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.

  • steventhedev@lemmy.world
    333·
    4 months ago

    Lemmy doesn’t have karma farming because it doesn’t have karma.

    Accounts earn their reputation based on name recognition, not some artificial score.

    • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.worldOP
      714·
      4 months ago

      Yet that’s all karma is. And I tap on a member’s name and I can see their “score” here.

      Believe it or not, some do place value on quantity, and some do so without checking quality.

      • KoboldCoterieEnglish
        23·
        4 months ago

        This might just be a feature specific to the app you’re using; it isn’t displayed publicly on web, at least on any instance I have an account with.

        • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.worldOP
          49·
          4 months ago

          Are you sure? I just tried a regular browser and went to Lemmy.world, tapped a random username, and was able to see their post/comment count, and tried a second app and found the same.

          E: you might be confusing my comment about score with a total number of points of upvotes. That isn’t what I meant. I was only suggesting that to some people the total comment and post score might equate to karma.

          • MagicShel@programming.dev
            16·
            4 months ago

            Here’s what I see for you in a browser:

            Here’s what I see for myself:

            No karma. No points. Just raw post count and comment count.

          • KoboldCoterieEnglish
            11·
            4 months ago

            Oh, we can see post / comment count, but that’s a meaningless statistic, no? The whole point of karma - the whole thing that makes karma toxic - is that it’s based on farming upvotes; it’s why Reddit is a cesspool of low-effort meme comments that’re engineered to gather those upvotes. Post / comment numbers can’t really be hidden anyway, unless you’re also proposing hiding a user’s comment history… you could get a quick rough total just by checking how many pages of posts and comments there were and doing some quick multiplication.