Another Reddit refugee here,
I think we’re all familiar with the Karma system on Reddit. Do you think Lemmy should have something similar? Because I can see cases for and against it.
For: a way to tracking quality contributions by a user, quantifying reputation. Useful to keep new accounts from spamming communities.
Against: Often not a useful metric, can be botted or otherwise unearned (see u/spez), maybe we should have something else?
What do you all think?
You can easily accumulate karma just by saying what everyone obviously wants you to say. I have 4 Reddit accounts with 6 figure karma and trust me, unless it’s about a topic I am familiar with, what I have to say isn’t any more insightful than some other person who has no or negative karma.
That’s how reddit felt in general, unless you were in some niche or heavy moderated sub to stay on topic. Meaningful comments were mostly buried by jokes.
When I was really young I just started saying what was popular and started accumulating tons of points on OSNews. It was a learning experience: I realized I wasn’t being true to myself and I learned to recognize it and stop.
It’s a useful skill to have, predicting what people wanna hear. There’s a guy who manages the place I play pool. He’s a bit of a dick, enough I don’t wanna spend time in his company, but staying on his good side means my time spent there is more enjoyable. None of our conversations are ever of consequence and they never last more than 15 seconds because he doesn’t like people (he literally wears a hat that says “I hate people” to his job where his responsibility is the management of people). So I just treat him like a dramatic subreddit and say what I think he wants me to say and as a result, he treats me slightly better than the rest of the people there.
I work in science and I am interested in branching into a more scientific communication role because I’m fascinated by the ways that misinformation propagates. Bullshit that’s packaged up and delivered effectively will be received better than good science communicated poorly. The problem is that being a good scientist doesn’t make you a good scientific communicator.
I’ve found online spaces like Reddit and Lemmy to be a fun challenge along these lines — how well can I craft my point to be informative but also appealing to many. How can I tell people what they want to hear while also telling them what they need to hear? Or in other words:
Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down… 🎶
So you’re one of those Reddit ‘comedians’ who post the puns and get upvoted to the top of threads?
Sometimes lol. But like I said it’s more that the karma I do have comes from the following topics: cooking, pool (the game not the hole with water), engineering, and Ted Lasso. If you get me too far away from those topics, or too far out of my specific expertise in engineering, then looking at my karma to gauge my level of authority on the topic would lead you wrong.