I liked karma per post, for some reason "hey, 100 people agreed with what I said" was giving me warm feelings sometimes. I don't think it's something to be particularly proud of, but still

Who needs Karma?

I mean any UI app can calculate it for you. It already lists all your posts and comments... Just add up the numbers. It doesn't need to be implemented in the Lemmy backend at all.

It's also great to create karma-whores and serial reposters, while discouraging discussion which leads to echo chambers.

Engagement is great, but I prefer quality over quantity.

But what is the goal? Gamification does work if your goal is quantity over quality, which it is for many site owners who want big numbers and to push ads. But for Lemmy, the only goal is for people to have a place to post links, comment, and build communities. People shouldn't post if they don't have something meaningful to contribute.

I'm not necessarily against showing stats for users, but we don't have corporate goals like "engagement".

Reddit's variable algorithm overriding karma and outright up/down votes to determine front page curated display, along side the inability to block the dredges of subs/sub users that had inflated karma from circlejerking to the top, were by far the more potent problems, not the karma system itself.

I cringed hard whenever I saw someone with 300k+ karma or whatever.

Like, you’re obviously just posting shit to get upvotes, it’s hard to even see an account like that as a real person and not just some upvote farming machine