What is your opinion about Lemmy not having karma but Kbin having reputation points?
Personally, I prefer Lemmy over Kbin because I hate karma and reputation points. I do not want to worry about downvotes, and Lemmy feels so fresh. I can post things that will receive lots of downvotes and not need to worry about losing karma.
I like that Lemmy doesn't have karma points, and hopefully it never will. I actually wish that it didn't even have the downvote button. For me, that was one of the bad things about Reddit, you could just make an innocent comment, and users would downvote you for no reason. I didn't even realize Kbin had reputation points. I'm glad that I chose Lemmy.
Karma as used on Reddit is fairly useless. A web-of-trust style karma system (do people whose opinions I respect also respect this person's opinions) would be helpful for sifting through the crap.
Echo chambers are caused by exposure to only one POV. I suppose WoT karma could be used to build an even more insular echo chamber if someone wanted that.
But I am talking about valuing a person's critical thinking skills, their ability to formulate and express reasonable opinions whether or not I agree with their specific conclusions. If that person finds something challenging, interesting, or fruitful then I want to read it, too.
The problem with downvotes is they're supposed to be used to push irrelevant things down and bring forward the "productive conversation", but...
...it's easier to use them as an "I disagree with you, get lost loser" button, and I feel like that doesn't usually help the discussion. And upvotes already bring up the good comments (although sometimes the most voted stuff is just memes and you miss the interesting stuff).
I like the thought behind this idea but I don't think it's a good solution. It requires having a reputation score, which I think outweighs the positives here. I could also see people trying to play this system in a couple different ways, which is just plain bad for discussion culture: encourage others to downvote something without spending the reputation yourself, or collect downvotes with bait content in order to eat through other peoples reputation.
While you're right that that's a downside of downvotes, I think that it's far better than the alternative.
Downvotes means we have a way to discourage really bad behavior and lets others see that it's discouraged. For example, suppose someone posts something bigoted. It sucks to see those kinda comments (especially when they affect you personally). When those comments are heavily downvoted, it feels better, since it tells you that the views expressed in the comment are not acceptable. It's extremely discouraging when I see bigoted posts with a positive score. Without downvoting, they all have positive scores and it's just "less positive".
It'd be nice if reporting was able to remove such comments before anyone sees them, but that will never be the case. Too many communities don't remove comments fast enough and many more simply won't remove comments unless they're really bad, if at all. Some moderators are bigots themselves and others simply don't have the ability to recognize dog whistles that may be in comments. Or they're not personally affected by the malicious comment, so they can be more easily convinced that if the comment was politely worded, it's acceptable even if it's blatantly bigoted.
To be clear, it does suck that users will use it as a disagree button for comments that are otherwise good, but that is far, far worth it. The presence of downvotes were a major reason why I used Reddit (and now this) while disliking the likes of twitter.
I think not having karma tells the user that they don't have to care about posting the "right" things. This is better, as I think the karma system of Reddit promoted conformity, as people wanted to gamify their experience on the site, and even created a weird economy of people selling high karma accounts to advertisers or whoever wanted karma for whatever reason.
I think karma could in some ways be fun, but overall was more of a liability than an asset for Reddit. I'm glad Lemmy didn't have it. Reduces karmawhoring incentives
i learned about it because i noticed my profile has -1 reputation. i didn't even know this existed. I agree with others, karma on reddit was stupid and people used low karma as a way to gatekeep subs. you couldn't post until you have 100 karma, that sort of thing. It's bad for business in my opinion.
Fundamentally, karma limits were mostly used as an anti-spam measure, if a rather crude one. I was actually a mod of a couple relatively large subs, and while I did feel bad for the impact on new users, the benefit from how much spam we caught with it made it ultimately worthwhile. There very well may be better approaches out there though, and I am excited to see how things grow here, but it is going to be a problem that the Fediverse will face as well.
I hate gamification of... Everything, but if it's just "oh hey I've been here for X years and at some point I got 5000 upvotes / 800 downvotes, that's cool I guess", I'm kinda for it actually.
It's like with videogame achievements. They're not super important for most people, but sometimes it's nice to look back at the stuff you've played or what you had to overcome. Some are addicted to it too. Real life doesn't give you much satisfaction in this way.
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