I don’t think we need it.

You can already see which posts are up/down voted. You can already check a user accounts age and post history.

I don’t need more than that.

Lemmy actually already has something called “reputation”. You have -3 sorry.

It leads to garbage tier repost trash.

No internet points, please!

No. I’d rather no up voting/downvoting on comments at all. It discourages discussion.

Nah, karma isn’t important. If we want an indicator of reputation I’d lean more towards a flair that the community can award.

No.

But if it did I’d prefer if it was divided into categories of some kind. Like, people often downvote content when they disagree, even if the content itself is good quality, or they might be posting legitimately funny/topical meme/jokes in a community where joking is discouraged.

It might be interesting to have a few options for votes, like agree/disagree, high-quality/low-quality, appropriate-forum/inappropriate-forum, or something to that effect.

So I could vote a post that is well-written and on-topic but that I disagree with as disagree, high-quality, appropriate. Or I could vote a joke reply that is on-topic and funny, but in a serious-only community as no-vote, high-quality, inappropriate.

Honestly, that would probably be a disaster in practice, but it might at least be a fun disaster!

In any case, I agree with others who suggest that vote tallies should be attached to posts, not users, at least publicly. There might be some utility to allowing mods or admins to see tallies for users.

Oh, and it seems to me that whatever system is used Lemmy-wide should provide some freedom for instances to handle user/post karma in the ways that they prefer and in a way that works well with federation. Like if my ‘FunDisasterLemmy’ instance allows voting like the above, when that data is federated if it isn’t relevant to another instance it should be handled gracefully.

It might even make sense to let communities have customizable voting. For example, a ‘ChangeMyMind’ community could have a ‘Did Change My Mind’ and ‘Did Not Change My Mind’ vote option (vs the practice in the Reddit sub of replying with a frustratingly-difficult-to-type character), or YTA, NTA, EAA, etc. (though in that case I suppose that’s more of a poll option)

Hard no on karma.

No, it’s not necessary. Who cares who contributes a lot? If a user cares about karma, then they should just stay at Reddit. We don’t need this to be a Reddit clone.

How would it track positive contributions by a user? You can do that by seeing their comments and the individual upvote/downvote.

Karma is just going to ruin this place.

Karma made Reddit toxic and limited the amount of conversing people did on the site. Here we can have conversations without worrying about down votes and Karma.

No. Karma leads to all sorts of dumb behavior like reposting the same 5 videos every day, bots farming karma, hivemind because people are afraid to be downvoted into the negative, etc… I’ve actually been thinking about creating a Reddit alternative that doesn’t have voting at all, or at least not visible voting.

I actually liked karma points. But I can live without it. It’s not that important.

kbin has karma. i actually really like that i don’t see my karma here. on reddit i became too focused on it, and so wasn’t my True self.

Yes, because it can be an indicator of reputation of someone.

No, because of the ease of getting it, as well as it can be a basis of someone’s ego.

Actually, any number that is attached to person has the same set of pros and cons, except of the ease, persumably. This includes SO’s rep system, Reddit’s karma system, YouTube subscriber/view/video count, Twitter followers/post count, etc. Adding karma system to Lemmy may have its side effects, but even there isn’t one, it may not matter since Lemmy has post and comments counts.

EDIT: In the end, when I’m reading Reddit or Lemmy, I gave no attention to the karma, and instead the vote count of the post/comment itself. Call me ignorant, but whatevs.