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.
Well, the thing about the fediverse is that things don’t live in one place … they’re distributed across the federation. Right now our comments, which are coming from different instances, are being copied over to each other’s instances and live on both instances, as well as every other instance that subscribes to this community.
Platforms can have agreements about doing certain things like deletion when a request for such a thing is sent out, and then rely on defederating from any platform that contravenes those agreements, which is a method that is both messy, unreliable but surprisingly effective, and also, all we have.
As for karma, it seems kbin is keen on it and lemmy not so much. Forming some agreement about karma calculations being opt-in might make sense now that both platforms have matured in their user base sizes.
Made a post to [email protected] about this: https://lemmy.ml/post/2212950