Not sure if this is a showerthought, but it popped into my head randomly due to anothe member’s comment that “karma farming isn’t a thing here.” It kinda is…just not as blatant and open as Reddit. If the instances grow in size and number it could become a real thing, we’d have the same issues as Reddit with huge numbers of bots, shills, and karma whoring users.
What if every year we zero out Lemmy points but replace them with a [insert thing here: colored bars?] that maybe qualitatively show positive post and comment levels and sort of show “years of service”?
Get rid of the incentive for points accumulation, but denote consistent positive contribution?
Edit: or leave the comment/post points as the are, but make them only tally a rolling 365 day count and participation in the last 30/60/90 or similar. Continued participation would be obvious, but no substantial amount could ever be collected.
If the points aren’t worth anything, then why would it matter if they change or go away?
E2: welp. People think it isn’t a problem, and they say it will not be. Can’t argue with a position that demands Lemmy/fediverse remain static in its present form. Discussion closed, I guess.
There’s nowhere where Lemmy shows a total karma for a user, is there? You can see their post/comment history how much each post/comment is upvoted/downvoted, but not any “total” karma score, right? (At least not without going through all of a user’s posts/comments and manually adding up the score. Or am I missing something obvious somewhere?)
So, what points are you proposing we “zero out?”
I doubt I’d be for any change like that no matter your answer, but wanted clarification anyway. Honestly I feel like what we’ve got here is pretty great and I’m not really interested in a lot of changes to what we have here myself.
Sure, you don’t get a total of upvotes the way that other site does, but like you said, you do get points for participation.
To some people those “points” matter. Same as karma.
And why would you be against such a change? Not trying to be argumentative, but if the points don’t matter, why would it matter then if they go away or are replaced with a yearly form “well done” symbol?