Points vs Karma?
Points vs Karma?
Help me understand points on Lemmy. How are they different than karma? And how are they impacted by posts that get spread to other federated services like Mastodon? Thank you!
Points on Lemmy are only for ranking posts and comments. The purpose here is for good posts and comments to stand out from bad posts and comments. Unlike Karma on reddit you do not accumulate an overall point counter on your profile. Which should potentially help reduce people posting and commenting low effort things for the sole purpose of making a number go up.
Good summary! There are however apps that sum up the points of your comments and posts and show them on your profile. This is only accurate for your own profile , as posts of others on other instances are not guaranteed to federate and taken into account.
After years on r/ i still don't understand what karma is.
At low numbers, 100s to 1000s, when combined with account age it's an indicator of interaction and quality of contribution. Higher than that it's meaningless.
They are pointless, just ignore them.
Meaningless? Sure. But you can't say they're pointless!
I don't know if this is the same across all Lemmy instances, but I believe that on Kbin, at least, points are a 1:1 count of your upvotes/downvotes/boosts, with boosts counting as 2 upvotes. So if you make a post that gets 10 upvotes, 5 boosts, and 3 downvotes, you have 17 points on your profile.