this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
651 points (95.4% liked)
General Discussion
12041 readers
3 users here now
Welcome to Lemmy.World General!
This is a community for general discussion where you can get your bearings in the fediverse. Discuss topics & ask questions that don't seem to fit in any other community, or don't have an active community yet.
🪆 About Lemmy World
🧭 Finding Communities
Feel free to ask here or over in: [email protected]!
Also keep an eye on:
For more involved tools to find communities to join: check out Lemmyverse!
💬 Additional Discussion Focused Communities:
- [email protected] - Note this is for more serious discussions.
- [email protected] - The opposite of the above, for more laidback chat!
- [email protected] - Into video games? Here's a place to discuss them!
- [email protected] - Watched a movie and wanna talk to others about it? Here's a place to do so!
- [email protected] - Want to talk politics apart from political news? Here's a community for that!
Rules
Remember, Lemmy World rules also apply here.
0. See: Rules for Users.
- No bigotry: including racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia.
- Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here.
- Be thoughtful and helpful: even with ‘silly’ questions. The world won’t be made better by dismissive comments to others on Lemmy.
- Link posts should include some context/opinion in the body text when the title is unaltered, or be titled to encourage discussion.
- Posts concerning other instances' activity/decisions are better suited to [email protected] or [email protected] communities.
- No Ads/Spamming.
- No NSFW content.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Maybe I'm missing something, but what was Karma more than upvotes minus downvotes?
The votes were not equal to karma. Karma wasn't just subtracting downvotes from upvotes. They made a function that not every up- and downvote changed karma. It was a weird mathematical function. Karma was also used to limit you from posting on some subreddits. That's the reason why I heavily dislike karma.
Karma was originally visible raw upvote / downvote tally. Reddit just obscured the upvote and downvote numbers to discourage manipulation for karma.
Limiting participation based on karma didn’t happen for a long time. By the time some huge subreddits took that step, it (or some other gatekeeping) was necessary to filter a lot of malicious users.
Kiiinda… You were limited on the amount of karma a single post or comment could raise or lower your accounts score. It’s not a complex algorithm by any means, just slightly convoluted.
It prevent things like mass-downvoting from counting much towards karma AFAIK, but that's more/less the idea of karma. The exact way it was calculated had nothing to do with people trying to game it. Minimums to post in communities did mean spamming elsewhere just to be able to post where you wanted though and the economic worth of "trustworthy accounts" made karma a karma an issue. Upvotes - downvotes still functions for the latter purpose. If people decide the fediverse is worth scamming, then farming will be a thing. Right now, its a fairly small niche space with an average user who is more internet-savvy than most mainstream social media users, so its probably not worth the effort of trying to scam here yet...