Lemmy

I don't like karma. It incentivizes short, meme-y posts since those are things that get gets a lot of karma.

I think not having it is good, it gets rid of the incentive to make karma farming accounts that use bots to spam old reposted content everywhere to get their karma up

The problem with karma is in the big picture. A lot of actions that yield lots of karma are not contributive to the community at large:

• unnecessary reposts and cross-posts; not based on the overall contribution that it brings to the comm, but on its potential to harness votes. This makes the content of the comms less diverse and interesting for veteran users.
• moderators deleting content from other users just so they can repost it later on, to farm karma. This happens quite a bit in a certain site, disengages the users, and creates unnecessary drama.
• people stop contributing with certain discourses not because they think "this is not contributive", but because it's unpopular. Sometimes you need to voice a hot take on an issue, to further discussion.
• it enables mods implementing stupid/arbitrary barriers like "you need X karma to post here", instead of pressing the instance admins to get rid of trolls and bots.

I also believe that karma is one of the big components of 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. It leads to shallow content.

And we might say "I wouldn't do those things for karma!", and a lot of people wouldn't indeed, but the ones who'd do it would make the place less interesting for everyone.

I think it keeps the people from saying what they want or how they want to say it. I saw an AskReddit post once that asked why do people on reddit sound like the same person. Well it was because in time, in order to keep or gain karma, everyone would eventually sound like the generic user.

I always ignored the numbers. I go where the chatter is. Which is why I love that I can sort by new comments, making it work like an old forum where a comment to a post pushes it to the top, so active discussion stays on the front page.

The numbers serve no real purpose other than complicating the above method of sorting by trying to add a perception of "liked" or "hated" to things that doesn't need to be there.

Instead of anonymously making numbers go up, I need actual interaction for my brain juice.

Fun fact: while not being exactly like what karma was on Reddit, Lemmy does store the total count of upvotes-downvotes your account has received. You probably can't see it because it isn't shown by the frontend (the website you see), but the data is indeed there.

Well there are multiple sides to this. There isn't a single it's good or bad.

Reddit got very popular, and the upvote/down vote was a part of it.

A very useful thing of this feature, is the ability to hide trash and get good content more views.

However the community isn't perfect, and some types of content can win over others, and often that winning content isn't useful, as it's just jokes or "funny" content.

If you were to sort by controversial in the reddit comments, and communities, you'll often find trash and useless content. Comments or posts alike. However it's. Not always the case, and sometimes legitimate content just gets down voted because people did not understand it or were just against that opinion.

In my opinion, if reddit were to remove the impact of the up votes/down votes and just put things as random, the content would be horrible with trash everywhere. But the little accounts may have a bit more chance to get up votes.

My lad, you're addicted to social media