For a little I while liked watching my karma gradually climb, with a feeling that I was contributing something. But… then I realised that one shit-post on a popular subreddit can routinely ‘earn’ more karma than 1000 high quality posts on smaller subreddits. … And with that realisation, I no longer saw any value in the karma score whatsoever.
I think it’s best that it’s gone. It skewed people to make low-effort posts in high-traffic places rather than high-effort posts in low-traffic place.
The problem of caring about karma was that after a while it was evident that effort, accuracy, attitude…none of it mattered, atleast for comments. It became mostly really easy to predict how a comment would be received, with a few exceptions from cross post traffic that would shake up the votes in waves as they were posted and down/upvote brigades flooded in.
Agree that I personally found it a waste of time but I do wonder if having it encourages more people to post good/funny content more regularly. That said surely it’s the same thing really just having it per post rather than an overall score
signatures were very dividing, a community usually had them or they didn’t and there were sometimes huge complain threads about them so they kind of just fell out of favor. You can still find places that use them.
badges reddit adopted and put into the profile page similar to steam which was not a bad idea since people with a lot of badges created new UX issues.
then you have status flairs and tags, these I really wish had come back, some subs enabled user flair which in some cases replicated the old forum style through CSS mods. Some of the styles you might have might be that your name glowed or had a small animation among other things. I always really liked these though I suspect at scale they have exploitation issues.
I think some of these features could make a come back on smaller instances. Not sure we should go entirely back to the way it was done in the 00s though.
Karma on reddit is the sum of upvotes an account has received on all it’s posts and comments combined. Lemmy only has the voting per individual post and comment, but doesn’t accumulate this as a sidewide score.
It affected how easily your comments or posts could get upvoted, the more karma you had the more “trust” you had. Bot accounts were bought from people with high karma due to this reason, and sold further for a higher price after farming.
At some point the post/comment karma was changed to a fuzzy number, someone claimed your karma affected how it was calculated. Not sure if true.
Reading about how digg died, one reason was “front-page” bandits/groups. Basically people grouping up and getting paid to land posts on the front page. The more they did it, the more “trust” they had to hit front page again, similarly to high karma accounts on Reddit.
For some reason, I thought they were all underwater, releasing bubbles up to the slightly choppy surface. Leaving aside physics and, you know, breathing, I was wondering if they were all not pooping because of the embarrassment of watching it float up to the surface.
Anyway, there’s probably a lesson in the about scrolling too fast, or too tired or something.
I never got the purpose of karma. You can’t spend it, it’s just a pointless number. A few subs used it, fire whatever reason, as a numbers threshold for entry, but getting karma was so trivially easy even without bots that it literally accomplished nothing in that regard.
Not that I ever cared about karma, but I can see why some people did. It plays into peoples need to be liked. Karma associates a number with how well your post is doing. Bigger number = more people liked your post. Basically quantifying how well liked your post is and then gamifying it.
Really that stat would have to be something like total karma divided by your number of posts, or number of views by logged in users on your posts. As a total number it’s meaningless. It’s like someone being a millionaire if humans were immortal. Are they really good at business, or have just been alive a long time?
Your brain sees the reward (karma) and gets a hit of dopamine. In theory this creates a spiral of encouraging you to post more contet for more dopamine hits. More content pulls in more users…
Back in 2013-ish there was a bot that would convert your karma to crypto back when it was cheap enough to just throw around like that. That was the only time in my life that I was ever paid to post, and it was like $6. I wonder how much it would be if I were to find that wallet now, but that was on an account that no longer exists. Oh, well!
Now it’s only a matter of time until some hackers replace it with paperbag-with-gloryholes.css it’s a very well known vulnerability with that files security
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