There's some misinformation floating around regarding Lemmy not having a karma system. While many have discovered otherwise, this is for those who may not have.
While it's not exposed in the Lemmy default user interface, Lemmy does have a fully functional karma system and it is visible in third party clients such as WefWef and Memmy.
Honestly is it even worth anything? Even on reddit I didn't really pay attention to how much karma a user had, maybe when I wanted to check if it was a bot or something.
Well, I completely ignored karma on Reddit for around a decade, until a friend one day pointed my huge karma out to me in a very enthusiastic way. I believe I will also ignore it here.
I know I'm in the minority here, but I think the karma system has value and I'd like to see us keep it. I did time as a moderator on a fairly busy subreddit, and requiring accounts to be >30 days old and have >100 or so karma saved us a lot of work. E.g., it made ban evasion a little harder to do, and reduced brigading.
It also helped to keep folks fairly civil and promoted considering perspective when posting, which I think is valuable.
With that said, I'd LOVE to allow communities to disable down votes... it's a missing feature in reddit, and if you are trying to promote discussion of a divisive topic, or to actively suppress an echo chamber, I think down votes are counter productive.
With Reddit, though, some subreddits required a minimum amount of karma to post, whereas if you have access to an instance you can post freely.
So it’s more a user rating of “this was good/how have you survived until this point” than a gatekeeping device: you, as a poster, can freely ignore your points and the points of others if you don’t care.
Does that karma allow me to buy NFTs, then resell them for double the price I paid, then create bots to karma farming, be called a karma whore by jealous people, grow my evil power, become the CEO of Lemmy, put ads, charge for the API so my official app is the only one allowed to work and talk to shareholders? If it doesn't allow me to do that, then there's no karma 😝
I think I am the only one that finds karma useful. Albeit my experience is based on Reddit, but I found it handy to check out who are the serial reposters that have huge submission karma and very low comment karma. My RES filter was getting..... large.
Honestly makes no diff. But it's a little nice to see. Didn't really change my behavior. I'm just happy to be here and I am engaging more than I ever did on Reddit.
I know my comic praising lemmy for no karma added to the confusion on this but I do appreciate that lemmy.world does not feature the server karma on profiles for reasons already said in the comments. Thanks for clarifying.
Does it have any effect - e.g. on the visibility of posts? I don't care about karma, but I do wish the web UI would hide comments with large numbers of downvotes.
Which instance keeps track of it? What happens when that instance blocks out the users / instances you earned from other sources? It just seems really exploitable if it's too open ended.
I really like this system as a bonus points, a thing you gain from being an active member, I know it can be abused and bring karma-whore, but I really hope they will not remove it in the future.
But you have to consider the difference to Reddit's karma system. If you have a high-karma account on Reddit, your comment or post trends much higher. That's not the case with Lemmy, as far as I know.
What Lemmy does with that score is ultimately instance-specific. Over time I expect we’ll see more differentiation between instances in terms of how they treat things like that.
How accurate is it? I use Memmy and after an update I went from 50ish points for comments to 3. I just checked on Wefwef and it shows that same score as well, so I'm unsure what happened. I didn't delete or change anything
I don't really care about karma, I actually would prefer if neither of them had it visible, but I'm interested to know what happened
And just to make things weirder. On kbin we have up and downvotes. But it seems only upvotes come in from other platforms. I never see a post or comment with a downvote here.