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.
I see nothing wrong in having scores. It encourages users to be active and post interesting stuff and provide interesting conversations.
In theory. In reality reposting the same memes, jokes and images will get you more Karma than any thought out, well written conversation ever could.
I don’t think OP has an issue with scores being visible on individual comments and posts.
The issue is that wefwef displays your total comment scores on your profile, where Lemmy does not (by default).
I think OP has a point - once people start caring about their total score, it could lead to toxic behavior across the platform.
I agree with you. I never saw a major issue with it. Sure, some people were way to focused on it but I do think it encourages more good than bad.
Kinda hilarious that someone downvoted you for saying you don’t mind karma; if that person disagreed that karma is okay, why did they downvote you and participate in the system? 🤪
I can’t lie that the few times I’ve gotten 1k+ upvotes that it felt good and when I’ve gotten bunch of downvotes that it felt bad.
The system works.
No it doesn’t. People already do that on their own; all karma does is encourage all of the toxic shit we ran away from. Why would we shit all over a new community by repeating a senseless and destructive mistake?
Only thing most people ran away from is predatory API pricing that killed apps with superior interface, forcing users to use sorry official app.
That was certainly the last straw, but it was a lot more than that.
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if you put any association between upvotes and self worth, on any platform, thats on you. i still thought karma was a fun measurement though, i see no problem it.
(in general, not @op)
reddit hasn’t “failed” yet, probably wont, ever. if it ever does, i promise you that karma wasnt the reason.
I obviously don’t, but everyone else does, and it’s not even something most people can really help. Fucking social media corporations had their marketing departments come up with the stupid idea knowing that people would be addicted to the dopamine hit from being upvoted.
At least on the OG Lemmy site, being upvoted or downvoted doesn’t actually affect you. But an app purposefully bringing back something the devs did not implement in the first place for good reasons, is deeply problematic and people need to speak out against the practice.
We have a chance to break the cycles of the past and we ought to take it.
There are other apps.
I think it’s like a popular gauge of reliability. It reflects how other users have reacted to particular interactions.
It’s an interesting discussion to have, but I don’t see it as something intrinsically bad.
Yea it’s definitely not intrinsically bad and is a good way for 99% of communities to gauge a post’s quality.
Random comment arguments where feelings get hurt over downvoted does not mean the upvote/downvote system is bad.
I want to see high upvoted posts on my feed, not the 90% garbage of new posts based on Reddit experience.
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.
This has very little do to with wefwef and all with the Lemmy backend. The API simply gives out the total post and comment scores of a user. Nothing is done client side here. And I can promise you, that most apps will display these scores on a user’s profile page sooner or later, simply because it’s easy to do. So if you really want to abolish karma, then you should argue your case for Lemmy overall and not for a single app.
Apps need to be pressured not to do that, but I agree with you that we need to speak to the Lemmy devs about the situation too. I’ll do that too, for now, we must address the fact that Wefwef, the most popular Lemmy app, is doing this.
After you hit 10K karma you stop giving a fuck, and so should you.
That’s the kind of toxic mindset that killed Reddit.
This isn’t specific to wefwef. There are plenty of other apps that do the same, i believe its tied to the actual lemmy api that keeps track of everything.
Ive never been a big fan of karma either, but just having post and comment totals doesn’t really bother me. As long as we as a community don’t glorify it. Even when i was on reddit i never cared about my karma.
Having said that, not everyone is of the same mind set and there will definitely be accounts trying to “farm” points. If one of them posts a lot that it annoys me i can just block them from my feed.
It’s not just a problem that can be ignored away. Troll and bot accounts that farm karma will ruin the site just as effectively as they did on Reddit regardless of whether people block them or not – their presence illegitimizes the site and ruins the atmosphere. No one wants to hang out on a site that is populated with them, they want a site with humans that want to talk to them for their own sake.
Like there are a myriad of reasons people need to be worried about this, and that people are being so flippant about it just because it points out something negative about Wefwef (not saying you are doing that) is deeply concerning.
gotta say I dislike karma as well, but what a client does clientside is sort of its own business.
its likely that the best easy to keep this “karma” irrelevant is to just ignore both it and the apps that try to quantify it.
having said that, depending on how a client fetches data to calculate things it could be defined as instance load abuse and those clients could be user-agent banned from an instance at the discretion of the instance admins. this really should remain an instance by instance choice though.
🤔 Can instance admins actually stop apps from tabulating karma? How does that work? Do they ban the whole app or stop certain data from being accessible by the API or?
I fully disagree.
My main issue with karma and post scores was that it increased social conformity. People became more and more hesitant to voice opinions that went against the Reddit users mainstream, because saying something people disagreed with got immediately “punished” with downvotes.
The downvotes then made the comment less and less visible, which further contributed to the silencing of discussions. I think (polite) discussion is an important part of a platform such as this one. It’s a pity that Reddit’s system discouraged discussion and became more and more a click factory. I hope that we can avoid that here. I agree that it would be a good step to remove the visible upvote/downvote system (or at least the downvotes).
If the majority does not like the concept of karma, they will migrate to a platform that doesn’t have it. You will not be doing anything better than a shitty company by forcing something that a large population of consumers doesn’t like.
The issue with this kind of decentralisation is that it becomes very difficult to stop someone from doing something a population does not like.
That’s what they did here, and this app is bringing back the very same thing people here are trying to leave behind. It’s too dangerous to just allow them to do that, and I know for a fact I am not alone in that opinion. Framing something that is objectively destructive in terms of “something a population doesn’t like” is sus as fuck. What do you stand to gain from an app doing such a terrible thing?
Lemmy exposes scores via the API; wefwef simply makes it available to the user. I can understand requesting an option to disable them though
Fuck, no.
Karma is what keeps bots and malicious actors at bay.
If you felt the need to have a high number, that says more about your own lack of personal control.
This web app (wefwef) has nothing to do with this. Take this argument to a Lemmy community about Lemmy.
I think it does.
A user’s combined comment and post scores are not displayed in Lemmy itself, but are on wefwef.
The OG Lemmy site doesn’t keep post and comment vote totals, only Wefwef does, hence the thread.
