Fediverse

It's surprising how much just keeping track can mess with behavior, eh?

It’s the main reason why Reddit was a giant circle jerk. I like here that you can upvote and downvote things but it’s not connected to your account at all. Just connected to the comment or post, as it should be.

My problem is that I'm not a poster.

I just don't think of things and then think "oh, I should share this with the world". If I have a question, I tend to enjoy the process of finding the answer unless it's game related, so thinking of crowd sourcing an answer rarely occurs to me.

But! While I'm less likely to run across things on lemmy that trigger my gush button because my interests are niche-ish, I tend to be willing to put in effort into such things.

Same with things that trigger my curiosity; if I don't have info that's useful, and I want that info, chances are I'll come back and share what I find and put effort into it.

Lemmy hasn't caught up with the population sizes of my niche interests enough for my old drive to help or discover to get triggered often though. It will, I'm sure, but it'll take time now that a solid user base has formed that will spread awareness of the platform organically.

Lemmy has gotten rid of that point system so now I feel like I can feel free to ask as many questions as I need without having to balance my karma.

Oh we can totally still see that:

If anything it's even weirder because I can only see your karma from the perspective of the communities we have in common. So even if you do comment a lot on some other community I'm not part of, you're very post/question heavy from my perspective.

That aside, think of it this way: nobody can comment if there's nothing to comment on, and nobody's gonna ask questions or post things if there's nobody to answer them. Even lurkers that just vote are important for this kind of ecosystem.

I'm just not a big poster, I rarely have questions, I rarely get so wow'd at content that I want to share it with other people. Well I wouldn't have any content to look at if it wasn't for all those people that actual post things, and I wouldn't have questions to answer or comments to share if there wasn't anyone to post content.

The number exists, and it doesn't matter.

Did it even really matter on Reddit? I've always thought that post karma was a lot more powerful and much easier to get than comment karma. One good post on Reddit and your post karma explodes, that's much rarer on comments, you just need lots of comments with like 5 upvotes each to very slowly build up that karma.

Mine for comparison:

Boy am I sparking some interesting conversations on there huh

Asking questions is valuable to an online community though. People need to ask questions so that others can answer, and plenty of them (often myself included) won't post questions they have and will just search around hoping someone else already did.

In your own personal opinion, what's the motivation for keeping an eye on karma? How would the experience change if you didn't have the possibility of racking up points/karma at all?

As you can see in the docs there is comment_score and post_score attached to every user. But you can always decide to not care about it, and I strongly recommend that

This is tracked btw its just that your instance of Lemmy is deciding not to display it. You have 1512 reputation.

I had hundreds of thousands of karma on Reddit. I keep forgetting that’s here too. I stopped caring a while ago anyhow.