I see nothing wrong in having scores. It encourages users to be active and post interesting stuff and provide interesting conversations.
this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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In theory. In reality reposting the same memes, jokes and images will get you more Karma than any thought out, well written conversation ever could.
I agree with you. I never saw a major issue with it. Sure, some people were way to focused on it but I do think it encourages more good than bad.
I don't think OP has an issue with scores being visible on individual comments and posts.
The issue is that wefwef displays your total comment scores on your profile, where Lemmy does not (by default).
I think OP has a point - once people start caring about their total score, it could lead to toxic behavior across the platform.
No it doesn't. People already do that on their own; all karma does is encourage all of the toxic shit we ran away from. Why would we shit all over a new community by repeating a senseless and destructive mistake?
Only thing most people ran away from is predatory API pricing that killed apps with superior interface, forcing users to use sorry official app.
That was certainly the last straw, but it was a lot more than that.
Only thing most people ran away from is predatory API pricing that killed apps with superior interface, forcing users to use sorry official app.
if you put any association between upvotes and self worth, on any platform, thats on you (in general, not @ you op). i still thought karma was a fun measurement though, i see no problem it.
reddit hasn't "failed" yet, probably wont, ever. if it ever does, i promise you that karma wasnt the reason.
I obviously don't, but everyone else does, and it's not even something most people can really help. Fucking social media corporations had their marketing departments come up with the stupid idea knowing that people would be addicted to the dopamine hit from being upvoted.
At least on the OG Lemmy site, being upvoted or downvoted doesn't actually affect you. But an app purposefully bringing back something the devs did not implement in the first place for good reasons, is deeply problematic and people need to speak out against the practice.
We have a chance to break the cycles of the past and we ought to take it.
There are other apps.
This has very little do to with wefwef and all with the Lemmy backend. The API simply gives out the total post and comment scores of a user. Nothing is done client side here. And I can promise you, that most apps will display these scores on a user’s profile page sooner or later, simply because it’s easy to do. So if you really want to abolish karma, then you should argue your case for Lemmy overall and not for a single app.
Apps need to be pressured not to do that, but I agree with you that we need to speak to the Lemmy devs about the situation too. I'll do that too, for now, we must address the fact that Wefwef, the most popular Lemmy app, is displaying karma scores when it really should not be.
After you hit 10K karma you stop giving a fuck, and so should you.
That's the kind of toxic mindset that killed Reddit.
I fully disagree.
This web app (wefwef) has nothing to do with this. Take this argument to a Lemmy community about Lemmy.
I think it does.
A user's combined comment and post scores are not displayed in Lemmy itself, but are on wefwef.
The OG Lemmy site doesn't keep post and comment vote totals, only Wefwef does, hence the thread.
gotta say I dislike karma as well, but what a client does clientside is sort of its own business.
its likely that the best easy to keep this "karma" irrelevant is to just ignore both it and the apps that try to quantify it.
having said that, depending on how a client fetches data to calculate things it could be defined as instance load abuse and those clients could be user-agent banned from an instance at the discretion on the instance admins. this really should remain an instance by instance choice though.
🤔 Can instance admins actually stop apps from tabulating karma? How does that work? Do they ban the whole app or stop certain data from being accessible by the API or?
Lemmy exposes scores via the API; wefwef simply makes it available to the user. I can understand requesting an option to disable them though
This isn’t specific to wefwef. There are plenty of other apps that do the same, i believe its tied to the actual lemmy api that keeps track of everything.
Ive never been a big fan of karma either, but just having post and comment totals doesn’t really bother me. As long as we as a community don’t glorify it. Even when i was on reddit i never cared about my karma.
Having said that, not everyone is of the same mind set and there will definitely be accounts trying to “farm” points. If one of them posts a lot that it annoys me i can just block them from my feed.
It's not just a problem that can be ignored away. Troll and bot accounts that farm karma will ruin the site just as effectively as they did on Reddit regardless of whether people block them or not -- their presence illegitimizes the site and ruins the atmosphere. No one wants to hang out on a site that is populated with them, they want a site with humans that want to talk to them for their own sake.
Like there are a myriad of reasons people need to be worried about this, and that people are being so flippant about it just because it points out something negative about Wefwef (not saying you are doing that) is deeply concerning.
My main issue with karma and post scores was that it increased social conformity. People became more and more hesitant to voice opinions that went against the Reddit users mainstream, because saying something people disagreed with got immediately “punished” with downvotes.
The downvotes then made the comment less and less visible, which further contributed to the silencing of discussions. I think (polite) discussion is an important part of a platform such as this one. It’s a pity that Reddit’s system discouraged discussion and became more and more a click factory. I hope that we can avoid that here. I agree that it would be a good step to remove the visible upvote/downvote system (or at least the downvotes).
Fuck, no.
Karma is what keeps bots and malicious actors at bay.
If you felt the need to have a high number, that says more about your own lack of personal control.
If the majority does not like the concept of karma, they will migrate to a platform that doesn't have it. You will not be doing anything better than a shitty company by forcing something that a large population of consumers doesn't like.
The issue with this kind of decentralisation is that it becomes very difficult to stop someone from doing something a population does not like.
That's what they did here, and this app is bringing back the very same thing people here are trying to leave behind. It's too dangerous to just allow them to do that, and I know for a fact I am not alone in that opinion. Framing something that is objectively destructive in terms of "something a population doesn't like" is sus as fuck. What do you stand to gain from an app doing such a terrible thing?