General Discussion

Have you ever thought that perhaps the reason that that there are so many bots posts on reddit is because of karma?

What exactly makes account with high karma trustworthy when we all know it can be easily botted and then sold?

That could have been the reason there were so many bots though, every new bot account needed to karma farm in order to become useful.

Why? You should let each post stand on it's own merit.

First, account age is silly for Lemmy, as almost 100% of people on here will have an account creation date in June 2023 or later because this place was a ghost town before Reddit decided to kill the APIs. A month from now, is someone with an August 2023 join date automatically presumed to be a troll, or are they just someone making the switch from Reddit a month later than everyone else?

As for karma, neither negative karma nor positive karma really tell you anything about the poster:

For instance, people can make good faith arguments advocating for conservative political opinions, but because the user base skews pretty far left here, those arguments will be downvoted. A discussion forum that bans opposing viewpoints is useless, and the echo chambers on Reddit are something I'd love to avoid here.

Similarly, it's also possible to effortlessly build positive karma. Simply copy/paste highly rated comments from the last time a common repost appeared on the feed, and chances are, your copy/pasted comments will get upvoted too. You can even automate it with a bot.

Karma meant nothing at Reddit, and moderators shouldn't be using it for decisionmaking purposes. It's useful for ranking posts and comments, but anything beyond that isn't helpful.

Kbin already counts upvotes and boosts, similar to reddit karma.
But it could perhaps be something that stays hidden for everyone but yourself and moderators (provided you are participating in their magazine, otherwise anyone could open a magazine to see everyone elses karma)

Karma is largely useless. As others have said. Let an accounts posts stand for themselves. Not their general popularity. Just because someone is downvoted on the whole doesn't mean they're a troll. It just means their ideas are unpopular. But not necessarily wrong.

I don't see how filtering by karma combats bots whose whole job is to farm karma. Wouldn't that just filter new bots until one of their posts takes off in some other community that does allow new accounts to post?

Hard disagree. If bots are concern, bot detection tools are the answer, not karma.