RIght now lemmy doesn’t calculate or display a user’s “karma”. And many think this a good thing (me included).
Interestingly, kbin does calculate karma, even for us lemmy users (you can all probably just search on kbin.social and find your karma now, +/- federation inconsistencies).
Whenever karma comes up, this fact often comes up, along with the identification of up/down voters, such that many lemmy users will probably know that they actually do have karma and can go look it up if they want to. Some lemmy apps/frontends are also reporting karma AFAIU.
So I think the question now presents itself of whether this is an issue we want users to have some control over, within the bounds of what can done over federation/AP of course.
I can imagine a system where karma is an opt-in setting of one’s profile, and a protocol is established that any platform/client that understands up/down votes ought to respect this setting and that non-compliance risks defederation.
Though lemmy/kbin obviously lean more “public internet resource” than microblogging platforms like mastodon, I think it makes sense to value user health and safety here, and this seems like a not unreasonable option to establish a norm around.
Thoughts?
I think having publicly-viewable ‘karma’ is a mistake - there’s no benefit to having karma-whore posts and bots if it doesn’t gain you anything, and that’s a cancer that eats away at other platforms. Similarly, the effect of brigading a single comment is much less - encourages conversation rather than groupthink. And we can all see each other’s posting history anyway - we can see whether any given account is a troll account and admins can ban them.
I don’t mind it not being displayed. There is no point for account karma. Shit, even on Reddit where it was used as a value marker for selling an account never made sense to me because the average user doesn’t ever look at a profile and may not even notice your username because they’re kinda small and the focus of the entire site is on the content and not the individual and it wasn’t, like, a thing to think people with tons of karma were more trustworthy. If anything, the opposite was true.
I’ve heard that it meant your posts would have a higher chance of hitting the FP but I think that’s bullshit considering a vast majority of FP posts were not from the same group of people (exception: GallowBoob was everywhere and posted frequently) and often were very low on the karma totem pole.
In smaller communities, you’d see that because there are like 50 people there at any given time and the only like 2 or 3 are posting decent content.
I’m not an expert, so those who know more, please correct me.
FYI: with the script User Details on Hover you can also see karma in Lemmy. Example.
From what I understand, there are technical issues with this. Allowing people to hide the karma if they want is easy. But blocking people for seeing karma even if they want is much harder. Note that if you want karma for posts and comments (to be able to sort the most voted ones), then the user karma is just a very easy query away (just sum the karma of that user’s posts and comments). EDIT: I realize that this would not solve the issue either:
There are technical ways to do anonymous and auditable voting, but I think that would be too overkill for the fediverse.Thanks for posting the userscript. I’m seeing lots of RES type features like this and hoping they’ll be rolled into one at some point.
