On Reddit, my karma was always weighted more on the question side than on the comment side. I felt bad for not being a valuable contributor to people’s lives rather than being selfish and always asking things for myself. Lemmy has gotten rid of that point system so now I feel like I can feel free to ask as many questions as I need without having to balance my karma. Also, I have noticed that I participate so much more on this platform than I ever did on Reddit.
Oh we can totally still see that:
If anything it’s even weirder because I can only see your karma from the perspective of the communities we have in common. So even if you do comment a lot on some other community I’m not part of, you’re very post/question heavy from my perspective.
That aside, think of it this way: nobody can comment if there’s nothing to comment on, and nobody’s gonna ask questions or post things if there’s nobody to answer them. Even lurkers that just vote are important for this kind of ecosystem.
I’m just not a big poster, I rarely have questions, I rarely get so wow’d at content that I want to share it with other people. Well I wouldn’t have any content to look at if it wasn’t for all those people that actual post things, and I wouldn’t have questions to answer or comments to share if there wasn’t anyone to post content.
The number exists, and it doesn’t matter.
Did it even really matter on Reddit? I’ve always thought that post karma was a lot more powerful and much easier to get than comment karma. One good post on Reddit and your post karma explodes, that’s much rarer on comments, you just need lots of comments with like 5 upvotes each to very slowly build up that karma.
Mine for comparison:
Boy am I sparking some interesting conversations on there huh
It’s not similar between apps, either, even with the same account. If you’re on Android, you can use Voyager and Connect and it’ll show you different numbers. Another thing is that it fluctuates. I see my “karma” on Voyager is around 14 points now, whereas I made a
postcomment quite recently where I also checked and I had around 40.So as a karma system, it’s unreliable enough imho that it’s not gonna (or shouldn’t) affect users as much as reddit’s karma system. It’s also another reason why I decided not to switch to kbin.