RIght now lemmy doesn't calculate or display a user's "karma". And many think this a good thing (me included).
Interestingly, kbin does calculate karma, even for us lemmy users (you can all probably just search on kbin.social and find your karma now, +/- federation inconsistencies).
Whenever karma comes up, this fact often comes up, along with the identification of up/down voters, such that many lemmy users will probably know that they actually do have karma and can go look it up if they want to. Some lemmy apps/frontends are also reporting karma AFAIU.
So I think the question now presents itself of whether this is an issue we want users to have some control over, within the bounds of what can done over federation/AP of course.
I can imagine a system where karma is an opt-in setting of one's profile, and a protocol is established that any platform/client that understands up/down votes ought to respect this setting and that non-compliance risks defederation.
Though lemmy/kbin obviously lean more "public internet resource" than microblogging platforms like mastodon, I think it makes sense to value user health and safety here, and this seems like a not unreasonable option to establish a norm around.
Thoughts?
I kind of feel like karma is pretty much a part of the link aggregator style site’s core usefulness. It’s a quick nod to figuring out if an account is generally well thought of or not and my immediate instinct would pretty much be to block people hiding their karma on here, because it points to an unwillingness to participate in the core voting and being voted on idea.
At the very least, I wouldn’t want accounts that opt out of displaying karma to be able to vote on anything either. All in or stand on the sidelines and watch IMHO.
I mean ... lemmy is doing just fine without it, and many here seem to be enjoying its absence, if they have even noticed it, so I'm not sure where you get this from.
core usefulnessseems like quite a stretch TBH.The only other places I've experienced such a system are reddit and hackernews. On hackernews, its often belittled as irrelevant or something best ignored, IME at least.
On reddit, well, I don't think much positive came out of karma's effect there. Let me know if you've got counter arguments to that.
Interesting.
The main issue I have with this position though is that it seems to ignore and even underemphasise the importance of maintaining good culture through reporting and inter-personal engagement and moderation. If there's a bad faith actor, instead of relying on karma, I think a better way to go would be establish a culture of people engaging with them and explaining why their behaviour is unacceptable, then reporting if necessary, and moderation suspending/banning them if necessary after that. I'd prefer this because it establishes that maintaining "civility" is in many ways a people problem and not nearly as much of a tech problem as many are inclined to think. It also removes the superficiality of a simple numerical score, which can completely miss context and easily be gamed and stymie open conversaion for fear of being permanently punished by "bad karma".
Another way of putting this, is to ask by what means does someone earn the right to up/downvote? And I'd say by being a member here that hasn't been moderated/banned. That's because the core utility of a vote-score is to more easily sort and assess the feed and post comments and know how the community receives your posts. It's about the posts first, not the person.
If anyone wants to judge someone by their prior posts/comments, and the votes they got, you are by all means able to browse their history, where their votes are coupled with the context of their posts. But I'd say until they're moderated/banned, they're entitled to vote. In the case of a pathologically down voted user (IE, regularly, repeatedly, and substantially downvoted), I think that's a moderation issue and should be easily captured by moderation tools (it's like a single SQL query), where again, admins can and should incorporate the context into any decision they make.