No I don’t. It’s just a dumb internet toy and I’m glad Lemmy and the Fediverse treats it like that. It used to annoy the fuck out of me with Reddit, where they tie your account to it. Too low or negative? Good luck posting anywhere or tripping the spam filter bot that thinks you’re an evader so you get banned over it.

People have this idea in their heads that the higher their karma is, the more righteous they are and that they can’t think or say wrong. When, based on experience, a lot of the time that people with high karma counts happen to be from the most insufferable bastard human beings I ever come across.

No. It encourages people to game the system instead of honestly engaging.

In a number-go-up kind of sense, yeah - it’s inherently gamification of social media and it is fun for some of our brains. However, I also think that karma or any other kind of “engagement accumulation” turns social media from a place of discussion into a competition for attention, where you’re more incentivized to post solely for upvotes. Only a small minority takes posting seriously like this I admit it, but it does make the experience worse for everyone.

That’s not to say the mindset doesn’t exist without karma, only that it gets amplified.

Not only do I not miss it, I’m relieved that it’s not here.

Some apps and front ends support showing your post and comment “karma”. Eternity, for example

I feel about the same. I don’t particularly care about it, but it’s nice to know how many I helped. It was intentionally removed, I believe so it doesn’t incentivise karma farms. If karma exists it will be used and there will be reasons to farm it.

Nothing a quick Postgres query can’t fix though :p

No, it just existed to block people from posting.

No.

Nope. I was on reddit for like 14 years and I couldn’t tell you what my karma was because I cared so little about it. I paid a little attention to up votes and that’s about it.

No. I don’t even like visible vote count. I think it hurts us more than it helps.

I get where you’re coming from. You could revisit the contributions you’ve made and the messages and replies you’ve received. The difference is that those ARE meaningful and hopefully in a good way. I think Reddit actively pushes the concept of karma because it’s an great engagement metric and they love that.

My opinion is that Reddit is captured and driven to push engagement for advertising revenue at the expense of meaningful interaction. Lemmy is a platform where that engagement metric is only intrinsic to the individual. People are here because they want to have meaningful conversations? Maybe I’m dreaming

I’m glad it’s not a thing here because as a “positive” incentive I feel like it drives some users to vapid karma farming over actually interesting and new content. That said, I occasionally miss it when there’s some unpleasant commenter douchenozzeling all over a thread and it’s an easy way to see if someone is always an unpleasant ass or if they’re having a bad day and otherwise make valuable contributions to Lemmy.

Never cared about the cumulative, only about the score on individual comments. Still got that, still get the little dopamine hit from looking at it.

nope

I don’t even have a down vote button anymore and I low-key like it.