On Reddit, my karma was always weighted more on the question side than on the comment side. I felt bad for not being a valuable contributor to people’s lives rather than being selfish and always asking things for myself. Lemmy has gotten rid of that point system so now I feel like I can feel free to ask as many questions as I need without having to balance my karma. Also, I have noticed that I participate so much more on this platform than I ever did on Reddit.
It’s the main reason why Reddit was a giant circle jerk. I like here that you can upvote and downvote things but it’s not connected to your account at all. Just connected to the comment or post, as it should be.
Usual reminder: It’s still connected to your account, but it’s not displayed. That’s a pure frontend decision, and something like kbin (more than a frontend, but still) does display it. The data is in the database, and an instance admin can query it. Haven’t looked into it, so I don’t know if the information is easily available for cross-instance admins.
As illustration of this fact, over here on kbin.social I can check this comment’s “activity” and see that the four upvotes it’s received so far are from @VieuxQueb, @kakes, @density and @Treevan. The timestamps are visible too.
This isn’t some sort of sneaky doxxing, its presented just two mouse clicks away in the standard kbin interface to anyone with an account. I wouldn’t be surprised if fancier tracking systems get implemented, maybe right in the instance or maybe with some kind of RES-style user script, to let you see patterns in who is upvoting or downvoting whom more easily.
This isn’t to say that people shouldn’t upvote and downvote freely, just keep in mind that it doesn’t work like Reddit did. This is public information here.
Also whether you automatically upvote yourself (which is visible with the others) depends on server/instance. kbin does not self upvote automatically right now.
Please tell me this only applies to kbin users and/ot there’s a way to disable it
This is a serious privacy risk
Voyager app displays total scores for Lemmy as well.
I didn’t notice this until you mentioned it. I really like that. Hopefully it stays that way.
I rarely up/down voted stuff on Reddit, because I didn’t want to feed the algorithm and have them do whatever it is they were going to do with that data tied to me.
Well said.
My problem is that I’m not a poster.
I just don’t think of things and then think “oh, I should share this with the world”. If I have a question, I tend to enjoy the process of finding the answer unless it’s game related, so thinking of crowd sourcing an answer rarely occurs to me.
But! While I’m less likely to run across things on lemmy that trigger my gush button because my interests are niche-ish, I tend to be willing to put in effort into such things.
Same with things that trigger my curiosity; if I don’t have info that’s useful, and I want that info, chances are I’ll come back and share what I find and put effort into it.
Lemmy hasn’t caught up with the population sizes of my niche interests enough for my old drive to help or discover to get triggered often though. It will, I’m sure, but it’ll take time now that a solid user base has formed that will spread awareness of the platform organically.
Asking questions is valuable to an online community though. People need to ask questions so that others can answer, and plenty of them (often myself included) won’t post questions they have and will just search around hoping someone else already did.
I’ve really enjoyed the questions asked here, and I’ve found the communities feedback to be invaluable.
And not all of those questions have been asked by me.
Lemmy has gotten rid of that point system so now I feel like I can feel free to ask as many questions as I need without having to balance my karma.
Oh we can totally still see that:
If anything it’s even weirder because I can only see your karma from the perspective of the communities we have in common. So even if you do comment a lot on some other community I’m not part of, you’re very post/question heavy from my perspective.
That aside, think of it this way: nobody can comment if there’s nothing to comment on, and nobody’s gonna ask questions or post things if there’s nobody to answer them. Even lurkers that just vote are important for this kind of ecosystem.
I’m just not a big poster, I rarely have questions, I rarely get so wow’d at content that I want to share it with other people. Well I wouldn’t have any content to look at if it wasn’t for all those people that actual post things, and I wouldn’t have questions to answer or comments to share if there wasn’t anyone to post content.
The number exists, and it doesn’t matter.
Did it even really matter on Reddit? I’ve always thought that post karma was a lot more powerful and much easier to get than comment karma. One good post on Reddit and your post karma explodes, that’s much rarer on comments, you just need lots of comments with like 5 upvotes each to very slowly build up that karma.
Mine for comparison:
Boy am I sparking some interesting conversations on there huh
It’s not similar between apps, either, even with the same account. If you’re on Android, you can use Voyager and Connect and it’ll show you different numbers. Another thing is that it fluctuates. I see my “karma” on Voyager is around 14 points now, whereas I made a
postcomment quite recently where I also checked and I had around 40.So as a karma system, it’s unreliable enough imho that it’s not gonna (or shouldn’t) affect users as much as reddit’s karma system. It’s also another reason why I decided not to switch to kbin.
In your own personal opinion, what’s the motivation for keeping an eye on karma? How would the experience change if you didn’t have the possibility of racking up points/karma at all?
My sense of community involvement depended on my karma count. I didn’t want to be perceived as a person consistently asking for answers rather than contributing them. I guess without karma that preoccupation goes away.
Thanks for replying. I personally enjoy it more without the personal ranking system. I think it stopped a lot of people from contributing for fear of public (and evident) disapproval while giving some people motivation to flood the site with low quality content just for the points. I still like the up/downvotes though but as a metric for the content, not the user.
Post karma and comment karma don’t map to questions and answers though. Maybe in some very specific subs posting=questions, but most post karma is posting links and memes.
I only ever found two uses for karma on Reddit.
There were some subreddits that imposed a limit on commenters requiring them to be above a certain karma threshold before they could comment or post, which most people would probably pass in a matter of weeks. I can see the use of this as a spam prevention mechanism, but it’s a pretty trivial thing if you’re a “real” account that’s sticking around for a while.
And when I passed 100k karma I applied for membership with the “century club” subreddit out of curiousity to see what was going on in there. Turned out it was pretty boring. Oh well. As far as I’m aware there’s no such thing as a “private” community in the Fediverse so this wouldn’t even be possible here.
As you can see in the docs there is
comment_scoreandpost_scoreattached to every user. But you can always decide to not care about it, and I strongly recommend thathate to break it to you but you have 1512 reputation points
Is that good or bad?
idk it was more karma than I ever had. always toiling away in the comments of less popular subreddits.
Currently I have 1737 rep points. It says I joined a month ago and you joined 3 weeks ago so I think you are beating me by a bit. I guess your strategy is working! :D
Huh … found myself on kbin and found out I also have reputation points.
I hate it! But, this is kinda the messiness of the fediverse at play. There are a few design/platform things which can only be guaranteed within the bounds of your instance, where beyond that it is kinda the wild west of the internet unless instance defederation is done.
if you could figure out where the point “live” maybe it would be possible to reset them to 0 on a periodic basis.
Well, the thing about the fediverse is that things don’t live in one place … they’re distributed across the federation. Right now our comments, which are coming from different instances, are being copied over to each other’s instances and live on both instances, as well as every other instance that subscribes to this community.
Platforms can have agreements about doing certain things like deletion when a request for such a thing is sent out, and then rely on defederating from any platform that contravenes those agreements, which is a method that is both messy, unreliable but surprisingly effective, and also, all we have.
As for karma, it seems kbin is keen on it and lemmy not so much. Forming some agreement about karma calculations being opt-in might make sense now that both platforms have matured in their user base sizes.
Made a post to !lemmy@lemmy.ml about this: https://lemmy.ml/post/2212950
What strategy? lol
Trying to contribute more
This is tracked btw its just that your instance of Lemmy is deciding not to display it. You have 1512 reputation.
How do I make that public?
Why do you need to make it public?
So people can tell that I’m legit.
Switch to an instance that displays it, like kbin. I don’t think you can on lemmy.
if you switch to kbin, you can then use Kbin Enhancement Suite to hide it. :) edit: from yourself, not from others.
I had hundreds of thousands of karma on Reddit. I keep forgetting that’s here too. I stopped caring a while ago anyhow.
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