RIght now lemmy doesn't calculate or display a user's "karma". And many think this a good thing (me included).
Interestingly, kbin does calculate karma, even for us lemmy users (you can all probably just search on kbin.social and find your karma now, +/- federation inconsistencies).
Whenever karma comes up, this fact often comes up, along with the identification of up/down voters, such that many lemmy users will probably know that they actually do have karma and can go look it up if they want to. Some lemmy apps/frontends are also reporting karma AFAIU.
So I think the question now presents itself of whether this is an issue we want users to have some control over, within the bounds of what can done over federation/AP of course.
I can imagine a system where karma is an opt-in setting of one's profile, and a protocol is established that any platform/client that understands up/down votes ought to respect this setting and that non-compliance risks defederation.
Though lemmy/kbin obviously lean more "public internet resource" than microblogging platforms like mastodon, I think it makes sense to value user health and safety here, and this seems like a not unreasonable option to establish a norm around.
Thoughts?
I'm not an expert, so those who know more, please correct me.
FYI: with the script User Details on Hover you can also see karma in Lemmy. Example.
From what I understand, there are technical issues with this. Allowing people to hide the karma if they want is easy. But blocking people for seeing karma even if they want is much harder. Note that if you want karma for posts and comments (to be able to sort the most voted ones), then the user karma is just a very easy query away (just sum the karma of that user's posts and comments). EDIT: I realize that this would not solve the issue either: ~~There are technical ways to do anonymous and auditable voting, but I think that would be too overkill for the fediverse.~~
Thanks!
The contours of this sort of issue on the fediverse often get mistaken, unfortunately. It is very much a "don't let perfect be the enemy of good" space, where establishing standards and acting to enforce those standards is the MO and relying on tech to provide guarantees without any need of human intervention being very much not the proposed solution.
The actions that people, IE us, can take are establishing norms through dialogue, allowing users to express their own desires, and allowing the federation system to do what it can to find the equilibrium between users' desires and the amount of connectivity people want.
It can be messy and boring, but that's what good community management comes down to in the end ... people sorting stuff out.
In this particular case, the proposal isn't to completely prevent a federated instance or a client from doing the calculation and presenting the information, but to get buy-in on the idea that we can "have nice things" without disrespecting people's needs, and then use our right of association (ie federation) to enforce what we care about.
Thanks for posting the userscript. I'm seeing lots of RES type features like this and hoping they'll be rolled into one at some point.
You could create a license that makes it illegal to process information about the users in that way. Obviously, someone is gonna violate it, but all the respectable instances will at least not, since they usually don't operate out of reach of working jurisdictions.
IMHO as a random user is that, given the nature of the fediverse, that makes more sense to be an option for instance admins. I'm personally more inclined to leave that decision to each user, but I see how the network effects play a role and how someone would want to enforce their decission on their own instances.
Anyway, it's an interesting discussion and I like to try to understand the consquences of each implementation.