On Reddit, my karma was always weighted more on the question side than on the comment side. I felt bad for not being a valuable contributor to people’s lives rather than being selfish and always asking things for myself. 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. Also, I have noticed that I participate so much more on this platform than I ever did on Reddit.
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?
My sense of community involvement depended on my karma count. I didn’t want to be perceived as a person consistently asking for answers rather than contributing them. I guess without karma that preoccupation goes away.
Thanks for replying. I personally enjoy it more without the personal ranking system. I think it stopped a lot of people from contributing for fear of public (and evident) disapproval while giving some people motivation to flood the site with low quality content just for the points. I still like the up/downvotes though but as a metric for the content, not the user.
Post karma and comment karma don’t map to questions and answers though. Maybe in some very specific subs posting=questions, but most post karma is posting links and memes.
I only ever found two uses for karma on Reddit.
There were some subreddits that imposed a limit on commenters requiring them to be above a certain karma threshold before they could comment or post, which most people would probably pass in a matter of weeks. I can see the use of this as a spam prevention mechanism, but it’s a pretty trivial thing if you’re a “real” account that’s sticking around for a while.
And when I passed 100k karma I applied for membership with the “century club” subreddit out of curiousity to see what was going on in there. Turned out it was pretty boring. Oh well. As far as I’m aware there’s no such thing as a “private” community in the Fediverse so this wouldn’t even be possible here.