Fake internet points. Karma. Whatever you call it… does Lemmy have the equivalent? There is an undeniable motivator in trying to earn more karma as a badge of honor.
Other things like badges to “earn”, and you have a silly but valid social award system for pushing people to contribute content.
Any form of "Karma" is going to be a net negative, reddit showed that just fine.
It was supposed to be a positive thing. Being as it's calculated through up/downvotes, and up/downvotes being meant as a representation of how relevant someone's post/comment is, the user's Karma would be an indication of how relevant their content and additions to the discussions are.
Of course, back in the real world, everyone just went and used karma to say if they liked/disliked a thing, so rather than Karma being a metric of relevance/helpfulness, it was more often than not a metric of how many useless fucking memes were posted.
People engage easier with rapid-consumption content like memes/images, or quick quips, etc. They don't have to take time to actually read reasoned discussion, and so someone focussing on the low-quality, low-effort crap will always end up winning when it comes to Karma, vs someone who takes out the time to actually add something of value.
Karma is the reason why huge swaths of reddit are full of low-effort garbage, and it needs to die as an idea.
It was a well intentioned idea that didn't work. Best not to repeat it again here imho.
The drawbacks outweigh any advantages. 'Karma' becomes the status symbol, leading to wisecracks, puns, and irrelevancies instead of intelligent dialogue.
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