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.
A karma score encourages making poor quality meme posts and comments in large quantities to gain more fake internet points. It's easily abused; Reddit is full of karma farming bots.
No downvotes was also mentioned here, but I heavily disagree. Downvotes, in my opinion are mostly a positive thing. Youtube hiding downvotes was a move towards a "good vibes only, no criticism allowed" type of environment.
Lemmy pretty much meets my ideal in this regard, it has downvotes and doesn't have a broken social credit system.
There are posts that contain despicable information/news but are useful to know, and I always struggled between upvoting or not voting since downvoting would remove karma from OP.
Downvotes aren't intended for the subject of the news, but for OP for making the post. If you hate the subject, I guess the correct action is to express it in the comments, or give an upvote if someone else already did.
There was an idea from blahaj.zone who considered making down votes enabled, but have less “weight” compared to upvotes. It sounded pretty interesting but I don’t think they implemented it yet.
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.
I think it can encourage unintended behaviors like karma farming.
I've seen similar trends in some FPS games in which during immediate game play your kill to death ratio is hidden to keep people engaged with the main loop instead of getting worked up over their stats.
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.
A big shout out to Lemmy.one. I signed up not knowing but love the fact now. Down votes don't add to the discussion. And posts and comments that are in poor taste should just be reported. Ignoring poorly made comments and posts is the best way to extinguish them. It forces the writer to improve their input if they care about the up votes. Down votes just make the user give up in wanting to contribute at all. Lemmy is about contribution. For now it is anyway.
Just look at the reddit accounts in recent years whose goal was to accrue as many downvotes as possible. Contributing absolutely nothing to the discussion.
yup, I started on Beehaw and realized I didn’t miss the downvotes and that it made interacting with comments sections feel much more in good faith. Later moved to my current instance after specifically looking for small instances with applications and no downvotes but federated with (almost) everyone. I know downvotes are still there for most other users but I don’t see them and it’s freeing!
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.
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