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Against Lemmy Karma
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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General Discussion
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I have never been sure what the point of caring about karma is. Pretty much it only gives a rough idea of how long an account has been open and how active it's been. 5, 50,000, 500,000? 5 Million? Who cares. It's not like you can do anything with it besides see the number change. I never have really seen anyone comparing karma or caring about other people's scores.
The only real thing it did was set a way for subs to disallow posting by new/troll accounts. There could easily be a way for lemmy to calculate a sum of votes on someone's most recent posts if people thought that was a useful or desired feature.
It was a way for people to visibly see some kind of validation. Whether it was validation that their ideas were appreciated, or validation that their trolling was successfully pissing people off, validation that someone simply saw and acknowledged their thoughts, or something else...I believe people intrinsically like assigning a visible numeric score to their efforts.
I'm not arguing for karma, and certainly not arguing for it here. But I understand why people like it.
I paid attention to it in the short term for those reasons - like, did anyone see my recent posts? Approve of them? Disagree/chastise me? A suitable substitute would be something that gave you a sum for the past 1-3 days. The running total was never very meaningful to me.
For sure, all those reasons. I didn't really care what my karma total was, but I would look at other users karma before deciding to get into a debate just to get a sense if they were a troll, karma whore, or regular joe. Sort of gave you a quick picture of who you were talking to. FWIW, I don't miss it as a feature at all.
True, "Karma" doesn't mean much unless you can refine "Karma" statistics, e.g. upvote/ downvote ratio, "karma" trend against time graphs, last 30 days net "Karma", filter "Karma" statistics specific to community/instance.
Still, you can't stop someone from selling a 5 million "Karma Points" account to trolls, so I disagree with showing "Karma" like Reddit.