2w ago

Should Lemmy support karma and account age requirements for posting in communities?

On Reddit, many subreddits have configurable requirements like minimum account age and karma before users are allowed to post or comment.

If a user doesn’t meet the criteria, they receive an automatic message like:

Your post/comment has been removed as your account does not meet the karma and/or age requirements of this sub.

Your account must be older than _____ days and have more than ________ combined karma to post here.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically.

Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

Do you think Lemmy should consider adding similar options for community moderators — such as requiring a minimum amount of local or federated karma, and/or minimum account age — before a user can post or comment in a community?

Would this help reduce spam or low-effort posts, or would it go against the spirit of open discussion that Lemmy encourages?

17 comments

Why do people want to turn Lemmy into Reddit so badly?
- I don't blame them, they come from Reddit and expect the exact same. To them it looks like a feature is missing - when in reality it was deliberately chosen
  OP don't take the downvotes personally, it's just that the question has been asked many times before
  
  If he expect to be exactly the same as reddit thrn he should be fine with mass downvotes
- Well Reddit used to not suck and not all their ideas are bad.
Should Lemmy support karma requirements
No, absolutely not, they can fuck right off. I hate that shit on reddit and I'll completely stop posting to any community/instance that implements it on the fediverse. It's completely disheartening to new users for them to find out that they can only interact after they've made posts elsewhere. Then they go there and those people have that too.
- Not only that, it's a meaningless requirement. There's subs on Reddit that exist solely to farm karma. You make a post, everyone upvotes it, done.
  
  Plus it's double-extra meaningless on Lemmy, where you can run your own instance and give yourself whatever karma count/account date you want.
I think account age would be more useful than karma. Karma is just a game-able system, but I could see a very short age requirement being useful eventually if a lot of spam starts to happen. I don't think we're there yet, though.
- That one seems easy enough to game where you just make a bunch of accounts one day and then after the short time you spam. Requiring something like 10 comments to be upvoted before you make a post is a bit harder to do as you need to make all the accounts and interact with random communities, like sure it’s still bottable but at least it slows down spam bots
  
  Maybe I'm wrong, but I would imagine tons of bot accounts being spun up just to wait for a bit would also be suspicious, right? But in that case they could be pruned before they did anything. I'm not a moderator, so don't take anything I say as fact.
Lemmy had Karma but got rid of it because it’s so gameable that its only uses are bad.
I say no. Not needed.
No
Technically this can already be implemented with Lemmy plugins.
However implementing account age could be circumvented later on since instance owners can edit account age from the instance database. Not an issue for now, but will be an issue later.
Federated karma in the way Reddit implements it can be abused in Lemmy by multiple instances sending each other's accounts automated like responses. You're going to need a different metric at the very least.
- Sounds like we need instance level karma where instances can upvote/downvote other instances, and user karma is scaled based on that number. I don't know if it'll be healthy, but it does sound like fun, especially if users get a say in the instance's vote.
No.

17 comments