As a somewhat frequent poster myself, I kind of miss the meaningless number going up. It lets me track how many people have seen the stuff I posted and cared enough to react

  • @afk_strats@lemmy.world
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    77 days ago

    I get where you’re coming from. You could revisit the contributions you’ve made and the messages and replies you’ve received. The difference is that those ARE meaningful and hopefully in a good way. I think Reddit actively pushes the concept of karma because it’s an great engagement metric and they love that.

    My opinion is that Reddit is captured and driven to push engagement for advertising revenue at the expense of meaningful interaction. Lemmy is a platform where that engagement metric is only intrinsic to the individual. People are here because they want to have meaningful conversations? Maybe I’m dreaming

    • @Daryl76679@lemmy.mlOP
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      22 days ago

      That’s a good point. I was just thinking on it since I recently reached 500 posts. Might go scroll through them and look at some of the comments again

  • @Commiunism@beehaw.org
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    57 days ago

    In a number-go-up kind of sense, yeah - it’s inherently gamification of social media and it is fun for some of our brains. However, I also think that karma or any other kind of “engagement accumulation” turns social media from a place of discussion into a competition for attention, where you’re more incentivized to post solely for upvotes. Only a small minority takes posting seriously like this I admit it, but it does make the experience worse for everyone.

    That’s not to say the mindset doesn’t exist without karma, only that it gets amplified.

  • I’m glad it’s not a thing here because as a “positive” incentive I feel like it drives some users to vapid karma farming over actually interesting and new content. That said, I occasionally miss it when there’s some unpleasant commenter douchenozzeling all over a thread and it’s an easy way to see if someone is always an unpleasant ass or if they’re having a bad day and otherwise make valuable contributions to Lemmy.

  • Max-P
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    47 days ago

    I feel about the same. I don’t particularly care about it, but it’s nice to know how many I helped. It was intentionally removed, I believe so it doesn’t incentivise karma farms. If karma exists it will be used and there will be reasons to farm it.

    Nothing a quick Postgres query can’t fix though :p

  • @Allero@lemmy.today
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    37 days ago

    Some apps and front ends support showing your post and comment “karma”. Eternity, for example

  • @Alice@beehaw.org
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    27 days ago

    Kind of, and it was a good way to keep trolls and spammers out of sensitive communities, but unfortunately with bots and astroturfing existing nowadays, karma incentives terrible behavior.