Reminds me of the Curious George where he noticed all the cars stopping when the light was red and going when they’re green, so he changed them all to red since that’s what people apparently liked looking at.
Also karma on Reddit is basically irrelevant. The only place it matters is in automoderation removing posts and comments for users under a certain level of karma.
Sure, that’s what I’m saying though. Anyone who posts regularly has enough karma that it makes no material difference. It’s one of those measures with high specificity when you have negative or low karma and almost no specificity once you get beyond some arbitrary minimum.
Karma’s return diminishes almost completely after you hit the bare minimum required not to get automoderated.
Posting comics on Reddit, I found it a quick way to see how well I made something and what people generally liked. Eventually though I started to become a little skeptical of the numbers, and hated having to play this game where those numbers might be better when posting at different times and different days. I couldn’t help but feel like some of them were bought initially to heat, or boost their posts.
I started to absolutely loathe those numbers, but I don’t know what you can do to replace them.
Which is honestly freaking dumb. Sure you can do it with a big community but it will speed up the hivemind and alienate new users and frankly did nothing to curb bots because bots just farmed karma elsewhere on a sub where it was open by spamming posts and comments. And then went right back on the “threshold” subs.
Probably people from Reddit defending the idea of a karma system, they always say that they’re made up internet points but the fact that Karma restrictions exist and are enforceable proves that wrong.
I once wanted to post a meme on r/memes. My post got removed because I needed a lot more karma (my estimation was that I needed 1k each for both comments and posts but it wouldn’t actually tell me how much I needed). I REALLY hope that doesn’t appear here. It just blocks people from making and sharing content with others.
It burning out your retina if you stare too long isn’t exactly the same as being unseen. I can see the fucker; just not for long periods of time in a row. :P
If Lemmy’s karma system can stay as it is, without adopting the Reddit way of how it handles it, I guess it’s fine. Personally, I’d like to at least have some place to go to, that doesn’t have likes, doesn’t have karma points or anything. Because it just encourages people to groom themselves to say things, that’ll garner the most attention. It invalidates your way of thinking and makes you check back on scores to feel validated.
I hate that I can’t go almost anywhere anymore, without seeing some stupid form of a karma points system. It serves no purpose. Reddit’s is worse because they tie your account to it. Don’t have enough? Welp, too bad, can’t post here. Got downvoted to oblivion? Welp, too bad, gotta wait some 10 minutes and fill a stupid captcha check.
I spent a fair amount of time on reddit over something around 15 years (I think) and not once did I happen upon someone with -100 karma that didn’t earn it by being a troll. I found it very useful to be able to weed out people who weren’t actually commenting to further the conversation, but derail it. Is that the type of thing you’re talking about not wanting?
People are confusing (probably due to intentional prompting by those trolls trying to have bystanders fight their battles for them) the very real problem on Reddit that if you chase karma there were benefits to be had in terms of credibility and reach of your messaging and so whatever entities might benefit from such would tend to fill the space over in Reddit with content like that. Realistically that doesn’t change the most common content much as it really comes down to the sort of thing people will upvote but it did make it a bit worse. That’s being confused with some notion that somehow anyone who wasn’t chasing karma was entirely ignored. That just isn’t true. You might not be the absolute center of attention unless you’ve either post or said something especially worthwhile but so what?
I had a fair amount of karma over there and it didn’t seem to grant me any special privileges that I could see. The issue for lemmy, is that the data is there, being federated. Maybe all the major platforms can be convinced to cap the top and the bottom, to prevent “karma whores”. Say, a range from 100 to -100?
Frequently though people with -1 to -10 karma on a comment were just saying something that went against the hive or even dared to question it.
As an experiment sometimes I’d say something slightly against the tide, nothing even provocative. It would get downvoted into the basement and I’d see it start slowly then it would get pigpiled on. Then I’d post the same comment, say, a few hours later and it would be strongly upvoted. The same pattern of slowly getting upvoted and then rapidly increasing.
You could basically always skip the first 3-5 comments on every post because their only purpose was to gain as much karma as possible. There were way too many generic comments that you would see over and over
A point system does help to bring popular topics to the top. If someone gives good advice and it gets enough upvotes then it rises to get more views by the larger audience. I think if there was a way to eliminate the point system and still give good stuff a louder voice then I would say that’s the system we need.
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