Why Lemmy is so superior to Reddit: No Karma, Just Value Content
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.
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.
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.
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
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…
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”.
How, exactly? Decentralization aside, lemmy is a reddit clone, but on a smaller scale. The same human psychology that drives reddit also drives lemmy. I think your assessment is more applicable to mastodon because there you really have to figure out how to fill your feed with content.
We have plenty of astroturfing bots & powermods here. Once karma becomes a worthwhile metric for some to filter by, it’ll be abused & manipulated here, too.
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/@wittycomputer@feddit.org
There can be many reasons reddit sucks, but I'd argue its mostly because Spez is a mega douche and Reddit was captured by mods who had agendas and just silenced anyone who disagreed. Or they were paid to do it.
Can't say I ever cared about karma. Lemmy reminds me of stripped down original reddit. Almost original. I remember when Reddit didn't even have thumbnails. Back then, there was a thing called memepool. You didn't know what you were going to get when you clicked on links on either site. There was a lot of fun unpredictable content and Reddit still meant you read it and we're vouching for it. It was like this whole world of quality stuff from really smart people. Thumbnails and subreddits ushered in a series of trashings and lead to intense divisiveness reddit never recovered from. . .
On Reddit the same post won't usually show up twice in my feed (unless it's a repost). So once you've seen it, Reddit notices that and kind of marks it as seen I guess.
Using Lemmy however I happen to see the same posts over and over again for days. Is there any way to fix this?
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.
That’s right! I said good shit in tech posts that was worth upvoting so others can see. Then there was an bad comment I wrote in patientgaming that deserved the downvotes and not worth reading.
Honestly, karma is just for getting started on reddit. Certain subreddits, require your account to exist and have a certain amount of karma to "validate" it. I don't think people care about getting karma beyond that point.