It does, it’s just disabled by default. Some third party clients, like Boost for Lemmy, have it enabled (or at least it did, it’s been a while since I’ve used it).
Chiming in with Boost, and I can’t find karma-like counts. Maybe a different app?
Because popularity contests are juvenile, and yes, even for politicians.
Why should it?
We can see all the negatives every day with reddit.
What positive does a Karma system bring to the platform and discussions?
Because when you see somebody with -1000 karma, it’s a pretty good indicator that you shouldn’t waste your time engaging with them.
There were plenty of users with high karma that weren’t worth engaging with too.
It only helped with lbvious jerks that you could probably tell were terrible just by reading their post.
Usually you can get the same info just from looking at their last couple comments. Trolls don’t usually very much.
You can take a look at their post history and that will typically tell a lot more than a number next to their name
Eh, it could help discern trolls (like when a user has -6900 Karma, you know they have dogshit takes) and could inspire actually insightful commentary (since it’s usually the more ingenious comments that get upvotes). But on the other hand, there are definitely some big cons to having a Karma-like system.
Honestly, a person’s actual post history should be more relevant and indicative to whether they’renworth engaging with tham a single number.
Furthermore, aside from deliberate trolls, most comments or posts should be assessed on their own merits, irrespective of the poster’s history.
People are complex, and it’s possible that raving political idiots might have thoughtful opinions on their favourite video game or the aspects that make a perfect butt.
Many years ago on reddit, you could get given gold. It gave you paid benefits. My comments earned me literally years worth of gold, and my karma was similarly increasing.
Then I came out as trans. Suddenly the gold stopped and my karma stagnated
That kind of bias is built in to the karma system. It doesn’t just punish shit takes, it also sidelines visible minorities
shoutout https://moist.catsweat.com
Some find such systems controversial but I like it for very obvious trolls who run around with tens of thousands of negative rep. Makes them easy to identify.
I don’t care why, I just hope they never implement one.
It is by choice. Prominent developers made that choice because they thought it might eliminate a lot of the popularity incentives reddit creates.
Now I don’t agree with that choice, but many others here do. I don’t think this solves the incentive issues but just makes instances a bit more of a wild western and requires moderators to do more work figuring out what to make of an account.
Maybe it would be great if this is still an option you could turn on / off per instance or something.
I do miss the special updoots like gold and stuff. It was fun
Because it’s stupid and Lemmy is decentralized unlike Reddit so it wouldn’t make sense anyway.
Because it’s shit made to drive engagement, not worth anything. Unlike reddit which views you as assets to make it money and incentivises use, lemmy owners pay for the bandwidth, don’t get anything from out shitposts and if anything it would be in their interest to disincentivise use.
Because karma ruins actual discussion.
As others said it was a conscious decision of the developers, as it’s gamification of the system and they aren’t big fans of that.
I agree with this decision.
The Fluff Principle* makes easy-to-judge content get higher scores, and we do see it Lemmy. It isn’t a big deal because fluff ends on its own specific comms, but once you gamify the aggregation of score points, the picture changes - now you’re encouraging people to share content that they believe to score high over content that they believe to be contributive.
Additionally a publicly visible karma enables a bunch of poorly thought mod practices, like karma gating (“you need +500 karma to post here lol”) or automatically banning people with low karma (even if it might come from a single post/comment).
*“Hence what I call the Fluff Principle: on a user-voted news site, the links that are easiest to judge will take over unless you take specific measures to prevent it.” (Source)
There’s no real value to any of it.
Attach free beer to point levels and watch this thing explode.
You know, we kind of do have it and some apps will even let you know. But it’s got a lot of flaws as everyone else has pointed out.
You know what I kind of want is a way to see karma by instance. What you’re going to learn is that certain instances have rather extreme views (including the default lemmy.ml) and seeing how unpopular you are there while being popular elsewhere might actually make that feature more interesting.
Like, sure he’s a -100 on LemmyGrad but he’s a 200 on Sh.itjust.works; take that as you will. Lol
Because it’s not fun
It is fun when I see a big number and it fuels my ego, though!
If you’re craving some gamefication we have posts/comments numbers
The more you contribute, the bigger the number gets!
Because lemmy is all about sharing and discussing contents, not collecting point. The Fediverse is also a decentralized network.
