Another Reddit refugee here,

I think we’re all familiar with the Karma system on Reddit. Do you think Lemmy should have something similar? Because I can see cases for and against it.

For: a way to tracking quality contributions by a user, quantifying reputation. Useful to keep new accounts from spamming communities.

Against: Often not a useful metric, can be botted or otherwise unearned (see u/spez), maybe we should have something else?

What do you all think?

  • Candelestine@lemmy.world
    03·
    1 year ago

    That seems to discount the idea that new people are continuing to join the internet every single day, and will have never seen the older content.

    It is inevitable that eventually their numbers will build to a sufficient degree that the content can, and should, be reposted to be brought to the newcoming audience.

    To actually stop reposting, we would need people to stop having children, ultimately. Otherwise it is simply serving a necessary purpose.

    • Shadywack@lemmy.world
      11·
      1 year ago

      That is a really good point, and I’m on the same page with you as far as reposting where credit is given. What I’m referring to on the concept of reposts is more akin to something posted by an originating author, which is neglected or ignored, until a high karma user simply reposts it and an engagement algorithm is tuned to float it in the feed based on karma and individual user-influence. The end result is that original content gets discouraged in lieu of limited gatekeepers of the “hive mind” nature of deigning what’s “popular” vs the quality of content sorted by non-karma based metrics, if that makes sense.

      To put it another way, it’s just my personal preference after seeing the sheer amount of low effort karma farmers that recycle unoriginal content recently posted who are able to float posts to the top, as opposed to truly original or engaging ideas being encouraged.

      That’s for me at least why I’m so turned off to the idea of a user-centric reputation model as opposed to the content quality metrics, that being the individual upvote and downvote trends for each post. There won’t ever be a perfect system, and I’m sure there will be reasons to attack that notion later.