On every lemmy app/instance I’ve checked, it seems that the post and comment scores on users’ profiles have been replaced by post and comment counts.

I often look at scores to quickly check a person’s credibility/involvement, and the count is much less helpful than the score in that regard. I could see this data maybe being removed because it was too server intensive to calculate, but maybe there’s some other reason.

I’ve searched and can’t seem to find any explanation for this change in release notes, but maybe I’m just not searching correctly. Does anyone know why this change was made?

  • jet@hackertalks.com
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    11 months ago

    https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3393#issuecomment-1779400639

    Public karma counts and karma farming are one of the things we really don’t want to replicate from reddit, there was a discussion about it for lemmy-ui, and it was decided to stop showing them because of how psychologically harmful it is.

    We should’ve removed these a long time ago from the API. As a substitute, you can show the post_count and comment_count instead of those scores.

    • eric@lemmy.worldOP
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      11 months ago

      Damn, linked right to the dev’s comments on git. Thanks you so much for that.

    • Dandroid@dandroid.app
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      11 months ago

      Have there been studies proving that the karma score on reddit is psychologically harmful? Or do they just believe that because they believe that?

    • sosodev@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Who is karma farming psychologically harmful to? It seems like aligned incentives to me. The vote totals are a representation of satisfied users.

      God forbid Lemmy have more content. We’re definitely drowning in engagement here.

      • rufus@discuss.tchncs.de
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        11 months ago

        I think that refers to using gamification to make the users spend more time on your platform. It kinda exploits the way our mind works. We have one eye on that score and want to see it go up. And if someone has a high score they are respectable in a certain way.

        What you say is correct, but there is another school of thinking that things should be more a level playing field. And the incentive should be solely you have something interesting to say. And not you want a reward for that.

  • 👁️👄👁️@lemm.ee
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    11 months ago

    Score is about how you match the hivemind opinion, it has nothing to do with credibility. Be free, say your controversial dumb shit that you know people will disagree with and challenge them to a duel to the death.

    • astraeus@programming.dev
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      11 months ago

      95% of history is probably written to suit the people currently writing or funding the history books, and that’s totally not a statistic I just made up.

    • Send_me_nude_girls@feddit.de
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      11 months ago

      Connect app thankfully shows me a score and individual comment vote counts. I want to see if a comment has a lot of people disagreeing, even if it’s overall score is positive. It’s an important indicator to fight missinformation.

  • GodlessCommie@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Credibility isn’t measured in points. People that go against the status quo will often have lower scores.

  • Yote.zip@pawb.social
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    11 months ago

    There has never been an official “global score” for users. If you ever saw one it was being calculated by your app/front-end.

    Edit: per jet’s reply it looks like it actually was historically in the API but not exposed on most apps, so calculation was done by the instance and not the app/front-end. It seems like they’re being removed entirely from the API soon or already have been.

  • Yawnder@lemmy.zip
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    11 months ago

    Or you could just check what that person just said now and there and judge them based on that?

    Like right now I’m judging you about being shallow that’s easily influenced by group mentality and that is craving for social validation.

    You might be the most chilled person, or have the best value system in the world. Our more or less unique and single interactions will have been this post, so why should I care about the others?