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.
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.
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.
Yes this
Really? I have like 15 meme communities blocked, and there are comparably very few niche communities.
With time we’ll get there! The more we slowly contribute to the niche topics, the more we’ll see these communities grow. I’m sure there are a sizable amount of people from Reddit looking for their niches on here to start growing more for them to fully hop over. I’ve got a good chunk of mine on Lemmy now, but still a handful of ones I haven’t found a comparable server for yet. If I understood running a server more I probably would have started a couple of my own for these topics.
Is there anywhere on Lemmy people can request for servers to get started? I think that would be helpful to have since missing topics are some of the barriers of entry for some people.
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.
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.
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.
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 🙂
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?
I just see them in the Everything feed, and if I don’t block them, they seem to dominate. I’m not actually against them, but I don’t want my feed to be all memes.
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.
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 had a discussion about using the Slashdot style voting rather than the Reddit style.
It not only has the additional tag, it has the max “upvote” display limit of 5, and the display code will expand and promote the best rated comments, while hiding the garbage.
I think comments on most forums would benefit from there being no ‘big upvote’ number to chase, as well as making the highest rated comments in a thread of say, 200, more obvious.
No, it was only up or down, but you could also choose to add a descriptor, funny, insightful, informative, flamebait, troll, and a few others: https://slashdot.org/faq#meta3
I turn my phone sideways and then my upvote is in a different dimension.
Maybe. They might also mean you’re an idiot.
If I am wrong sombody will generally probide a rebuttal tho but deff happens
Genuinely curious, does that mean that, for you, getting downvoted gives you dopamine/a sense of accomplishment?
Your above comment is in the negative when I’m making this comment. Does that feel good? Again, genuinely curious, hard to put a non-judgemental tone in writing.
I can’t relate to that feeling, upvotes and downvotes to me show how much a community agrees or disagrees with what I’ve said. Either what I said isn’t right for the community I posted it in or maybe just a generally unpopular opinion if I’m getting downvotes. Might make me reflect but usually no big deal, I’m mostly here for the discussions, memes and current events. Outside of trolling I don’t really see how getting downvoted might be seen as a good thing by a poster.
If people down vote but are unable to provide a coherent rebuttal, that means that they are rage down voting.
I guess getting people to rage can feel validating, knowing that I’ve made someone rage quit a game feels satisfying for sure.
I don’t personally feel that way about sites like Lemmy/Reddit/Social-media in general where things are more discussion and social-interaction based though. I guess for my kind of discourse goals, if I’ve made someone angry rather than laugh or understand my perspective, I’ve done a bad job.
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?
It’s because Reddit specifically optimizes the site so that upvotes give you the maximum dopamine and keep you hooked on it like a crack. Most corporate social media thrive on keeping their users hooked through cheap tricks.
Lemmy Marxist Leninist Stalinist Maoist dev on the other hand doesn’t care or isn’t even able to do this because he doesn’t have an army of psychology experts to design it that way
So no you don’t get anything out of karma but your brain thinks you do and every aspect of the site is built to maximise this. I hate it
I was offered $300 for my Reddit account once lmao
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.
Reddit become more unusable because of the ads, bots, redditors who promote their onlyfans / business.
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.
Might also discourage people from feeding the trolls.
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
Kbin didn’t federate downvotes which was pretty funny. No one from it knew when they were being downvoted by lemmy.
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
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.
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.
The karma restrictions seems at first a good idea but can be bypassed very easily. The bots steal older popular posts or pictures and repost them.
Sure, but it offers at least some protection.
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
That’s true, but it’s gotta be balanced by limiting the fallout of extreme cases on other users
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.
I do like the slow down, cowboy think and I’m pretty sure reddit had that extremely early on as well
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.
I always like forum setups where you had limited posting privileges until you’d had a couple of posts. Usually, they’d have an introduction category where you could post, and then comment on some other users’ posts, to get your post or reputation count high enough to unlock the rest of the board.
Most Lemmy sites are small enough to have a local introduction community or other ‘free’ communities for newbies to dip their toes and acclimate. They’d be good places to centralize posts on how all of this works, too.
Wouldn’t scale to large servers, though.
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
notify you every time you get 5 upvotes
wat
Is that a new thing? I’m pretty sure it didn’t do that before I left.
It doesn’t accumulate and display anywhere though, does it?
I think there might still be one or two apps that show a total.
Doesn’t show your total on the Eternity app
It doesn’t have karma in the sense that there is a publicly displayed total of every post and comment you made so you can point at your profile and be like “look how much karma I have!”
…what do you think “karma” is?
Ironically, this account’s bio and its history is screaming “I am a LLM posting a bunch of AI slop”.
What makes you say that?
Bio: “Your Digital Workshop. We build websites and host them, as well as create content for your social media.”
Posts: all on a bunch of different communities. All of them short, just one or two sentences.
Short comments scream human to me more than long comments. Like that guy who never posts any comments shorter than three paragraphs all perfectly formatted and punctuated.
Like that guy who never posts any comments shorter than three paragraphs all perfectly formatted and punctuated.
'Sup.
Yes, I realize this particular comment is somewhat self defeating and probably not a great example. But that’s not the point.
The point is it’s apparently become my mission in life to annoy all the people on the internet who just check out any time they see a string of text that’s longer than 160 characters. I’ve been doing this since the early '90’s and you punks will never stop me.
The user I’m thinking of has a cat themed username. They comment quite a bit, or at least they used to.
Yeah, but the point is the consistency. It’s quite easy to prompt the model to just respond in always in the same way, and one could just say “you are supposed to talk like an average redditor. Keep it positive and short, and only elaborate if asked to.”
By that point you may as well be an LLM. ChatGPT is pretty good at emulating writing styles.
- My reddit account (with the same username) is 19 years old. This one was created in June of 2023, from even before the blackout. OP’s account is 17 days old.
- If you really care about it, I can arrange ways to prove that I am a real person - just get my matrix id here, and we could chat there if you want. Do you think that OP would accept such a request?
- Are you forgetting that some weeks ago there was some idiot around here telling how he wanted to get some LLM bots to post content and figure out if others would notice? Oh, and it’s not that it was a fully automated bot. The idea was to just post the content, but on accounts where he was supervising and could write as well.
I stand by my opinion. OP’s playing y’all for fools and now we are all arguing pointlessly.
- that’s just ageism gatekeeping /hj
- Assuming you mean video chat: I think it’s very reasonable for someone to turn down a PII (personally-identifiable information) reveal.
that’s a very normal bio
I guess I’m a LLM, thanks for letting me know.
username checks out
I guess so, I got to change it to Witty Human to stay under the radar.
Draw me a picture of a full glass of wine. Full to the brim. Practically spilling over.
Anything else I can help you with?Draw me a hamburger, just bun, patty, bun. No lettuce, condiments or toppings.
Sorry, I don’t work on Sundays. I’m a special kind of computer
I think the only way to really fix this is to make votes a limited asset that accounts have. There are forums where this has worked okay: bodybuilding.com forums has a reputation system where accounts are limited in what they can give to other voters.
As long as “karma” is unlimited it suffers from the same problems whether you count it in aggregate or not. As some other commenters have said, people still seek validation in individual comments. I know because I do too.
Shit, I’m sorry. I had close to 1m before I bailed. It was all quality comment karma though. I just have no life.
Thanks, kind stranger! Here’s an updoot and Reddit Silver!
