Not sure if this is a showerthought, but it popped into my head randomly due to anothe member’s comment that “karma farming isn’t a thing here.” It kinda is…just not as blatant and open as Reddit. If the instances grow in size and number it could become a real thing, we’d have the same issues as Reddit with huge numbers of bots, shills, and karma whoring users.
What if every year we zero out Lemmy points but replace them with a [insert thing here: colored bars?] that maybe qualitatively show positive post and comment levels and sort of show “years of service”?
Get rid of the incentive for points accumulation, but denote consistent positive contribution?
Edit: or leave the comment/post points as the are, but make them only tally a rolling 365 day count and participation in the last 30/60/90 or similar. Continued participation would be obvious, but no substantial amount could ever be collected.
If the points aren’t worth anything, then why would it matter if they change or go away?
E2: welp. People think it isn’t a problem, and they say it will not be. Can’t argue with a position that demands Lemmy/fediverse remain static in its present form. Discussion closed, I guess.
Lemmy doesn’t have karma farming because it doesn’t have karma.
Accounts earn their reputation based on name recognition, not some artificial score.
Yet that’s all karma is. And I tap on a member’s name and I can see their “score” here.
Believe it or not, some do place value on quantity, and some do so without checking quality.
This might just be a feature specific to the app you’re using; it isn’t displayed publicly on web, at least on any instance I have an account with.
Are you sure? I just tried a regular browser and went to Lemmy.world, tapped a random username, and was able to see their post/comment count, and tried a second app and found the same.
E: you might be confusing my comment about score with a total number of points of upvotes. That isn’t what I meant. I was only suggesting that to some people the total comment and post score might equate to karma.
Are you talking about looking at a user profile and seeing the number of posts and comments they made?
There is no karma or points and I can’t figure out why you would call a raw count that. The count means absolutely nothing. I could make a board and post “lol” a thousand times to drive up that number. And if you reset it after a year I could just do it again.
If you care how many times someone has commented and feel like you’re winning or losing anything based on that, that’s pretty weird. You’re asking why people are so opposed to this change if counts aren’t important, but why is the impetus on someone to defend the status quo when your only reason for wanting to change it is some people might be weird about it. Show me weird behavior. Demonstrate how it is a problem without referring to Reddit which is a completely different system with no relevance.
Show a need for a change and we can talk options and tradeoffs. That’s a reasonable conversation. This… isn’t. But that’s okay. I’ve posted dumb shit before and it turns out regardless of up or down votes, it’s still just one comment.
No such thing here. It’s literally impossible for it to be a problem.
Yeah, as the other people here pointed out, there is no such thing as karma here on Lemmy. So your post is a bit pointless. In fact they tried not to include too much gamification, in a deliberate attempt to address a few issues with how it works on Reddit.
And showing the number of posts a user posted isn’t the same thing. You sometimes want to know if someone is active, or a regular, or a lurker or a new account. And getting that info requires a few clicks and a deliberate attempt. Not something people are going to brag with. It doesn’t even tell much. Could be 100 low-quality posts. Or 100 posts done in 5 minutes in a private community that no one ever read.
And I mean even if there were Lemmy points and you’re zeroing them out and introduce a “years of service”… Isn’t that going to be the next toxic metric people are going to brag with? And it’ll incentivise people to create some empty accounts, so they have something ready in the future, should they need it. Or they’re going to look down on other people and say “yeah, but I have 2 years of service”… So I’d argue if you want to get rid of farming points, you have to get rid of them, not introduce a different one.
Profiles have karma here, idk what you are saying. Maybe your client hides it?
Mind posting a screenshot? I see it like in the screenshots by the other commenters… No karma anywhere…
I mean there are apps who do things differently, and they can go ahead and compute something, add up the votes and display that. But it’s not in Lemmy itself. Not that I’m aware of.
The chief difference between here, and Reddit, is that there is no accumulated tally of votes here. Someone can “karma farm” all they want here, and they will have exactly nothing to show for it. Their account doesn’t have a number going up, there is no final score that marks them out as any kind of special.
Adding any kind of system to denote “consistent positive contribution” as you mentioned, or any kind of actually accumulated score, regardless of rolling delay, would only provide incentive for “karma farming” that does not currently exist.
Your proposed solutions would create the problem you’re trying to solve, a problem which does not currently exist.
