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To prevent "karma farming"? (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Not sure if this is a showerthought, but it popped into my head randomly due to anothe member’s comment that “karma farming isn’t a thing here.” It kinda is…just not as blatant and open as Reddit. If the instances grow in size and number it could become a real thing, we’d have the same issues as Reddit with huge numbers of bots, shills, and karma whoring users.

What if every year we zero out Lemmy points but replace them with a [insert thing here: colored bars?] that maybe qualitatively show positive post and comment levels and sort of show “years of service”?

Get rid of the incentive for points accumulation, but denote consistent positive contribution?

Edit: or leave the comment/post points as the are, but make them only tally a rolling 365 day count and participation in the last 30/60/90 or similar. Continued participation would be obvious, but no substantial amount could ever be collected.

If the points aren’t worth anything, then why would it matter if they change or go away?

E2: welp. People think it isn’t a problem, and they say it will not be. Can’t argue with a position that demands Lemmy/fediverse remain static in its present form. Discussion closed, I guess.

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[–] [email protected] -5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Sure, you don’t get a total of upvotes the way that other site does, but like you said, you do get points for participation.

To some people those “points” matter. Same as karma.

And why would you be against such a change? Not trying to be argumentative, but if the points don’t matter, why would it matter then if they go away or are replaced with a yearly form “well done” symbol?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I mean, you don't get karma. Content does. And some of my posts/commenta have a net positive score and some have a net negative score. But I don't have a karma score.

And, yes, the points do matter to me. But honestly I get emotionally invested in seeing that my comment was controversial. (I don't think I really want my posts to have net negative scores, but if a post has a lot of interaction but a net close-to-zero score, that's often interesting to me.)

And why would you be against such a change?

I mean, first off, I don't feel you've even explained it well enough for me to get what you're even going for, and that makes me worry that you haven't even thought it through for more than 10 seconds. Would these "well done" symbols be associated with users or posts/conments? (I'm guessing posts/comments because how would they prevent so-called "karma whoring" if they were associated with users?) What do you mean by "once a year?" (Do you really mean "once a year" or more like "any post that's over a year old"?) Would the "well done" be just another way to represent the now-abstracted-away net score? Would upvoting/downvoting be disabled for posts/comments that have made the switch?)

And that's not to even mention the more technical considerations like "would this involve the creation of a background job subsystem in Lemmy to update the data behind the scenes?" and "how would the data in the database change when this once-a-year switchover happens?" and "how would this feature be rolled out to ensure continuous full functionality for users on both apps and LemmyUI?"

But beyond that, even if we worked out the details of the design, making such a change has a cost. A cost in cognitive load for newcomers. A cost in maintenance for the developers (both core developers and app/client developers.) A cost in day-to-day usage. A cost in user base, because no change is going to be universally popular (maybe excepting bug fixes and invisible changes) and for some pretty large user-facing change like this, some folks are going to leave over it.

Simplicity/elegance is a strength. New feature ideas are a dime a dozen. The best software projects are those that don't adopt new features without a damned good reason.

Edit: Oh, Jesus. I just read other comments you've made in this post and you're talking about the number of posts/comments count, not karma. Yeah, you definitely weren't explaining what you were going for well.