Lemmy

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Establishing a norm around karma calculations being opt-in across the fediverse (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by maegul@lemmy.ml to c/lemmy@lemmy.ml

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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?

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[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

I think votes should exist.
They're a gesture and/or a statement just like replying. They're terse but often times, as with IRL, all you have to respond with is an affirmation (or disapproval). Mastodon has gone through trying to understand this, where they have the "like", basically an upvote, but which isn't used in anyway to affect the feed. Still, people love "liking" posts because of its communicative/social/gestural aspect.
Votes are useful for helping someone sort through a feed and tree of comments. Sure it has downsides, such as echo chambers and people aiming for content that gets the most votes, but that's were separate communities and sorting options come in, though I think a bit more in this regard would work well, some of which is probably coming already. All up, so long as people recognise that maintaining a good culture is important and "up to us", votes + sorting + communities is a good system IMO.

As for "votes persisting outside of the thread" ... I don't know what you're referring to, apart, obviously, from user "karma", though "karma" could be extended to other entities such as communities or instances.

In the case of "user karma", I'm not absolutely opposed to it, in part because it's enescapably emergent from upvoting, so any particular platform having it, as in the case of kbin but not lemmy, is always going to happen. I'm in favour of user options and flexibility, as I've stated above. Beyond that, I don't think the idea carries enough merit for it to be the default on a platform. That is, I'd make it "opt in". I think the only universally understandable purpose for "karma" would be for a person to assess how well they're being received, and even then, I don't think that needs to be public.

As I see it, the utility of votes on posts and aggregating user karma are rather distinct, and as the lemmy experience shows, the latter doesn't naturally follow the former. Many users came to lemmy and almost didn't notice the lack of karma despite voting and using vote scores to assess and filter posts. Very few have expressed any desire to bring it back. IMO, quantifying a person's performance, quality etc is just a bad idea.