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.
I just hope that Lemmy stays nice. I don’t want it to reach 100 million+ users and be overwhelmed with RAGEBAIT and scams.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
Lemmy still relies on upvotes for ranking the feed, so, farming them makes sense, it’s just isolated per each post.
And I believe the issue might get worse as Lemmy grows. The reason Reddit came up with karma and all that is because the more people you have on your platform, the more baddies you have to account for.
For now, Lemmy is small enough for a basic interpersonal reputation to mostly just work, but as it grows, we need something else. Presumably, not karma.
Piefed implements an “attitude” system which tracks up vote ratio and a few other simple metrics mods can use to identify bad actors
“bad actors” simply means “unpopular or politically incorrect opinions”. Fuck that.
