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By choice. The main developers don’t like that kind of gamification, bragging, karma farming and the negative aspects that come with such things.
Sorry you got jumped on as a new user a bit.
The karma system on reddit encourages posting and reposting stuff that everyone has seen before to get fake internet points, and maybe what you win is a “more powerful account” for the algorithm instead of everyone getting a more or less equal voice.
You can still get people to follow you and build a tribe if you want without that, and you are also free to start any community you like, so a few mods don’t end up controlling all the online real estate and steer the conversation unfairly.
Plus its simpler. Sometimes simple is good.
So that you can ask stupid questions and not have repercussions hunt you til the days your account is deleted
It would motivate more low quality post spam like we see on reddit.
shoutout https://moist.catsweat.com
It used to in the past. It was removed in the 0.19.0 release. This is the pull request that took it out (I think).
This thread has some of the reasoning for it, but at a high level the Lemmy devs made a call that the benefits a karma system provide didn’t outweigh the problems a karma system can cause.
A raw number across the whole federation would be useless. Different instances have their own cultures, making a unified number worthless. People could also goose their numbers by creating an instance that gives their account unlimited karma.
Instance karma could be useful, but it is a design decision not to show it. I suspect that will continue until there is a need to use karma for moderation, but I suspect that defederation would be the lower lying fruit for now.
Because karma ruins actual discussion.
There’s no real value to any of it.
Attach free beer to point levels and watch this thing explode.
It… does, though? I always go to my profile and check how my comments are doing before I sign off. Numbers go bigger make dopamine go brrrr.
But it doesn’t have an account total karma tracker (it did, but was removed).
I like it this way, you get approval on your comments/posts, but don’t have a public ‘worth’ value to increase - that can cause problems.
Because it’s shit made to drive engagement, not worth anything. Unlike reddit which views you as assets to make it money and incentivises use, lemmy owners pay for the bandwidth, don’t get anything from out shitposts and if anything it would be in their interest to disincentivise use.
It does, it’s just disabled by default. Some third party clients, like Boost for Lemmy, have it enabled (or at least it did, it’s been a while since I’ve used it).
Edit: as it turns out, the Karma count was removed from Lemmy in version 0.19.
Because it exploits how dumb the internet toy such as a karma system really is.
I like the Fediverse’s handling of it. Look, I can post however much I want. Unlike Reddit, where I got to storm to AskReddit because it doesn’t care about how much karma you’ve got, farm karma, wait for a period and then finally be able to post where I want to.
People have sadly tied their existence to this system. I mean, the higher a karma count is for someone, I’ve noted how much of a snobbish bastard people love to come off as. Like as if it makes them superior, regardless of the shit takes and awful arguments they project.
Karma systems invalidate thought and discussion. Do you really mean to say what you’ve said because you mean it? Or did you say it because you know it’ll garner the most points? Quite frankly, I’d rather be saying what I want to say because some of the time, I do mean it. On Reddit, I always have had to fake myself and say stupid shit just so I can have enough points to finally post elsewhere. So many people on Reddit will say anything and do anything to make themselves feel better about themselves by phoning in thoughts, opinions and expressions. But I doubt they actually believe into half of the shit they say or do.
And when you get downvoted? Welp, be prepared to karma farm again because some subreddits will not allow you to post or just throw you into the spam filter bin because you get prompted by a 9 minute timer before you can post again. It’s just an atrocious system all around that has bastardized the way people communicate with eachother. So, Fuck Reddit’s Karma system, it doesn’t belong here.
That’s mostly true I think, but it is a really useful resource for mods and I completely understand why they use min karma limits. ( On Reddit I just have a min 5 karma requirement (posts only) and a larger range that just triggers modmail - filters out 90% of bot posts and I can manually address the false positives. I would hate to have to manage a larger community)
As others said it was a conscious decision of the developers, as it’s gamification of the system and they aren’t big fans of that.
I agree with this decision.
The Fluff Principle* makes easy-to-judge content get higher scores, and we do see it Lemmy. It isn’t a big deal because fluff ends on its own specific comms, but once you gamify the aggregation of score points, the picture changes - now you’re encouraging people to share content that they believe to score high over content that they believe to be contributive.
Additionally a publicly visible karma enables a bunch of poorly thought mod practices, like karma gating (“you need +500 karma to post here lol”) or automatically banning people with low karma (even if it might come from a single post/comment).
*“Hence what I call 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.” (Source)
I do miss the special updoots like gold and stuff. It was fun
