I’m a nobody, but I’m officially supporting this decision of the devs to remove karma (user score aggregates) from the API. Because karma brings on a plethora of problems¹:
It is gamification of the system. As hinted by their PR, this is not healthy.
It leads to less varied and less interesting content, due to the fluff principle.
It feeds echo chambers, by giving people yet another reason to not confront them, even when moral and sensible to do so.
It shifts the focus from the content to the people, detracting from the experience of what boils down to a bunch of forums.
It is yet another reason for people to congregate in oversized and unruly communities, instead of splitting into smaller ones.
Re-enable it at the API level and continue hiding it in Lemmy-UI if that is your personal stance on the matter.
A lot of those issues will affect negatively your user experience, regardless of you using the karma feature or not. Simply because other people use it.
And it’s also the sort of "lead acetate"² feature that makes clueless users annoy the shit out of interface developers, until they add it. “I dun unrurrstand, y u not enable karma? Y u’re app defective lol l mao” style. With app devs eventually caving in.
As such, “leave it optional” is probably a bad approach.
Considering how easy it is to spin up troll accounts or amass multiple troll accounts across multiple instances, removing a useful metric for identifying them at a glance is, IMO, irresponsible.
This is a poor argument. It has some merit in Reddit³, but not in Lemmy.
You aren’t identifying trolls by karma. You’re assuming that someone is a troll, based on a bad correlation. Plenty users get low karma for unrelated reasons (false positive - e.g. newbie user unknowingly violating some “unspoken rule” of the local echo chamber), and plenty trolls get past your arbitrary karma wall³ (false negative).
So relying on karma to decide who’s a troll is not as effective as it looks like, and it’s specially unfair to newcomers, thus discouraging the renovation of the community. IMO it’s a damn shitty moderator practice.
Since trolling is mostly an issue when you get the same obnoxious troll[s] coming back over and over and over, under new accounts, to post gaping anuses again, and mods have no way to detect if the troll came back, mods should be upstreaming this issue to the admins of the instance of their comm - because the admins likely have access to your IP⁴, and can prevent the user from creating a new trolling account every 15 days.
And, if for some reason the admins are uncaring or uncooperative, the mods should be migrating the comm to another instance.
What Lemmy needs is not to enable shitty moderation practices. It needs better mod tools to enable good moderation practices:
the context of the content being reported should be immediately obvious, no clicks needed
there should be a quick way to check all submissions/comments of a user to your community
there should be a way to keep notes about users, and share them with the rest of the mod team
some automod functionality. Such as automatically reporting (not removing!) content or replying to the user based on a few criteria defined by the mods.
e.g. #2: If someone posts a particularly toxic comment but their score is high, I’m more likely to read through their history and conclude they’re having a bad day or something. Without the score, I will not read through and likely just ban them and move on.
IMO this is also a shitty moderation practice. Should I go further on that? [Serious/non-rhetorical question.]
NOTES:1. Since this is already a huge wall of text I didn’t go deep on each of those claims, but I can do so if desired/requested. 2. It’s sweet but poisonous. 3. Because in Reddit you can’t “migrate your sub to another Reddit instance”, and the only instance there happens to be administered by arsehats who give no fucks about you or your sub. It’s a dirtier situation that warrants dirtier solutions. 4. Anecdote exemplifying this claim: from 2020~22 I had multiple trolling accounts in Reddit, to shitpost in cooking subs (for some puzzling reason they’re cesspools). Guess how many times this sort of “you need more karma to post here” barrier locked me out? Zero. It’s simply too easy to comment some shitty one-line in a big community (I used r/askreddit for that) and amass 500, sometimes 2k karma points in a single go. 5. If instance admins do not have access to the IPs of the users engaging with their instances, regardless of where they registered in, that should be fixed.
Then join an instance where scores are disabled if you don’t like them. :shurg: Choosing an instance where downvotes are disabled is already a preference, so making the score aggregates optional is completely in line with that.
You’re already on .ml, so they’d have them disabled given it’s run by the devs who have removed the data from the API, so nothing would change for you.
The whole shtick of Lemmy is run your instance the way you want to run it. The removal of the scores from the API seems heavy-handed and feels like the devs are forcing their preferences/values on others.
Then join an instance where scores are disabled if you don’t like them. :shurg:
Already addressed - a lot of those issues will still affect you, even if you don’t use the karma system.
Let’s say that instances A (karma disabled) and B (karma enabled) federate. A users won’t get the karma system itself, but they’ll still get: less varied and less interesting content, stronger echo chambers, and higher concentration of users in oversized and unruly comms. Because they use the same comms as the B users and thus the behaviour of B users affect A.
Choosing an instance where downvotes are disabled is already a preference, so making the score aggregates optional is completely in line with that.
Downvotes are a mixed feature, with pros and cons.
Karma looks good from a distance, but upon closer inspection it’s only cons. (Including enabling shitty=assumptive mod practices.)
You’re already on .ml, so…
I am clearly not talking about my individual usage here. I’m talking about users in general and the Lemmyverse as a whole.
The whole shtick of Lemmy is run your instance the way you want to run it.
I’m not sure on what’s supposed to be the [ipsis digitis] “whole shtick of Lemmy”, and I’m not assuming it.
The removal of the scores from the API seems [for me] heavy-handed and feels [for me] like the devs are forcing their preferences/values on others.
For me it looks like a sensible decision that takes into account its impact into users and the Lemmyverse.
EDIT: I’ll go further. Dunno if the devs agree with this or not, but I believe that “user aggregate score” = karma also attracts and retains users with the wrong mindset - who are not here to share, contribute or be part of something social and collective; but instead to farm virtual e-peen points for the sake of their individual egos. And I believe that this “it’s all about MEEE! ME! ME!” mindset is part of what makes Reddit such a dumpster fire.
Sure doesn’t seem like it. I went to a lot of effort to make the best of the mod API calls that are available and they go and remove a useful chunk of it. 😒
As someone who is against use aggregate scores and pleased to see it removed I can understand the desire to make it available to admins/moderators to assist in their actions.
I think making the numbers available only for admins/mods would make sense, though I also feel it starts to get to be an arbitrary divide.
I also have to wonder if an admin/mod couldn’t simply use the view of the user’s posts/comments we all have access to along with the various sorts available. Want to know if a user posts generally well received stuff … look at their posts and sort by “Top all time”. Want to know if they’re regularly posting stuff that is poorly received, sort by “Controversial” (which is new) or just “New”. I’d suspect that in the end integrating this sort of lookup into the moderation tooling so that it’s easier/quicker to do would be more worthwhile than persisting with user aggregates.
Firejail has some big security flaws. There us bubblejail, which uses the way better bubblewrap also used for Flatpaks.
But the Bubblewrap and Flatpak Situation is quite complex. Flatpaks, as well as Podman containers, require user namespaces. Through these namespaces programs can get privileged access to system components, which is why secureblue now has bubblewrap-suid installed.
bubblejail maybe uses that binary already, or it needs to be patched too.
To add to this systemd can do everything they can. You can isolate network, do fire-walling, and sandboxing pretty easily. Any OCI container can be used too if you don’t want to install something too.
npm means it’s a JS app running on a JS runtime, which is roughly similar to what python does. Electron runs on top of the runtime and indeed provides some kind of stripped down browser.
But yeah, in this case the app does use electron :)
been selfhosting the smtp relay and using the app for quite a while. If you use it as a private chat for sensitive content, it is PERFECT. Really looking forward to its future development in group chats.
Its pretty nice. I am using it for a couple groups. It has some screen reader accessibility issues, but the devs are responsive and fix them as i find them.
simplex seems to check all boxes for respecting privacy. it doesnt rely on using any identity (no strong selectors like email addresses or phone number). seems very forward-thinking in its concepts.
there is now a discovery mechanism of some sort… but otherwise it’s a feature and not a bug that you can only identify people whom you had an initial exchange with. much preferable than something that Signal that without asking (and without opting out?) will by default access all your contacts and match them through the use of a strong selector (phone number) also:
i think with the minimal knowledge the server has of its users (and the no-identity concept) this really limits risk. Also it means that for the most tight of security models, one can use their own server (which is not feasible with most other chat protocols)
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