Another Reddit refugee here,

I think we’re all familiar with the Karma system on Reddit. Do you think Lemmy should have something similar? Because I can see cases for and against it.

For: a way to tracking quality contributions by a user, quantifying reputation. Useful to keep new accounts from spamming communities.

Against: Often not a useful metric, can be botted or otherwise unearned (see u/spez), maybe we should have something else?

What do you all think?

  • itsnotlupus@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    There have been efforts to build reputation systems that don’t rely on central servers, like early day bitcoin’s Web of Trust, which allowed folks to rate other folks with public key crypto, thus ensuring an accurate and fair trust rating for participants, without the possibility of a middle-man putting their thumb on the scale.

    One problem with it is that it was still perfectly practical for bad actors to accumulate good ratings, then cash out their hard-earned reputation into large scams, such as the “Bitcoin Savings & Trust” (for $40 million in that particular case), which quite possibly made it measurably worse than not having a system that induced participants into making faulty judgments in the first place.

    I think the main practical value of something like reddit’s karma is an indication of age and account activity, both of which can probably be measured in other, if less gamified ways.

    • Zak@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      For the use cases I have in mind, it’s not necessary to make gaming the system impossible, only expensive. Manually banning one spam account is easy. Manually banning ten thousand spam accounts is overwhelming.