On every lemmy app/instance I’ve checked, it seems that the post and comment scores on users’ profiles have been replaced by post and comment counts.
I often look at scores to quickly check a person’s credibility/involvement, and the count is much less helpful than the score in that regard. I could see this data maybe being removed because it was too server intensive to calculate, but maybe there’s some other reason.
I’ve searched and can’t seem to find any explanation for this change in release notes, but maybe I’m just not searching correctly. Does anyone know why this change was made?
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3393#issuecomment-1779400639
Public karma counts and karma farming are one of the things we really don’t want to replicate from reddit, there was a discussion about it for lemmy-ui, and it was decided to stop showing them because of how psychologically harmful it is.
We should’ve removed these a long time ago from the API. As a substitute, you can show the post_count and comment_count instead of those scores.
Damn, linked right to the dev’s comments on git. Thanks you so much for that.
I love how they point out the psychological effects that karma has on people. It gamifies the process, but it also makes people compare themselves with others to a degree that’s simply toxic. It’s forced competition for the sake of content farming, we’re people not livestock.
Good
Have there been studies proving that the karma score on reddit is psychologically harmful? Or do they just believe that because they believe that?
Who is karma farming psychologically harmful to? It seems like aligned incentives to me. The vote totals are a representation of satisfied users.
God forbid Lemmy have more content. We’re definitely drowning in engagement here.
I think that refers to using gamification to make the users spend more time on your platform. It kinda exploits the way our mind works. We have one eye on that score and want to see it go up. And if someone has a high score they are respectable in a certain way.
What you say is correct, but there is another school of thinking that things should be more a level playing field. And the incentive should be solely you have something interesting to say. And not you want a reward for that.
Score is about how you match the hivemind opinion, it has nothing to do with credibility. Be free, say your controversial dumb shit that you know people will disagree with and challenge them to a duel to the death.
95% of history is probably written to suit the people currently writing or funding the history books, and that’s totally not a statistic I just made up.
Connect app thankfully shows me a score and individual comment vote counts. I want to see if a comment has a lot of people disagreeing, even if it’s overall score is positive. It’s an important indicator to fight missinformation.
I’ve been here since June, and it’s never had karma score calculated for the profile. My understanding was that they didn’t want to promote karma farming like is done on Reddit.
Interesting. I’ve browsed mostly using voyager (which copies the look of Apollo for Reddit), so it looks like I should direct my question there.
Don’t judge peopke credibility with scores. Check the person history and decide by yourself what is not credible
While collecting more data is better, it is also more time consuming. And honestly who checks more than the last dozen comments when looking at a user? I would always do that in addition to looking at the score. Now I only look at the last comments and therefore have less data on which to draw a conclusion.
There has never been an official “global score” for users. If you ever saw one it was being calculated by your app/front-end.Edit: per jet’s reply it looks like it actually was historically in the API but not exposed on most apps, so calculation was done by the instance and not the app/front-end. It seems like they’re being removed entirely from the API soon or already have been.
So, this just means you only see the total right? Post + comment “karma” in total?
Or did I understand it wrong?
Not sure if it is possible but would’ve preferred that the entire karma/ score would just be removed. But then again, how would one do with the posts being up or down voted and such.
No. Currently it only shows you the post and comment count.
Example:
Posts = 3
Comments = 10In some instances/apps, it used to show you a score of your total upvotes for those posts and comments. So if you had 3 posts that each net 7 upvotes and 10 comments that each net 5 upvotes, your score would be:
Posts = 21
Comments = 50The entire score has been removed, so you can rejoice.
Ahh that’s cool! Better though, less fixation on the karma.
The current app I’m using, Avelon still shows total score though. All the other I use (Memmy, Voyager and Mlem) don’t.
Hopefully Avelon will follow.
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