Overwhelmingly on this page, the sentiment is that people do not want karma. I literally only have four bullets of pros while the cons fill up an entire page. Here are some changes the people have mentioned to have instead of karma. (Note that these are truncated and may not reflect their exact suggestion)
Changes:
Slashdot’s system: karma can only get +5 or -1 (@solstice)
Awards! Still worth nothing, but sometimes a post deserves more than an upvote, hence stickers (@wwaxwork)
Buy/Give awards as a way to support this (@penguinsAreRapists)
Give users notifications if they reach upvote thresholds for upvotes or downvotes. Still gives dopamine (@[email protected])
Voting system nice, but no need for sitewide (@Duchess)
Easily seen age and activity metrics. Helps to tell apart old account that regularly posts from young, spammy account (@Cybermass)
A percentage/history graph/something that uses multiple metrics to produce the rating. Needs discussion to flesh out (@EtherWhack)
Lemmy does not need to be an exact copy of Reddit (Dick Justice)
No carry over, but hidden metric might be good (@WetBeardHairs)
Flairs that the community can award (@Waitwuhtt)
Negative scores on posts should be hidden except to moderators. Autoreport posts that go below 0. (@dreadedsemi)
Get rid of visible up and downvotes (@joroo)
Mastodon allows each instance to enable/disable these numbers but defaults to hidden (@dustyData) Lemmy can do this (Rozaŭtuno)
...I think that's about all that I can glean from this thread before my head explodes. I've only read about half of all the posts. If you want the full doc which includes a compilation of pros, meh, cons, good talking points, and the changes, ask me. Edit: Good luck reading these since I don't know how to create new lines on lemmy x_x
My big thought is this: one bot-infested instance could get anyone up to infinite "karma". So, direct "karma" doesn't work.
Now, you could do some simple stats, and be like "how many lemming's worth of karma do you have, taking an instance's active population divided by your share of 'karma'".
IDK - I like stupid internet points. I never cared how much other people had of them, but it's fun to watch mine go up. It's gamification in the most pure state - quantifying something to make it more pleasurable
I think it's best they remain pointless, and someone's 'karma' only appear when you click on their profile... but it'd be a shame if there was no way to earn them. Even if you received a total per-server, it's just fun