Did people actually change what they’d say based on whether or not they thought they’d get upvotes? I always just said what I wanted and used the karma to determine how popular of an opinion it was, so pretty much exactly how Lemmy works now. I don’t think I ever looked at my overall account karma on Reddit.
Yes. It can also trick you into thinking a reactionary opinion is actually a popular one. For example in my country, ireland, there’s been a few incidents were people of different nationalities have done unsavoury things caught on camera. This usually results of the comment section of the ireland sub to have a debate about whether there’s too many immigrants in the country. Whichever side gets more upvotes is widely perceived to have “won” and bystanders will in turn adopt that position.
I don’t think I’ve ever changed an opinion of mine to go along with the hive mind but the karma system has definitely discouraged me from commenting things because I would been downvoted into oblivion. It’s not worth getting into arguments when you can clearly see people not siding with you.
How does this system solve that? Comments still have vote counts and reactionary comments still make it to the top of threads, there’s just no visible count of total aggregated votes.
You’re correct, the entire system is already in place. The only thing that is currently missing is adding up all of someone’s ‘karma’ from their their posts and having it shown on their profile. Some of the apps already have this implemented since it’s easy to incorporate.
That’s not the only thing that’s missing. A total upvote count on my profile page wouldn’t be the problematic element that Reddit has. I would welcome a total upvote count on my profile page.
I’m fine being downvoted to oblivion by some anti-good astrotufing campaign, but it’s getting honest, legitimate opinions slid down and out of discussion that feels risky
I’m definitely anti right wing, but that doesn’t automatically make the left right about everything.
What is true about both sides is that some people just wanna look for a fight/argument and dehumanize their political ‘other’. It’s easy dopamine and righteous rage that drives engagement in every human.
Any good faith comment that points this out in an argument and has credible examples is always worth its salt.
I actually like finding out I’m wrong or my information is incomplete/outdated. I don’t care for unfounded opinions in myself or others regardless of how they make me feel!
It did the opposite for me. I see those threads in r/canada or other posts and I’d comment trying to get downvoted because I hated the circle jerking and manipulation of threads with cliché comment chains intent on being dog whistles. I hated karma and somehow ended up with a stupid amount of it.
The big thing for me is that I’ve seen a lot of people say they’ve had their accounts stalked and harrassed for saying really mild things. With how many times I’ve read “I read your post history and…” over even the most mild disagreements, I absolutely believe this happens on a regular basis. Dropping an obviously unpopular opinion feels like an easy way to become a victim.
I’ve had my account stalked! Right in the middle of it I switched from Kbin to Lemmy (so I could try out the apps) and had to inform my stalker about the new account.
Frustrated and annoyed at having to look for my posts in many different places, they seem to have given up 🤷
This is a clear win for the Fediverse! I was able to switch instances and get subscribed to all my previous communities in no time at all while this doubled up stalking efforts 👍
Yea there’s some psycho’s out there. I picked a few up. Nothing really crazy from them and surprisingly most of them had poor infosec so I was never too concerned that they were anything to worry about. Really emotionally invested people who don’t like when they read things they disagreed with
That’s how I lost my three accounts and I have completely given up
Whenever someone said they checked my post history I immediately considered it a victory and moved on.
Interesting. How do you know this? That the bystanders looked at the upvotes and decided their opinion on immigration based on this? Were there polls or something?
I agree
Ah, c’mon downvoters…gotta keep some sarcasm alive at the same time!
100%. I’d even be ok with getting rid voting mechanisms all together. The comment and responses to it should be indicative of it’s quality instead of some vague numerical value which somehow makes it better than the other because more people voted for it based on their own understanding on how a vote works.
Discussions shouldn’t be about what’s popular. Social media has corrupted our ability to have intelligent discussions because non popular viewpoints aren’t entertained anymore and people with non popular viewpoints don’t want to contribute due to the retaliatory nature of likes/votes.
It’s eroding our ability to reason and we need to stop it.
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I mean, it kind of does mean something small, which is credibility. Karma wasn’t ever a flawless way to determine credibility, but it was a decent first pass, like an online ocular patdown.
Uh, no. Lol
It maybe showed popularity. But it was frequently manipulated.
In ideal situation downvote should not be used for disagreeing but topic relevant and quality. In ideal situation…
Example: replace this entire comment with a portion of a highly upvoted comment below from this same thread, combine that with an official experience that only shows one or two top level comments and those copies can also get lots of upvotes. Reddit was rife with these kinds of bots.
Bro I’ve never for a second thought that gallowboob had any credibility whatsoever and the motherfucker had like, all the KARMA
You’re completely missing my point. I’m not saying you should worship the guy, but he has more credibility than a troll with negative karma or a 3 month old tshirt bot with a few hundred karma from plagiarized comments.
Both those cases have 0 credibility from any sensible person as they are functionally equivalent
Hi I’m necrocommenting this old comment, sorry.
You’re conflating post karma and comment karma. Post karma is shit and almost everyone on reddit with super high post karma is awful. Comment karma however is often a decent measure of credibility. The problem is people conflate the two, or worse, inappropriately value post karma over comment karma.
The biggest issue in some places was, even if your opinion is valid, if it didn’t fit the group speak, it would be downvoted regardless.
It wasn’t really a great indicator if your opinion was popular or not, it was more if it got that groups niche.
wasn’t really a great indicator if your opinion was popular or not, it was more if it got that groups niche.
… That’s called popular opinion lol.
Of course it matters where you say something. It’s literally no different than IRL.
If I’m on Reddit it’s to Reddit, it’s not to change my vocabulary and content to fit each individual subreddits niche.
Imagine being in a country bar and a table only wants to talk about and listen to rap music. The rest of the place shouldn’t have to bend to their will or create some safe place for them.
There’s an old saying to “read the room”. It’s the same online and offline. The reaction you get depends entirely on the audience present.
Reading the room is about the tone you set, not the words you say.
People just don’t like hearing that they’re wrong, or that popular opinion is wrong. Questioning themselves makes people uncomfortable.
The tone you set is dictated by the words you say.
And the words you say are dictated by others potential opinions on what you said and the tone you said it
Yes, people definitely did. Maybe not a majority but a lot
Karma did limit where and how frequently you could post
And that makes sense to some degree. I used to mod a large community on re**it and usually rage bait/flaming/troll accounts got filtered out by our automod which was set to 50 karma iirc. Most communities that use a karma filter have it set really low so farming a lot of karma is really unnecessary
Y’all act like that can’t happen on Lemmy. The total score is already visible via API. Nothing’s stopping a community from running a bot that auto removes anyone below a threshold. It’s entirely possible right now to write that code.
That and also many subs wouldn’t allow people to participate if they didn’t have a high enough karma
That was used as a crude spam filter against bots and new accounts
The amount of deleted downvoted comments makes me think most people at least change their minds afterwards. Which to me is the real weird part, you hide your opinion so you don’t lose useless internet points…
I think you are envisioning something a little more intentional/thought out than it is. We do this socially all the time. You gauge the audience and you adjust what you’re going to say to better fit it. Or to upset them if you’re trolling but that tends to be more deliberate.
I bet if you took your comments from a hobby sub/forum/group/etc. you frequent, and then one from a meme community, you will find your tone and rhetoric are very different. And again this is not a bad thing! You are doing and saying what is appropriate for the context. It is very natural to do. But the point is you probably don’t sit down and calculate your exact wording. We just sort of do it, and our goal is generally to “fit in“ or get some affirmation from the community we are participating in.
Did people actually change what they’d say based on whether or not they thought they’d get upvotes?
I’d argue anyone who did that probably had nothing interesting to say and/or didn’t actually care about what they were saying. Same with the people who complained about downvotes.
/me watches some dude post hateful contrarian bullshit on a light hearted comic.
"It’s not even funny and this shit comic comic has been done before. Quit self promoting on reddit bitch!
Edit: Why am I being down voted!? Fuck you know it’s true! Mods temp banned me apparently. I don’t care I’m never going to block her so I can always down vote!"
Somehow everyone who commented on his parent comment has every comment in their profile down voted for the last 50 comments…
Yep. I remember someone asking on a hiking sub about a backpack. It was a very fashionable and heavy canvas pack. I hike a good bit and have never seen a pack like that being used by others in the trails, so I said that I wouldn’t recommend that pack. I think it had like 30-40 down votes. I never gave my opinion on a pack again.
Bro you are welcome to elaborate here I mean what can be so controversial about a fucking backpack
Yeah right. I learned my lesson the first time. No more opinions from me.
:)
: C
Genuine question, and I don’t mean any disrespect, if down votes are intended to mean people disagree with you, and you don’t know these people, why did you care so much that you won’t share your opinion on things again? I’ve never understood this way of thinking. Maybe I’m just weird but I for the life of me can’t imagine caring that much about what strangers think.
I think the karma system on reddit had a real effect on behaviour. What you often found it did was cause people to write comments for the audience of voters instead of for the person they’re responding to. This eliminates personal interaction between users and turns everything into soapboxing. You stop having real conversations with each other, instead it becomes about pandering to votes.
This then also causes people to vote based on this as well. “You’re not saying what the group wants to hear” downvote is the voting behaviour it creates.
This so frigging much. People are not having conversations, they are posturing.
It’s like going into a debate prepared for discussing ideas, and the other debater is going for discussing emotions.
Truly fucked up and patently divisive
Yeah it’s annoying. Things are far more pleasant when people are actually talking to one another, it creates a more human interaction and you don’t get the kind of bad-faith engagement associated with trying to pander to votes. People self-censor far less as a result as well, aside from instance rules.
The weirdest part is the interactions, I swear to God people is hell bent on their conversations being pre-tainted with assuming the worst possible take on the others side.
It’s like people can’t no longer have different thoughts on the matter without going full civil war in the comments
To be honest I’ve gotten used to that and have had that here with “you glorify Lenin blah blah blah 100gorillion deaths gommunism no food”. I think that’s a specific type of person issue.
:/
Guess it’s gonna take a while. I think it’ll never get used to it haha
I didn’t. If anything I enjoyed the downvotes sometimes. Your downvotes mean nothing
I always thought it was amusing if I got into an argument with someone and they downvoted each of my comments before replying as if that meant something. Dude, I already get that you don’t agree with me. Why are you bothering?
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That Rick quote is like the wojak where he’s got the smirking mask but is crying behind it. It always cracked me up when I saw people use it. If the downvotes mean nothing, why mention them at all?
I’ll dissent. I like the karma system. It gives me a quick read out of who’s a troll and who isn’t.
I don’t care about post karma so much, but the comment karma was an interesting stat.
Edit: An important caveat. We MUST keep downvotes visible. MUST. Having just a positive score breeds absolute insanity.
Negative karma doesn’t necessarily indicate a troll, any unpopular opinion can get down-voted to hell while similar but differently expressed ideas get up-voted in the same thread. I’m not against karma system though, just think it’s quite useless in most cases.
All comment karma tells you is who was first to a thread basically in my experience, and I had over 500k of it lol it’s nothing though I could go troll for days before making a dent in the 10k you get from an obvious joke on the new tab and then the thread takes off
Best way to tell if someone is a troll is just to look at what they say imo 🤷🏻♂️
I had my third party app and browser extensions set to automatically hide comments by people with very low karma and very low comment scores. I’d only ever see hateful comments if I clicked to unhide them and I liked that
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You forgot about the baby eaters in your list of people you dislike.
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I find it funny you had a list instead of just saying harmful people. It was a joke.
Idk I felt like above a certain point karma was just an indication that that person knew how to game the system and play nice with reddit.
I like how it is on lemmy. I feel like downvotes/upvotes prompt conversations. You’re at 47/6 and it doesn’t really matter to me, it just shows that people might not totally agree and then I’m hopeful that they have left a comment.
I think it’s also possible that the voting system on reddit was effective at marginalizing people.
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You can only lose about 100karma in one comment thread so if a troll can get one high upvote comment it can counteract literally 100’s of negative comments.
Karma was pointless. Nobody cared at all. Upvotes and downvotes are fine and useful to be able to see both. Karma is a worthless system and encourages spamming low-effort garbage memes and endless reposting of the same shit.
Not one time on reddit did i consider or care about my karma
I saved up 14 years worth of karma on Reddit and traded it in for…nothing, because that’s what it’s worth in the real world.
i got about 60K comment karma which meant I could sell my account for about 500 bucks. I didn’t because I didn’t want that username doing bad stuff, but it was interesting to see it’s value isn’t quite 0.
Had no clue you could sell a reddit acct…doesn’t surprise me though.
I’m against any sort of gamification on social media. Not even achievements/badges or awards. That is the start of dark patterns and addictive design.
Exactly. It feels rewarding to receive karma but that dopamine rush is actually what Instagram, TikTok and all the other corporate-driven platforms out there are exploiting. We don’t need that here.
how do people on this site not realize that the points next to your posts affect how your posts are sorted and are literally the exact same system as reddit? am i just so blind that i can actually see the numbers next to my posts or is everyone here just trying to be so anti-reddit they’ll make up bullshit that isn’t reality?
They are talking about karma as a thing you could collect, point totals for all posts added together displayed on your profile. Not the voting mechanism itself.
Lemmy also has this and everyone’s point totals are visible from the API. If you’re not seeing it, that’s because your client is hiding it, not because it doesn’t exist.
The nice thing is though, it’s different for every server and from every server, so unless you follow a convention to say the user’s homeserver vote total is the definitive amount, then there’s no true karma.
My beehaw account is a great example. I made some comments on Lemmy world before it defederated. World and shitjustworks users can still vote on the old comments but they won’t count to my home total, and from Lemmy.world my vote total won’t change for that account significantly from that point. The vote totals on this lemmy.ca account will be different from lemmy.ca, beehaw.org or lemmy.world’s perspectives because the servers defederated can’t see the karma I earned on each comment on the other server, while lemmy.ca can see both.
Downvotes are also disabled on beehaw, so any downvotes won’t affect my total at all but could show on other servers.
Lastly, there are some servers with 40000 accounts and 3 active users (who post and comment), vote botting is feasibly a thing. Imagine if I made a Lemmy server at Rentlar.org and as the admin I made 20000 accounts who upvote me every where I post. I’d be the first user on Lemmy with 1M total votes, but would that mean anything other than I’m a somewhat tech-savvy narcissistic loser? No.
Wait why is downvoting disabled on beehaw?
because being negative isn’t allowed there.
You are pretty much correct. Although the moderation is very strict, it makes for a more laid back and friendly experience.
its real laid back because there’s so few people there.
Sounds kinda boring actually.
Lemmy also has that bro. Some clients display it and some don’t, but when I click on your name I see that you have 510 total comment score and 0 total post score.
https://i.imgur.com/NxSyRDg_d.webp?maxwidth=760&fidelity=grand
I believe the devs have said they aren’t going to make it officially visible, which is all I care about. If you want to make value judgements on people based on a number so bad that you had to find a client that shows it, more power to you.
I hadn’t thought about it until just now but IDK if that number is accurate. My instance doesn’t have downvotes, so if you view my profile from lemmy.one it might look like I have a higher karma than if you look from lemmy.world, I’m not sure.
Take it all wirh a grain of salt I say
It’s that important tho? There had to be a reason why it isn’t the norm
It wasn’t important on Reddit. Even there you could only lose 15 points on any downvoted comment and you couldn’t lose points for posts. Karma was just a way to measure how frequently you interacted in an additive way. It’s only real utility was for mods to bar new accounts from posting without getting come karma from other places first. and Lemmy definitely needs something like that in the near future for moderation, but they have to fix the bug with the total first.
And that system was irrelevant on Reddit just like it is here. You still have a total karma number in the API, every app I have used shows it, even if it is broken right now. Only the default theme on the web page hides the number. The only people who saw value in karma are the people who farmed it and the people who bitch about the people who farmed it. Either way, making posts that get a lot of upvotes specifically to get a lot of upvotes happens here just like I does on Reddit so idk what this OP is trying to say because they’re farming karma lol.
There were many subreddits that did not allow participation unless someone had a karma over a certain threshold. For many of them the threshold was pretty low, only meant to stop brand new accounts and trolls, but still.
Additionally, the “people who farmed it” often did so because a reddit account with a high karma score was literally worth money to adspammers and people running bots.
The karma system contributed to what made reddit bad.
You only lost 15 karma on any mass downvoted comment and 0 for posts. The only person who cared about people’s karma was you dude.
I don’t see how that addresses any of what I said. If anything this seems like this would mean the subreddits that blocked people with no karma weren’t even doing it to block trolls, just new users.
I didn’t care about my karma or any specific persons, I like to get into arguments about stuff and that is how you get downvoted. I just don’t like the behaviour a karma system motivated.
If you’re getting downvoted in an argument, guess what, that means you’re bad at making arguments. And this system is exactly the same, regardless of if you can see it or not, sorting by top will still sort by the net sum of votes.
If you’re getting downvoted in an argument, guess what, that means you’re bad at making arguments.
I pretty much agree with your second sentence/point, but this is bullshit. I got so many downvotes on reddit for literal descriptions of my perceptions and experiences as a gay woman. Half the time there wasn’t even a debate or argument happening. As reddit culture skewed more and more conservative, many technical and nerdy communities became actively hostile to the basic facts of my existence. Then there are all the downvotes I got for believing in human and minority rights while downthread with some bigots. My more visible posts on the same topic would be solidly upvoted, while everything below the arrow was smashed below zero because only angry little shits followed the discussion that far. I agree that the system on Lemmy isn’t meaningfully different and will inevitably have the same effects, but sorting by voting over-centralizes the meta and destroys real discussion and diversity of experience and opinion. It literally only works in limited circumstances within subjects that have objectively correct answers. Anywhere else it introduces so much chaos.
I mean, generally getting downvoted in an argument is a matter of course, at least until people who you aren’t arguing with chime in.
Also a lot of what you are saying doesn’t really make sense to me? I feel like I’m not sure we agree what we disagree about.
Honestly the shit I got downvoted the most for was just standing up for trans people, reddit is full of transphobes.
Karma is the total of upvotes and downvotes a user receives over time not just single posts and comments. It leads to discrimantory moderation and users tend to whore themselves out for upvotes to boast.
Ever heard of gallowboob?and this site has that exact mechanic in the API.
It wasn’t a 1upvote=1karma system on Reddit. Mostly, Lemmy does it better by the community caring less and not having posts limited if a user is under a threshold.
Arguably one difference is that on lemmy it’s just a straight up sum AFAIK, while on reddit there are some algorithms attached to tweak things so you can’t lose vast amounts of karma from a single shit comment and such.
Reddit bad lemmy good, you are not allowed to say otherwise.
Edit: Bruh people on lemmy don’t get sarcasm either 😭
You can on reddit say what you want. If you really care about the number next to your name you’re just a victim
I never changed my opinion just so I get more karma on reddit either.
Lemmy’s system is no different from Reddit’s and my original comment was sarcastic. I’ve noticed sarcastic posts without /s get downvoted more easily on Lemmy for whatever reason.
There’s a lot more good faith here. On Reddit you could safely assume anything ridiculous was meant sarcastically, and usually be correct. Here, the sarcasm is not assumed so your comment is more likely to be judged as having been spoken sincerely.
Which is actually really nice, even if it gets a comment misunderstood from time to time. Reddit just feels shitty and hate-filled anymore. But Lemmy feels a great deal more emotionally neutral, and if I dare say so, human – which is to say, not attempting to increase emotional involvement and generate clicks by being provocative and antagonizing by design.
EDITED for clarity
Yes, its why “/s” exists. (Even if some dont like it)
Did karma ever stop anyone from posting their racist, hateful shit on the other site?
Nope. Frankly a karma system would be such a terrible idea for Lemmy. We just need more mod tools, which is a downside of Lemmy being a new platform that grew really quickly.
Never. It only insensitived the other bad behaviors. Karma farming, fake content, and reposting.
Those posting bad stuff often upvoted themselves on other accounts anyway.
I like being able to say what I want without being banned by a power-tripping mod, or downvoted into irrelevance by a circle jerk. We need to be able to point out that the Emperor isn’t wearing clothes.
Imagine being so addicted to social media you let a number change his you act. Absolutely sad.
I always hated those subs that prevented you from posting unless you had a minimum amount of karma.
I used reddit for nearly a decade, but sometimes I wanted to make a throwaway for a specific, non-trolling purpose but was unable to do anything because of stupid, worthless karma.
For the karma whores out there, if you want a karma system so bad, go back to reddit where you belong. - Ex-Karma whore
I mean, upvotes are counted and tracked so how is that different than karma?
On reddit, if your karma is too low you’re not allowed to participate in most communities.
I mean, it’s a super low bar.
If i was, say interested in r/choosingbeggers, id annoy the crap out of any small ungated sub with “I agree” till I get my 100 karma.
Update: i don’t remember writing this
There’s currently nothing stopping a mod from creating a bot to do the same. Maybe it’s already a thing.
Shhh let them just enjoy it for now
You don’t have a score.
I guess it depends on what interface you’re using.
Karma system was a horrible feature on reddit.
Also losing the ratio on comments/posts, now that I would like to see on here.
This is why I keep asking for downvotes sometimes, just to rig the system. I even downvoted myself.
By the way, can you help me shame myself?
Saying what you mean can be impossible when every sub demands “respect” or “civility” instead of honesty, accuracy, and appropriate behavior.
Sometimes telling someone to go fuck themselves is entirely appropriate.
Sometimes explaining to someone why they’re being a moron is entirely appropriate.
Yes, you can navigate those situations with G-rated kum-by-yah language, and you can eat yogurt with a fork. But demanding anyone do that is aggravating fucking nonsense.
Intense moderation can create a forum where there’s never reason to poke someone over what an asshole they’re being - but that’s not what anyone’s doing, here. They’re mostly protecting trolls, by refusing to comprehend what trolling is. It’s not when you say dumb shit you don’t mean and people get mad at you, like some playground argument with one smirking child in a shouting match about the make-believe. It’s people spreading disinformation with textbook fallacy. It’s emotional abuse with “do you still beat your wife?” level manipulation. It’s not deep. It’s neither hard to spot nor hard to call out.
But what’s currently forbidden is calling it out.
Insisting people take it in good faith is failure. That’s exactly what trolls demand. It is the only way trolling accomplishes anything, ever. If they just said dumb shit nobody believed, there’d be no problem. But the appearance of a sane argument, and the trappings of “debate” around their infuriating horseshit lies, create false legitimacy. It helps abusive dishonesty spread. It is actively ensuring that whatever “free marketplace of ideas” is supposed to filter out total garbage, can’t.
And anyone who falls for them going ‘punishing me would only make me stronger!’ is incapable of dealing with a smirking child. They’re just fucking lying. It’s not deep, or hard to spot. Call their bluff and see what happens. The answer will apparently blow your mind.
I just fucking say it and tbh, I ended net positive most the time. Wasn’t even a concern of mine but I can see how it might have influenced others.
Easiest way to collect negative downvotes is originality or making fun of what passes for German humor.
Easily the communities I spent the least amount of time with.
Same but net neg on most of my comments.
Yeah, I tell those communities to pound sand and leave.
But isn’t there a karma system? At least I’m seeing points on posts and comments and that’s what karma is/was on Reddit right?
