RIght now lemmy doesn’t calculate or display a user’s “karma”. And many think this a good thing (me included).

Interestingly, kbin does calculate karma, even for us lemmy users (you can all probably just search on kbin.social and find your karma now, +/- federation inconsistencies).

Whenever karma comes up, this fact often comes up, along with the identification of up/down voters, such that many lemmy users will probably know that they actually do have karma and can go look it up if they want to. Some lemmy apps/frontends are also reporting karma AFAIU.

So I think the question now presents itself of whether this is an issue we want users to have some control over, within the bounds of what can done over federation/AP of course.

I can imagine a system where karma is an opt-in setting of one’s profile, and a protocol is established that any platform/client that understands up/down votes ought to respect this setting and that non-compliance risks defederation.

Though lemmy/kbin obviously lean more “public internet resource” than microblogging platforms like mastodon, I think it makes sense to value user health and safety here, and this seems like a not unreasonable option to establish a norm around.

Thoughts?

  • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    Thanks!

    The contours of this sort of issue on the fediverse often get mistaken, unfortunately. It is very much a “don’t let perfect be the enemy of good” space, where establishing standards and acting to enforce those standards is the MO and relying on tech to provide guarantees without any need of human intervention being very much not the proposed solution.

    The actions that people, IE us, can take are establishing norms through dialogue, allowing users to express their own desires, and allowing the federation system to do what it can to find the equilibrium between users’ desires and the amount of connectivity people want.

    It can be messy and boring, but that’s what good community management comes down to in the end … people sorting stuff out.

    In this particular case, the proposal isn’t to completely prevent a federated instance or a client from doing the calculation and presenting the information, but to get buy-in on the idea that we can “have nice things” without disrespecting people’s needs, and then use our right of association (ie federation) to enforce what we care about.