Seeing a lot of upvotes on a post or comment feels nice, seeing that mass social approval of whatever my contribution was. But I also never had any interest in engaging in low-effort posts to get that same reward. I also think the Lemmy hivemind disapproves of low-effort posts like that so such behavior would not be rewarded.

I do wonder what motivated people who made low-effort posts for karma, and why I don’t seem to see it here even though we share an upvote/downvote system. Identifying that might help us at least figure out what not to do so that we do not set up a system that encourages that behavior. We do still clearly have the ability to see upvotes on posts and comments.

It is also possible I’m seeing low-effort posts but they are not rewarded as heavily and I mentally dismiss it as “just someone trying to get any activity going on the Fediverse at all.” I sometimes just post a link and let it be because it’s relevant to the community, I thought it was cool, and I’d like to see some Fediverse activity there but don’t really have anything original to say. It’s possible the low-effort posts are not rewarded not because the Lemmy hivemind disapproves of low effort but because they just don’t see it in the tiny little community I posted in that receives maybe an average of 3 upvotes per post.

For what it’s worth, I’m not using “Lemmy hivemind” in a derogatory fashion here, I just mean it as “the general sentiment of most Lemmy users”.

Karma? The system that encouraged people to make the most milquetoast posts to appeal as many users as possible? Karma farming heavily reduced quality on reddit.

No thank you. We need some sort of encouragement but karma is not it.

Currency is not inspiration.

I’d rather have cooperation instead of competition as primary incentive: “If I post quality content, others might want to post quality content as well”

Maybe try to get used to how lemmy is instead of immediately trying to change it into a carbon copy of reddit.

I prefer being able to separately see the number of down votes.

Also your redditisms are a great reminder of how people here talk normally instead of exclusively in quips

Karma is not a good system.

I do agree however that additional features to encourage posting and engagement would be good for Lemmy.

Jfc, no.

Karma was part of the problem with reddit, we don’t need or want it here

I like contributing to a community and see it climb the ladder https://lemmyverse.net/communities?order=active

The Alexandrite front end for Lemmy has a feature called “Vibe Check” that shows a user’s positive or negative score in each community they post within. It is a nice check for spotting trolls quickly, or even if a person “trolls” in one community but not others. If you scroll down their profile past around the first ~30 comments/posts (Alexandrite is infinite scrolling), it will score the vibe check on however many comments/posts are loaded which is usually 100 loaded when past this ~30 mark.

IDK, if you want to post, you post. I don’t feel that encouragement is really needed.

I don’t miss karma being a thing (and people focusing on growing it by pleasing as many as possible, instead of focusing on content) but I’m also past the age of getting good/bad grades for doing my homework or for participating in class ;)

I’m pretty sure introducing karma will boost low effort reddit-like posts. And those don’t need any encouragement, imho.

Some instances disable downvotes. This is an important thing to consider for anything related to post/comment scores.

Edit: I also fear that a karma system would encourage just sticking with the overall Lemmy, instance or community mainstream, more than it is now already the case with up/downvotes and how they affect the sorting of posts/comments.

We don’t need those. Sharing what you like is enough :)

I currently miss a point system to motivate me that shows people via my profile how much I could help by posting/commenting.

Wut?

Are you expecting, like, a bidding war or something?