I’m not sure if this has been asked yet, but what are your thoughts on the profile page displaying the total number of post and comment upvotes (separately)?

All opinions are welcome. I just want to hear perspectives, I don’t particularly advocate for either way.

  • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
    12·
    3 years ago

    We used to have this, but got asked to remove it because it could lead to karma farming. Its still in the API / DB, but not displayed anywhere.

    • DPUGT@lemmy.ml
      2·
      3 years ago

      Is hiding it going to be enough to avoid karma farming? Back on Slashdot in the late 1990s (early 2000s? it’s been so long I couldn’t put an exact date on it), there were stupid games about the uid… and it was immutable and mostly hidden. There was a period of at least 8 months where it came up in every thread. Or hell, the shit that happened on kuro5hin and Digg… to only use reddit as an example of how this stuff can be screwed up is inviting the “those who don’t know history are doomed to re-implement it” cliche.

      Even when I try to justify voting as a concept, I fail to come up with any decent arguments. And it’s not for any lack of trying… I don’t know what it’s supposed to accomplish except groupthink. If it’s about letting users find something they like better, that seems a valid motivation, but the psychology of online voting seems at odds with the implementation.

      On reddit, I’ve had people come in and downvote storm technical articles on a specialty subreddit. Nothing controversial, nothing offensive. Those vote counts would be a bad metric to decide what I like, and they would have been a bad metric for the people doing the downvoting (they’d never see anything like it on the front page without subscribing, and would never see anything in my subreddit because they downvoted everything). Comment voting is often similar (or, perhaps, becomes similar when anything grows to the scale of reddit). Such shenanigans are probably happening on other posts, but since they get their first few initial upvotes, they weather the storm without much trouble.

      It’s sort of like usenet-of-old’s killfiles, except other random anonymous strangers are writing the killfiles for everyone and succeeding or failing (relatively) based on how clever they are in gaming all of it.