Why Lemmy is so superior to Reddit: No Karma, Just Value Content
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.
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.
"Karma" is just a counter of a user's recieved votes. It still exists on lemmy, most clients just choose to not display it.
Also where is this "value content" supposed to be?
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.
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.
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.
Just value content
Lemming36: Here is a high quality 46 MB photo of a shiny bat poop straight to .world HDD
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.
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.
Yeah, but in this day and age we’re going to grow with easy-to-consume content e.g. memes. Once growth hits a critical mass then the niche communities will come.
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.
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.
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.
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
Why the past tense? Is Kbin dead?
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
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.
...what do you think "karma" is?
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"
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.
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.
Ironically, this account's bio and its history is screaming "I am a LLM posting a bunch of AI slop".
Downvoted. Not because I think reddit is better, but because this is clearly a circklejerk post, and what's more reddit than THAT???
Downvoted your comment. Because announcing downvotes is very reddit.
Thanks for letting us know
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!
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. . .
Oh my sweet summer child,!
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.
Seeking validation apparently is core human trait so I am not sure if it is possible to avoid it at all. Still as you probably know social media corporations keep us hooked to their crack using it and amplifying the base value
Funnily, ironically some Lemmy apps copy Reddit UX (that was designed by psychology experts) and thus make it more addictive than it is on the web app.
Best bet to avoid social candy crack is to use lemmy from terminal if that is possible, or default site
I would imagine if you made karma points limited on the spender side rather than unlimited, then it might make users “try harder” to get validation, thus improving the quality of content on average.
Or it all could be bullshit and fail. Hard to say. You are right though, it’s all manufactured for engagement.
