Lemmy’s design is focused on quality content by ditching the Karma farmers and addicts. No more chasing upvotes—people here actually focus on real value instead of feeding the ego.
EDIT: I know there are upvotes and downvotes, but the problem with Reddit is you can’t post in most communities if your karma or reputation is bad. This is a big problem because herd mentality prevails there and if ypu have unpopular opinions you’re basically censored.
Lemmy isn’t designed to milk ypur dopamine with notifications every 10 upvotes, so you focus more on posting valuable cont instead of farming for approval and upvotes.
Visible post and comment scores are still going to produce some of this behavior. You may not have a total karma but people will still get dopamine from seeing their posts getting upvotes and be reinforced in doing the same again. So the same mechanisms of social pressure and uniformisation are at play. The worst being when people delete their minority opinion comments because of the downvote pressure.
You can turn vote counts off if you want to.
Yeah but I won’t because I like dopamine.
Down votes mean I am reaching the correct audience for that specific content
Maybe. They might also mean you’re an idiot.
Slashdot used to have a multidimensional voting system that would allow you to up or down vote something based on whether it was funny/insightful/correct, etc (can’t remember the dimension). I wish we had something like that. Sometimes it would be useful to mark a comment as “funny, but also wrong”
I wish that commenting would automatically upvote a post. It’s far too late to fix the use of an upvote as approval of subject discussion and not just an agree arrow, but I often…no, I almost always forget to upvote the initial topic even after leaving a few paragraphs. One would hope whatever algorithm is used also considers activity and number of comments in a rating or suggesting it to others.
Yeah, I often just forget to upvote generally. Although this could lead to argumentative posters making troll posts, getting engagement and trending just because people reply to them.
There ate multiple algorithms, but I don’t think any of them account for both votes and comments… I might be wrong though.
Tangent: the "scaled* algorithm, which normalises post ranks by the popularity of the community they’re posted to, is excellent. I recommend everyone use it as their default.
One feature I liked about Kbin was that my own comments weren’t upvoted automatically
Why the past tense? Is Kbin dead?
Oh my sweet summer child. EVERY new service and SocMed site starts out like this. Fresh, fun, and working properly. Until the masses show up. That’s when it goes to shit.
Eternal december.
I feel like white-list federation can fix it.
You could do that if you wanted, but if we had these moderation things will probably be fine. It’s also Eternal September
Yep, it’s just a matter of time till karma system is getting implemented on here too
It already exists, it’s just not shown.
Why make this assumption? Is there a reason you believe we need that karma system? I genuinely can’t think of any reason, outside of corporate interest to push engagement.
You have nine up votes for this comment.
Can see it on boost for Lemmy.
Of course you can see the comment’s individual karma. But, if you got my profile or yours, there is not accumulated karma.
Ah, i see now what you’re saying now. I’m sorry for being thick.
Yep, any sort of karma system is needed to get the masses to join somewhere. To attract the majority of people you need something that keep them interested. Karma on reddit is the same as likes on Facebook or Instagram
The lack of karma is definitely a plus. Zionist trolls can downvote all they want, no one cares. In fact, there isn’t much of an incentive for any to invest in “downvote farms”.
There are upvotes and downvotes and they do have some use gauging that content IMO
That being said, without the corporate structure and profit motive to produce a monetizing algo that encourages others to game it to further their own monetizing goals…it’s SIGNIFICANTLY better
Up/Down votes aren’t inherently bad, Reddit and other corporate platforms corrupt it with their profit chasing
Well, I kind of disagree with the up/down votes being inherently bad, as they more front-load early posting rather than accurate posting. Meaning early engagement is likely to have higher upvotes rather than engagement which is factual and well thought out. This incentivizes much more emotional and meme posting.
I’ve seen it happen time and time again on Reddit and even here: someone makes post, bunch of people react only to the headline, or spread misinformation, and by the time nuanced posts and thought out posts are made, engagement has plummeted and people have moved on to the next thing.
I mean there are upvotes and downvotes so I don’t know what you mean. But there isn’t a real incentive to have lots of upvotes on here. I’m not even sure why karma farming even is a thing on reddit. Maybe cause you can sell the account to whatever guy wants to buy it?
deleted by creator
That’s batshit crazy
Not crazy if you want to advertise on the down low. I worked a summer once doing that shit, it’s insidious. Blockers don’t even block someone pretending to like a product.
Removed by mod
And yet for some reason I spend a lot of time on Lemmy
“Karma” is just a counter of recieved votes. It still exists on lemmy, most clients just choose to not display it.
Also where is this “value content” supposed to be?
Our value comes from our superior bean-based posting economy.
Really? I have like 15 meme communities blocked, and there are comparably very few niche communities.
Yeah, lemmy suffers a lot of from this. Too many posts that try to just make the front page, too many popular communities that dominate c/all. I’ve even had a friend quit over this.
I genuinely miss communities about games, linguistics and niche hobbies - they just aren’t as popular as news/politics/general memes and that. I do try to post them as much as i can, but since they’re niche there’s only so much content you can find.
I’d love for the frontpage to have some [optional, ofc] changes that encourage more of this type of content.
Why would anyone be on all? Even with reddit I I quit going to all probably 10 years ago…
And don’t let my Lemmy age fool you, I drop my account every 6 to 8 months. It took my a lot longer to figure that out on reddit.
Ok…then what do you recommend for a varied random feed of news and posts from various communities?
For me it’s to find new content (i block most news/politics communities since they’re most of c/all) but there’s a lot of attention and eyes to be gained from all.
But most of this, as i said; is buried by the generic popular content.
Well yeah, that’s what ALL is right? The most generic stuff. You can browse communities and subscribe as needed.
If you are going to use all It might help to enable scaled sorting.
It boosts small communities in the sort.
I’ll try, thank you 🙂
For games, make sure you are subscribed to:
All are healthy and active, and I’m sure there are more. I suggest cross-posting stuff from a niche community you contribute to, to one of these, to bring traction to the smaller community.
maybe my definitions of healthy and active are extremely biased, but these communities have several days-old posts with low numbers of comments and limited reply threads. not only that, but there’s lots of news articles about the industry but not much stuff about GAMES, be that random reviews, discussions, or memes.
Well it’s partly my bias too, because when I joined Lemmy about 3 years ago, lemmy.world didn’t exist yet and there were around a couple dozen new posts on All of Lemmy per day at the time.
I’m just really grateful for how much we’ve grown as a site, even if we’re still hardly anywhere close to the scale of modern corporate social media. But imo it doesn’t have to be, I like this.
what do you want to discuss post it, no one has a montery incentive to make this site work for you, if you want it to do you gotta do it yourself, commentings a good step, now make a post about what you want to discuss so theres a more recent post on that community about it
Ah i’m sorry, i should’ve specified; i meant communities for specific games. A lot of these games are too obscure to hvae a community for themselves, sadly :(
Last one seems not to exist.
Lemmy.world is not federating with beehaw.org
Beehaw is quite toxic and for that reason, lemmy.world is not federated. I expect an angry swarm of people from Beehaw to send me death threats now to prove how untoxic they are.
Pretty much any game or random hobby I’m on at the moment, I could count on finding a decently populated and active Subreddit. This is what’s missing from Lemmy.
Blocked? Why? If you don’t want to see them why are you subscribed to them?
I mean if you want niche communities you create them and subscribe to them right?
Browsing the global/all feed is one way to find new communities, and some people just like using it in general rather than defaulting to a subs-only view.
Seems like a not so good way to me, and thats why people are complaining.
You can just look through the communities and sub to good ones.
Maybe it would be helpful to use ALL with scaled sorting. It boosts smaller communities.
I gave up using all on reddit a very long time ago, and Lemmy is basically the same… But at least on Lemmy you have scaled sorting to try and help.
Or just…browse all and then block communities you don’t want to see. Most stuff I block is furry shit. Nothing against it, I just don’t want to see it.
For what it’s worth I generally agree with you, and especially think the people who treat /all as their own personal feed are nuts, but nonetheless it’s something that some people do 🫠
Everyone has their own preferences about how to use things!
I usually doomscroll all. on reddit, i used to sub to subs, but on lemmy, because it’s quite small, I just use all.
Lemmy is small enough, that without even seeing a karma total, some users have an unofficial “rapport”, where I’ve seen them around enough to recognize whether they are the type to go against the grain, a perpetual troll, or a usually reasonable person with an unusually spicy take.
Reddit become more unusable because of the ads, bots, redditors who promote their onlyfans / business.
Well, and also because I can express my hope that a piano fall on Spez’s head.
And we’re allowed to say Nazi’s are bad
You just get the occasional weirdo from a weirdo instance arguing otherwise
yeah, and you can luckily just block their instance
It’s comparing lemmy to Reddit, not to the twitter zombie
Isn’t Karma essentially just the delta between upvotes and downvotes you get with some sort of weighting thrown in?
Because you can very much get that delta on here, it just isn’t visible in the default Lemmy interface. If you look at your account through an Mbin frontend for example you can see the “Reputation points” value in the sidebar: https://fedia.io/u/@[email protected]
We have that here too. FlyingSquid comes to mind.
Just don’t be a woman on Lemmy.
Sure, most people won’t downvote or harass you just for being a woman (a lot will… we didn’t get the best of Reddit at all, and I doubt the new adoptees are any better…) but they will often enough make things difficult even if they aren’t actively causing problems.
But men of Lemmy (aka the vast majority of the user base since they ran off all the womenfolk) don’t care. They see that as quality control or some dumb shit, because THEY aren’t interested in woman things, so nobody should be, or they think their “as a man” comments should be important or some shit… Whatever the post is about. If it doesn’t cater to them, it can fuck right off.
Which is why cis women make up <10% of the Lemmy side of the fediverse. It’s a disaster for women here.
But I wonder how long you’ve been here. Most of the posts of this nature are from very new accounts and they don’t know the problems yet…
Is this really the case? I find this unexpected. Lemmy seems to be friendly to the LGBTQ people, namely trans.
If what you say is true, we should probably address it somehow.
Any examples of this? It sounds terrible and should be addressed.
The downvotes prove your point. This topic needs more discussion, but most of the times when women bring this up, their comments get downvoted to hell. It’s quite a “gotcha” for someone to ask to see “examples” when most of the examples we’ve come across or created will be buried or have since been deleted.
Alternative question - for those that don’t believe this is an issue, when is the last time you came across a post on Lemmy that is specifically for/about women or women’s issues (especially one posted from a woman’s perspective)? Or even better, go ahead and make such a post. Watch how fast the downvotes come.
I expect this comment to be downvoted the same way as the parent comment was, the same way that past posts I’ve made and read about women’s issues have been downvoted on Lemmy. If men want this place to be inclusive for women, they have to do their part to support us - not downvoting our concerns, simply because they don’t experience the same issues, is the absolute bare minimum. Otherwise, why would we keep posting/commenting about our issues when doing so invites a downvote cascade?
No, the downvotes are because nobody was victimizing her here but she went off on a rant and called me horrible things that I don’t deserve to be called. Sexism can go in any direction and I don’t tolerate any of it.
I’ve not had a problem here, do you have examples of this? Not saying it does not exist, more curious.
That’s how it is anywhere that doesn’t have any real moderation. There are those actively seek to harass anyone who isn’t right leaning cis hetero white male. Lemmy like every other modern social platform is an open air forum available to the entire 7 billion population of the world. Moderators don’t see 99% of the posts. And 99% of what they do see, they don’t take for than a few seconds to consider. The nefarious abusers are almost always more subtle than moderators give thought to. This allows harassment to run rampant. This is a fundamental issue with social media. As as I’m concerned it’s an intractable problem.
That’s as opposed to the traditional internet boards where posting was orders of magnitude lower volume. Site administrators and moderators cared about fostering a good community. Moderators saw a not insignificant portion of the content posted. Not just reports. Forum members used one pseudonym. No throwaways like the reddit/lemmy paradigm. What you posted was attached to you as a person. Therefore there was consequences to being an asshole. In other words deterrence.
Also I find it kind of amusing how they out themselves for their simpleton world view. I’ve noticed a pattern where they take superficial readings of a post to identify keywords/phrases. Then assign identity to that user. Then engage in harassment based on that.
For example say I posted something that was sympathetic to women. Ergo they assume I am a woman. And they engage the usual framework of belligerent replies appropriate to that assumed identity. I know for certain the key words in the second sentence of this comment already has triggered someone for sure.
I don’t get the karma hangup thing. Like… Lemmy does have Karma, but we just don’t culturally make it a priority.
The fact that it’s not designed to notify you every time you get 5 upvotes changes the game. Also low Karma accounts can post in Lemmy as opposed to Reddit.
This may not be an inherently bad thing given that low karma accounts tend to be trolls.
I’d argue that low karma accounts tend to be new people or lurkers.
By low karma I mean -100 types.
Good moderation eliminates trolls pretty quickly. Admins are incentivized to respond to users’ concerns rather than a profit motive. Some communities do have a minimum account age for certain actions, and some instances require a real email address and IP address to join/participate.
Trolls are bots are rare on Lemmy. They are the norm on reddit.
The traffic on Reddit is massive for highly populated subreddits. And these subreddits that restrict low karma account activities aren’t doing it for any profit motive.
I understand Lemmy isn’t really big enough for this to be a concern here.
If/when it does get big enough, what would be a good solution? It would be possible to do the same as Reddit
If/when it does get big enough, what would be a good solution?
The best solution is to do nothing and don’t try to bring reddit’s groupthink enforcement flaws to lemmy.
Exactly - Reddit specifically and intentionally uses dark patterns to reinforce the importance of karma at every turn. The first interaction that someone has with Reddit is usually “you don’t have enough karma to post/comment/vote in this subreddit.” There are secret communities and public awards for high karma earners. There is a frontpage dedicated to rapid karma-earning posts. There is no disincentive for karma farming reposts, and subreddits are actually punished for reducing reposts. Karma is commoditized.
Here the votes still matter, but the algorithm is public and users can and do sort in a variety of ways to discover new and relevant content. There is no single “front-page”
Unfortunately, on reddit - when subreddits restrict new posters or low karma commenters, they’re just trying to mitigate the impact of trolls and bots and people making new accounts. It’s not about being elitist.
Yeah because reddit (and Lemmy) are different to what a lot of people are used to. Users coming from things like tiktok or Facebook need to lurk a bit before posting so they get a feel for the culture.
It is gatekeepy but its nessesary in my opinion. However I can see how the karma restrictions are super jarring for new users since it takes a while to get especially if your comments are always buried.
There used to be a saying on early image boards that have helped me more times than I can remember. “Lurk moar”, it has served me well. Even getting used to office culture. It helps to not make any faux pas that would make it harder to get along.
low Karma accounts can post in Lemmy as opposed to Reddit
But should they?
One of the things I miss about reddit (and slashdot before that) was that if you got downvoted/downmodded a lot in a short amount of time, it would tell you to slow down (, cowboy). It helped to limit the damage when someone would go on a troll spree before they got banned.
Some subreddits did implement a “you must have x karma to post” rule, or account age, which I wasn’t always a fan of, especially if it was karma within a certain subreddit. I understand the logic, that it was intended to make people read the community before posting, but I’m not sure if it hit the mark. But it did limit brand-new spam accounts, which are already here on lemmy.
I believe it’s an unhealthy habit, silencing unpopular people. Some of us low profile oddballs like to share our thoughts too
Some communities use a “santabot” to auto-ban accounts with more downvotes than upvotes. I’ve never seen it happen to someone who didn’t deserve it.
Unpopular opinions deserve to be silenced? Terrible idea. We already have way too much group think.
Hey, I’ve got unpopular opinions. No, it’s usually someone who is trolling.
It’s far from perfect but of the people I’ve seen, they are usually so bad that they are damaging dialogue, not fostering it.
Usually it’s eventually reversed if they are not a troll. People here are pretty decent and upvote most things.
Hey, I’ve got unpopular opinions. No, it’s usually someone who is trolling.
A lot of people can’t tell the difference and just assume that someone with an unpopular opinion must be trolling.
