On Reddit, my karma was always weighted more on the question side than on the comment side. I felt bad for not being a valuable contributor to people’s lives rather than being selfish and always asking things for myself. Lemmy has gotten rid of that point system so now I feel like I can feel free to ask as many questions as I need without having to balance my karma. Also, I have noticed that I participate so much more on this platform than I ever did on Reddit.

  • w00tabaga@lemm.eeEnglish
    32·
    1 year ago

    It’s the main reason why Reddit was a giant circle jerk. I like here that you can upvote and downvote things but it’s not connected to your account at all. Just connected to the comment or post, as it should be.

  • southsamurai@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    201·
    1 year ago

    My problem is that I’m not a poster.

    I just don’t think of things and then think “oh, I should share this with the world”. If I have a question, I tend to enjoy the process of finding the answer unless it’s game related, so thinking of crowd sourcing an answer rarely occurs to me.

    But! While I’m less likely to run across things on lemmy that trigger my gush button because my interests are niche-ish, I tend to be willing to put in effort into such things.

    Same with things that trigger my curiosity; if I don’t have info that’s useful, and I want that info, chances are I’ll come back and share what I find and put effort into it.

    Lemmy hasn’t caught up with the population sizes of my niche interests enough for my old drive to help or discover to get triggered often though. It will, I’m sure, but it’ll take time now that a solid user base has formed that will spread awareness of the platform organically.

  • Glemek@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    1 year ago

    Asking questions is valuable to an online community though. People need to ask questions so that others can answer, and plenty of them (often myself included) won’t post questions they have and will just search around hoping someone else already did.

    • chronically_crazy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I’ve really enjoyed the questions asked here, and I’ve found the communities feedback to be invaluable.

      And not all of those questions have been asked by me.

  • subnuggurat@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    In your own personal opinion, what’s the motivation for keeping an eye on karma? How would the experience change if you didn’t have the possibility of racking up points/karma at all?

    • Favrion@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      5·
      1 year ago

      My sense of community involvement depended on my karma count. I didn’t want to be perceived as a person consistently asking for answers rather than contributing them. I guess without karma that preoccupation goes away.

      • subnuggurat@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        Thanks for replying. I personally enjoy it more without the personal ranking system. I think it stopped a lot of people from contributing for fear of public (and evident) disapproval while giving some people motivation to flood the site with low quality content just for the points. I still like the up/downvotes though but as a metric for the content, not the user.

      • Zaktor@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        Post karma and comment karma don’t map to questions and answers though. Maybe in some very specific subs posting=questions, but most post karma is posting links and memes.

    • FaceDeer@kbin.social
      2·
      1 year ago

      I only ever found two uses for karma on Reddit.

      There were some subreddits that imposed a limit on commenters requiring them to be above a certain karma threshold before they could comment or post, which most people would probably pass in a matter of weeks. I can see the use of this as a spam prevention mechanism, but it’s a pretty trivial thing if you’re a “real” account that’s sticking around for a while.

      And when I passed 100k karma I applied for membership with the “century club” subreddit out of curiousity to see what was going on in there. Turned out it was pretty boring. Oh well. As far as I’m aware there’s no such thing as a “private” community in the Fediverse so this wouldn’t even be possible here.

      • density@kbin.social
        2·
        1 year ago

        idk it was more karma than I ever had. always toiling away in the comments of less popular subreddits.

        Currently I have 1737 rep points. It says I joined a month ago and you joined 3 weeks ago so I think you are beating me by a bit. I guess your strategy is working! :D

        • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.mlEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          Huh … found myself on kbin and found out I also have reputation points.

          I hate it! But, this is kinda the messiness of the fediverse at play. There are a few design/platform things which can only be guaranteed within the bounds of your instance, where beyond that it is kinda the wild west of the internet unless instance defederation is done.

          • density@kbin.social
            1·
            1 year ago

            if you could figure out where the point “live” maybe it would be possible to reset them to 0 on a periodic basis.

            • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.mlEnglish
              1·
              1 year ago

              Well, the thing about the fediverse is that things don’t live in one place … they’re distributed across the federation. Right now our comments, which are coming from different instances, are being copied over to each other’s instances and live on both instances, as well as every other instance that subscribes to this community.

              Platforms can have agreements about doing certain things like deletion when a request for such a thing is sent out, and then rely on defederating from any platform that contravenes those agreements, which is a method that is both messy, unreliable but surprisingly effective, and also, all we have.

              As for karma, it seems kbin is keen on it and lemmy not so much. Forming some agreement about karma calculations being opt-in might make sense now that both platforms have matured in their user base sizes.

  • starman@programming.devEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    As you can see in the docs there is comment_score and post_score attached to every user. But you can always decide to not care about it, and I strongly recommend that

  • iAmTheTot@kbin.social
    1·
    1 year ago

    This is tracked btw its just that your instance of Lemmy is deciding not to display it. You have 1512 reputation.

  • Crow@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I had hundreds of thousands of karma on Reddit. I keep forgetting that’s here too. I stopped caring a while ago anyhow.