Reddit karma is a self-perpetuating problem. Karma being used as an indicator of an account's quality and trustworthiness incentivizes karma farming, effectively turning fake internet points into real money. This spurs the development of bots whose sole purpose is to farm karma by reposting old content from humans (and more recently using ChatGPT to generate comments) which then spurs the rise of human "bot hunter" accounts whose sole purpose is to detect and report bots "stealing" content. At some point reddit turns into bots acting like humans vs humans acting like bots.

Technically, lemmy does actually track a user's karma.

It's- just not exposed via the user interface... as of right now.

Kinda of like how kbin displays who upvotes and downvotes. Lemmy also tracks this data too, and can easily report on exactly who is upvoting and downvoting.

In the case of this post, for example-

I think it can encourage unintended behaviors like karma farming.

I've seen similar trends in some FPS games in which during immediate game play your kill to death ratio is hidden to keep people engaged with the main loop instead of getting worked up over their stats.

I don’t really care about karma or reputation points. However, I really enjoy having a community where you can upvote and downvote.

Just like on Reddit, I don’t care. As long as it’s not tied to my ability to interact with the community then let them have their silly internet points.

A karma score encourages making poor quality meme posts and comments in large quantities to gain more fake internet points. It's easily abused; Reddit is full of karma farming bots.

No downvotes was also mentioned here, but I heavily disagree. Downvotes, in my opinion are mostly a positive thing. Youtube hiding downvotes was a move towards a "good vibes only, no criticism allowed" type of environment.

Lemmy pretty much meets my ideal in this regard, it has downvotes and doesn't have a broken social credit system.

I like that the total values of both votes are shown. It's better than the way reddit has it at least.

I kinda like how it is now.

I think the system on Reddit was pretty terrible and ripe for abuse. Over the years I saw a lot of threads where people discussed being harassed by another user who disagreed with them in a sub, and then proceeded to hunt down their posts and down-vote every single thing they posted across the site. Downvotes for literally no reason other than some irrational dislike of someone they don't even know, etc. Conversely, lots of high karma posters who never really contributed anything other than low effort posts like memes and pics.

I think having and using the upvote/downvote system is a very poor tool for promoting critical thinking and open discussion. Even posts that contain opinions that seem horrid to the majority of others commenting in a thread discussion can still have value as they can help illustrate the world is larger than the little bubble present in a thread and sub of like minded people where only those who agree with each others' ideas are given value.

Already disliking that I see the upvote/downvote buttons present on kbin as well as reputation points, so not really even sure I will be engaging long term tbh. Have stated before in other comments that I don't think it wise to just recreate the systems in Reddit since we will just end up in the same place, with the same issues. We should be better than that. Feel free to downvote now. ;)

I think having no reputation point is a good thing, it gives no incentive to post low-effort content just to get reputation points.

I think karma could in some ways be fun, but overall was more of a liability than an asset for Reddit. I'm glad Lemmy didn't have it. Reduces karmawhoring incentives

I don't care for Karma-farming, but I liked having some way to tell if someone was a real community member or a throw-away account. I liked that there were some subreddits that wouldn't let you post if you had low karma because it helped hold back the trolls.

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I never cared about karma points at all. I just said what I was thinking. Only annoying thing on Reddit was when you didn't have any karma at all.

People begin downvoting your post now, because you don't care. lol

We need them for better distributed moderation of spam

Karma as used on Reddit is fairly useless. A web-of-trust style karma system (do people whose opinions I respect also respect this person's opinions) would be helpful for sifting through the crap.

I think not having karma tells the user that they don't have to care about posting the "right" things. This is better, as I think the karma system of Reddit promoted conformity, as people wanted to gamify their experience on the site, and even created a weird economy of people selling high karma accounts to advertisers or whoever wanted karma for whatever reason.

So yeah, I prefer not having visible karma.

I would prefer a platform without karma or reputation. The way reputation works on Kbin isn't great anyway. Downvotes lower it but upvotes don't raise it. My rep is low because most people don't boost.

A karma/rep system can disincentivize participation as well. I don't think it's necessary to keep trolls at bay.

I kinda don't care either way I guess.

I just wanna see some memes