Hey! Thanks to the whole Reddit mess, I’ve discovered the fediverse and its increidible wonders and I’m lovin’ it :D

I’ve seen another post about karma, and after reading the comments, I can see there is a strong opinion against it (which I do share). I’d love to hear your opinions, what other method/s would you guys implement? If any ofc

  • puppy@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    What we have right now in Lemmy strikes the current balance IMO. Individual comments are upvoted/downvoted. But no cumulative score.

      • Dark Arc@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        There is that aspect of karma of “if you’ve got negative karma, you’re probably intolerable” but I’m not sure how much that helps in practice vs just banning people. Karma can also filter out fresh accounts for high spam communities, ofc, that doesn’t work perfectly either…

        • bionade24@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          This wouldn’t work in the fediverse anyway, as it’d even easier to fake your user karma here (on an own instance).

        • Invalid@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          Karma farming has always been one of the worst aspects of the other place. Repost bots will sustain them long after the humans are all gone.

          Throwaways are still an issue with banning.

          Some kind of participation based scoring would just bring us back to farming and alienates lurkers.

          Account age is unreliable.

          Hmm… I hate leaving the burden on mods but karma has too many negatives.

      • Machinist3359@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        I agree 90%, downvotes shouldn’t have that much weight. That said, comments which are abusive or hateful probably should have long term consequences for the user, even if they are themselves not worthy of a ban. Maybe reputation can be a “strike” for number of reported comments.

        To be clear, here I’m thinking of “dogwhistle” comments which individually are plausibly fine, but in aggregate indicate this person is up to no good.

    • DrGiltspur@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      On the other hand, kbin has a cumulative score, but currently implements it badly wrong. Your cumulative ‘reputation’ is calculated as “boosts - downvotes”. So if you post a thread that gets 100 upvotes, 9 downvotes, 80 comments and 5 boosts, you are rewarded with ‘-4 reputation’. Nobody really uses boost, so it is very easy to rack up negative reputation.

      Thankfully, I don’t think ‘reputation’ actually does anything, but it is still kind of annoying to be ‘punished’ for posting.

    • RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I would almost say a better system would obscure usernames completely. Only show the comment text, and allow voting accordingly.

        • Invalid@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          Federation already makes that completely impossible.

          I don’t agree with the lack of usernames of course. There’s no community when there is no way to associate posts with individuals.

        • RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          The problem is Lemmy already can’t allow that. Every user is Multiple Man. If you ban or block me on one instance I can just come back from another instance. What’s more, I can just keep creating more and more instances to evade blocking or banning infinitely.

          My point is simply that votes on comments should reflect merit on the actual comment, not because you recognize the posters username and dont like them so you downvote them regardless of what they say.