Hellos, so, like everyone else here I am a Reddit refugee with a particular and profound hatred for karma, and the idea of it, because I saw how Reddit karma made everything on that hellsite toxic. People’s self-worth became tied to it because it was a direct measure of other people’s approval of you, and so people did everything possible to maximize their karma, including making bot accounts that karma farmed and sold them to marketers. People would fly into a rage and refuse to listen to each other simply because their comments were getting downvoted, making civil debate impossible and causing destabilization everywhere. Reddit karma is double plus ungood.
From what I understand, Wefwef has a similar feature where it shows your total post and comment scores. That’s basically Reddit karma, and it needs to go, like now. Even if it’s client-side, it doesn’t matter, because it is tying a number to people’s self-worth and will cause the same toxic, mean-spiritedness, negativity, anger, vitriol, and corporate marketers exploiting the situation like vultures on a corpse that we saw the last time we migrated to a new site.
Please, PLEASE remove the comment and post scores from the app. PLEASE don’t let Lemmy fail like the other sites did. PLEASE don’t let that kind of hurt be allowed to spread through our communities anymore.
People don’t NEED to be rewarded or punished based on other people’s opinions of them and their comments or posts. They don’t NEED to see that shit. It only causes harm and pain.
PLEASE take it off.
For our sanity’s sake. For our people’s sake. For decency’s sake.
No one who has been on Reddit for a long time believes that. It doesn’t represent anything but someone’s skill at gaming a broken system, and people sacrifice what actually matters: well thought out social discourse for its own sake, because of it. It’s how people actually respond to it in the real world. It’s what we all saw with our own eyes.
Evil political groups exploit karma systems to cause destabilization in countries and game political systems; it happened here in the U.S. We remember that shit and we don’t want it repeated.
If there is no karma, that won’t happen, and we can enjoy what makes Lemmy shine: positive, meaningful conversation for nothing but its own sake.
Karma always seemed like the silent nod or head shake from the community. I never understood building up karma as an objective, but think that having a way to understand if your views are considered positively or negatively by the community seems useful. An alternative with no system of feedback might be something like 4chan.
It’s not actually a true representation of the community’s opinion of you though. And that’s kind of the problem. People and companies can and will rig those votes in their favor, distorting important political debates and wreaking all kinds of havoc.
That seems like a fair point. I’ve never looked into how easy or difficult it would be to manipulate a person’s own karma, but I imagine it takes quite a few accounts.
I’m still not quite convinced that the karma system itself leads to toxic disourse though, and think that there are a decent number of examples on the internet of toxic discourse without a karma system. I’ll cite 4chan here again since it’s one that I’m a little familiar with. I was curious if removing karma for political communities might support more positive sharing of viewpoints without the brigading of some of the old Reddit communities, but I just took a quick peek back at /pol/ and it made me skeptical.