On every lemmy app/instance I’ve checked, it seems that the post and comment scores on users’ profiles have been replaced by post and comment counts.
I often look at scores to quickly check a person’s credibility/involvement, and the count is much less helpful than the score in that regard. I could see this data maybe being removed because it was too server intensive to calculate, but maybe there’s some other reason.
I’ve searched and can’t seem to find any explanation for this change in release notes, but maybe I’m just not searching correctly. Does anyone know why this change was made?
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3393#issuecomment-1779400639
Public karma counts and karma farming are one of the things we really don’t want to replicate from reddit, there was a discussion about it for lemmy-ui, and it was decided to stop showing them because of how psychologically harmful it is.
We should’ve removed these a long time ago from the API. As a substitute, you can show the post_count and comment_count instead of those scores.
Damn, linked right to the dev’s comments on git. Thanks you so much for that.
I love how they point out the psychological effects that karma has on people. It gamifies the process, but it also makes people compare themselves with others to a degree that’s simply toxic. It’s forced competition for the sake of content farming, we’re people not livestock.
Good
Have there been studies proving that the karma score on reddit is psychologically harmful? Or do they just believe that because they believe that?
Who is karma farming psychologically harmful to? It seems like aligned incentives to me. The vote totals are a representation of satisfied users.
God forbid Lemmy have more content. We’re definitely drowning in engagement here.
I think that refers to using gamification to make the users spend more time on your platform. It kinda exploits the way our mind works. We have one eye on that score and want to see it go up. And if someone has a high score they are respectable in a certain way.
What you say is correct, but there is another school of thinking that things should be more a level playing field. And the incentive should be solely you have something interesting to say. And not you want a reward for that.