I like the current system, you upvote/downvote posts and comments and that should be enough. No points attached to a user only to what they post.

Definitely no. In addition to the downsides you mentioned, I feel like the redditor’s desire for karma is what causes these hiveminds/echo chambers and cliché comments that are so typical of many subreddits.

Edit: Thank you so much for the gold kind stranger!

I am personally indifferent. Never really cared on all my accounts on Reddit.

Absolutely NO. Karma farmers were always annoying af, and it also makes people mean and annoyingly circle jerky about stuff.

Id say no. Karma leads to gamification and gamification leads to enshittification.

I’d rather have lower traffic and higher quality. Karma is of real benefit only to commercial owners, not users.

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I don’t think karma was ever particularly useful on Reddit. You can’t really differentiate between someone with a lot of karma from a whole lot of low-effort posts and someone who has made fewer but higher-quality contributions just from karma scores. For that you really need to look through their comment and post histories

I like numbers and statistics so I’d be interested in seeing them here, but it’s just a curiosity and not in any particular way actually useful.

I had an 8 year old account on reddit (deleted today) and had accumulated a decent amount of karma. that being said I didn’t even notice there wasn’t any karma here. the voting system is nice to see which comments are popular but there’s no need for it sitewide.

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.

Personally, I like that the individual posts and comments have up/down votes. That allows the community to self moderate to some extent. That lightens the load on moderators to police bad content, while simultaneously promoting good content. It also means that the community rules do not need to be so heavy handed as to suppress dialog - take /r/conservative as an example.

But I do not believe that those votes should carry over to any kind of metric that affects users or communities in other ways. Perhaps a hidden metric available for moderators is useful for identifying problematic posters. But any kind of publicly visible metrics turn into some obnoxious internet point scoring game that invites shitposters and spammers and bot farmers.

No thank you.

I think it’s good for dealing with communities that don’t want newly created users to interact, or even limit the appearance of how much karma you can do X thing.

I Gota downvote this idea. Karma was my least favorite part about Reddit

Upvotes and downvotes are nice in that they suggest that I’m not posting or commenting into the void.

I’m not overly interested in my grand total.

I don’t think it would serve any purpose