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.
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 displaying karma scores when it really should not be.