I was actually about to make a post about this, addressing this issue, but more glad this is already up.

I'm not a fan of any karma system, regardless of platform. People really tie themselves to reactions, likes, upvotes, downvotes .etc to where it cripples them. Nothing they say or do becomes authentic and natural anymore. They say or do things for the specific purpose to get something to validate what they're saying or doing.

And it creates this frustrating system where we end up having to deal with farmers. Reddit is ingrained with it, because we've seen it one too many times. People reposting junk, they get thousands of upvotes and they aren't held accountable for it. We've also seen people perform downvote brigades, hence coining the term 'downvoted to oblivion'. Where, people proactively downvote every post and comment someone has made because of some spite and out of emotion in regards to an opinion that was said.

And they know the effects of these things, because we tie ourselves way too much into it. I'd like to not see scoring or karma systems everywhere. They do nothing but encourage the worst out of anyone to exploit them. They're meaningless, it's just an internet toy that people play with when so many platforms try so hard to describe their importance. But in the end, it's just a stupid internet toy that serves NO purpose.

Say "No!" to the karma ho.

I agree. The less flair, the better, imo. Ideally, I would like it to stay as it is now, where your username and avatar are the only reputational markers, and upvotes and downvotes are only officially tracked on a per post basis. If you want to increase your reputation, then put out quality posts that make people remember your username.

Any other additional flair/reputation trackers besides that incentivise low effort posts. Those posts are entertaining, don't get me wrong, but it would be nice to see how lemmy evolves without directly incentivising them.

Edit: wording

Karma sucks, i nuked my reddit accounts every 6 months to stop myself getting hooked on it

Agreed

I don’t know why we have Karma system, people can just buy an account if they’re banned or such. The system that Digg had was never build to locked people out, it was to make things popular.

I like karma - gamification is fun, humans like watching number go up

I think the answer is to localize it. Maybe community/server based, maybe make it bleed off with time, maybe do all of these and use statistics to come up with a way to make the metric useful somehow

What we don't need is karma done badly, and there's a lot of far more important things to worry about first - I think we should put it way on the back burner and wait for an elegant proposal for how to handle it

I've mentioned it in a another post but I don't want any visible points at all. I think the counts for upvotes, downvotes, etc should all be hidden.

Can someone explain how Jerboa up/downvotes aren't karma? I don't quite understand how karma isn't already a thing here.

The Reddthat instance that I'm on also has disabled down voting which I'm also all for. On Reddit, down voting very often became a tool for vocalizing what you disagreed with rather than a low effort or inappropriate post.