I understand that lemmy is a great place to be in for discussing our experiences with Android phones, but l find the forums/communities great for discussion purposes. The signup is very simple, just with an email id. Whereas in lemmy, an instance can have several communities, a community based on discourse would be exclusive for that purpose.
Yes it does. You seem to be focusing purely on the account restrictions and hidden comments that mass downvotes incur on reddit. I’m talking much more broadly about how points systems influence behaviour. People subconsciously make decisions about whether to engage and how to engage based on how points have previously been awarded.
Traditional web forums do not automatically sort or rank comments based on some kind of points/voting system. It’s just a chronological feed, where every comment is displayed equally regardless of how agreeable or controversial they were. Points systems encourage groupthink and pile-ons without discussion, in a way that traditional forums never did.
No it doesnt. Karma would mean that those points add up somewhere, they do something other than in a single post.
Also, some instances don’t even show votes at all.
Go back and re-read my comment. Slowly. I am not talking about account karma.
Then you are not talking about Karma at all.
You are talking about what points look like during a discussion as votes (again an instance may not even display them). That isn’t karma at all, its just votes on a single page.
I hear that you are saying they might affect behavior during a single discussion.
The one thing very different I guess is forums do put things in order. In this type of forum you can comment in any part of the chain which is probably more interesting when comparing the two.
I still use traditional forums, hell I admin one. I certainly am not against them.
Yes, that’s what I have repeatedly said…
You are the one who focused in on the word karma. I only used it initially because it does exist elsewhere in the broader context of traditional forums vs the type of social media that has largely replaced them. If you had read anything else I had said then it would have been clear to you that at no point was I suggesting Lemmy had a karma system akin to reddit’s where users are punished for accruing downvotes.
Words have meaning, do why did you use it then?