On Reddit, you had the "fake internet points". On Lemmy the points are totally real, but still worthless.

Corroded

I'm pretty sure you can do that on individual subreddits as well. Do you mean on an instance wide level?

Corroded

I don't think it is in Tesseract or Alexandrite but I feel like I vaguely recall Jerboa, the mobile app, having it.

slazer2au

Admins have the option to disable it on a per instance basis.

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That just blew my mind, I didn't even realize that was a setting.

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Yeah it exists in the metadata, so certain front ends can display it and other platforms like Mbin and PieFed show it as a reputation score or something like that.

I think the way that Lemmy handles it is perfect, there's no reason to display the cumulative score and it definitely acts as a barrier to free and open discussion because people start censoring themselves and judging other users by their profile rather than the things they actually say.

madjo

I've been able to exchange some of my points in the Lemmy Store for a rub on tattoo.

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I'm not following you. I see your previous comment was in a thread about video game bosses though?

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rub on

( ͡ᵔ ͜ʖ ͡ᵔ )

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You have a point.

.Donuts

And we should keep it that way. As soon as you can derive value from your profile karma and/or it means something, it'll break any sense of earnest discussion some are trying to have in the first place.

Look at Reddit: any serious thread is peppered with might-be-funny one-liners in the hopes of catching some upvotes. This makes those threads harder to read through, although it does make for funny AI summary results.

It's not just off topic banter to increase karma though. It's also reposting old memes, jokes and stories that did well in the past to farm that sweet karma. Throw in some copied top-level comments too and some subreddits are basically perpetually living in a déjà vu.

Let's not try to aim for that.

.Donuts

Now this is democracy

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It’s ok, it was a bad and unrelated joke.

I was just suggesting that the Lemmy system was better than the Reddit system, but that there might be a better system than this.

StudSpud The Starchy

If we don't have fake internet points, then how will we know what to think? Won't somebody think of the points‽

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Lol that's an interesting thought. I wonder what it would be like if instead of simply giving upvotes and downvotes, you could rate every comment/post on a scale of 1-10 or something. It probably wouldn't work at all, but maybe there is some kind of system out there that would work better in the future.

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Ooh, so they can also be invisible internet points.

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Somewhere in these comments someone has said that it’s used to discriminate …ie “this account doesn’t have a very high karma” or not being allowed to comment in a sub cause you don’t a high enough karma.

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Haven’t been able to pay my bills with fake or real internet points yet. I can give you something equally worthless in return though. How about an AI drawing of a capybara?

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You have many.

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They're really not meaningless though. For one thing, they allow moderators and admins to more easily detect trolls and bad faith actors. And on platforms or with add-ons that allow better tracking of vote history, it allows the user to more efficiently moderate their own experience, should they so choose.

Also, I think you've got to be kind of an asshole to not recognise that a little bit of validation from communities that you participate in is a nice thing to have and that downvotes can hurt to an extent, even if it's not the same as getting physically slapped. And to be clear, I'm not pointing at you or anyone, I'm just riffing here. I haven't even seen downvotes for a while now.

So yeah, I'd say they're meaningless in a video game sense. You're not going to win any prizes with them. But there's a reason they exist, plus no one is immune to the effects of positive or negative reinforcement.

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What happens to the ultra trolls who have a negative total?