the dark side of karma. I believe it have some good side too.
The good side is really small, in comparison with the bad side.
If you want to amass karma, it's better to pump out low-effort content, that users see and upvote out of habit. If however you want to contribute with a community, high-effort content is generally preferable; specially reposts of highly upvoted posts. As such, even if karma promotes activity, it'll promote the sort of activity that ends as noise, for most people in the community.
The above will need to be addressed by moderators, who have a bigger pressure to implement rules against low-effort content. That means that non-mod users need to follow bigger rulesets, and increases the workload for the mods.
Karma reinforces echo chambers, as users with more karma are seen as "more authoritative". As such, it has a chilling effect on divergent opinions - because people don't want to lose that façade of authoritativeness. And this snowballs really fast because people voicing those divergent opinions will get lower karma, and be seen as less authoritative, thus the opinion is seen as less trustable than the one promoted by the echo chamber. (Note that this affects even fluff opinions like "it's fine to say 'animes'" or "I like pineapple on my pizza".)
In a certain defunct site, karma raised concerns about moderators misusing their mod powers to remove posts from other users, and then repost them to amass karma. Or users spamming a legit post with reports, through bots, to get rid of it. This can be generalise into "once you set up karma as a goal, some people will use shitty ways to reach that goal".
Specially assumptive = stupid moderators are prone to assume too much out of karma. Low karma should mean only "people in general don't like what this person posts/comments"; and yet those assumers often treat it as "low karma = troll" or "low karma = shitposter".
In another comment, you said:
But ir might be concerning that Lemmy doesnt incentive activity somehow .
I don't think that encouraging activity is "bad" (far from that!), but that karma is the wrong way to do it.
Intentionally, Lemmy itself doesn't total your upvotes and downvotes. You can go to your profile and see them for a given comment or post, but not an overall total. Some apps do show it.
Most of us agree that Reddit karma caused people to post and say things just for the karma, which was an overall negative. People put too much value in the score. So while we have upvotes and downvotes, they're deemphasized, and that's on purpose.
My post was mostly lighthearted. But ir might be concerning that Lemmy doesnt incentive activity somehow . Aggregators are as good as how many people participate
God no
We don't do karma here, one of Lemmy's major improvements over Reddit.
This isn't really true, Lemmy does keep track of the amount of upvotes you get some of the mobile apps display it.
The total is just not displayed on the websites.
Karma doesn't exist here.
If you're serious some of the apps track vote counts though it seems like it resets every once in a while.
There seems to be two bugs with the calculation. First of all the count doesn't sum properly, secondly it resets to 0 when you delete a comment.
There's no karma, only post/comment score.
Karma is often a perverse incentive; in theory it's supposed to encourage good quality content, but in practice it encourages unnecessary reposts + barely acceptable (but easy to judge) content.
This message is to inform you that your account will not be able to post/comment in the next 24 hours due to the negative karma accumulated from this post:
This is a cool-down period to allow you to think how your future contributions will be constructive and positive.
Repeat infractions may escalate to a permanent ban!
Bad bot. OP is a newbie asking an honest question, and for that they get booted by a bot?
It would make sense to notify a human mod when a post is drowning in downvotes like this one, but it's a mistake to trust the bot to hand out suspensions.
That's obviously someone making a joking point about karma.
such a welcoming communities
Accumulated karma is not officially tracked. You can however see how many up votes and down votes you have on your posts and comments in the profile section.
Is that value stored on the home instance of the user? I think summing karma is a terrible measure of an account. So if it's stored in the instance, I'll update mine to be a large random value.
Maybe we can have the admins of all instances update the value for all users to a random value to make it worthless.
