Fact is, the Lemmy ecosystem needs money to handle the growing server reqirements as more people migrate as well as the development cost of new features (I know Lemmy is OSS but the devs should still get some compensation for their effort).
Seeing how much some reddit users love awards so much that they cant stop giving money to Reddit to award posts protesting the api change, this could be a great way for users to voluntary support the ecosystem. It can be easily ignored by users not caring about them (clients could even add an option to hide them), but users liking the feature can go wild and this time the money goes to volunteers keeping this alive instead of greedy admins, power mods and investors.
Though there would be some big organization questions attached:
attached:
Which server handles the payment? A centralized one, the one where the post was made or the one where the user giving the award account was created.
How will the money be shared between the Devs and the individual instances in a way that is fair but cant be abused easily.
Could we like, not immediately talk about monetisation 1 month after leaving reddit?
If you want to support your instance host, you can ask for a way to donate.
I think it's a distraction from the actual interactions. Same way karma is.
I'm all for supporting instances and open source developers, but any kind of reward for a donation creates wrong incentives. Donation is called a donation because it's a gift without expecting something in return.
Can we leave the karma system and awards with Reddit? Allowing voting in comment sections for pseudo-moderation by the users is good, but when it turns into a scoring system the conversation devolves into a competition to see who can craft the most palatable opinion to get the most imaginary internet points.
Despite all my thoughtful and helpful comments I made in my 11 years on reddit, you know what my top comment was?
I'm really not looking for a Reddit replica. And um, being rewarded for a good comment isn't really something I need. Or anyone needs. I think getting a cookie for a good comment can be left behind
Edit to add - I should have read the rest of the post more carefully, but I stand by my initial sentiment. Money needs to be funneled into those working hard on this, but I don't know, I don't want more and more Reddit features coming out
I pass. Gamifying social interactions leads to abuse and lowers the quality of posts, comments, reports, etc. It's a streamlined path to enshittification.
I think like 99% of people picked accounts on the top 10 servers, and there are hundreds of more servers out there that have only a few users. Why do you all flock to the same server (Lemmy.world in particular) and then go "shit this is getting expensive guys". :)
Fediverse. Federated. Not Centralized. Not Reddit.
This technology supports speeding out, so many people (instance admins) share the costs.
Could be a good way to fund servers, but I'm not sure how they can make it not sketchy as fuck. No way I'm trusting payment info to some random dudes server.
Wouldn't mind having a safe option to throw a dollar or 2 to a favorite server and get a nice shiny badge on the profile.
I am more for going on with donations, with some kind of useless leader board for volunteering activities, to introduce some kind of "safe" and fun gamification.
I have no idea what this could be, I am not very good in creating games
tl; dr: if you don't want to see seas of ads, awards are the better choice, in my opinion.
honestly, i would be fine with it. I'm not entirely sure what's the big philosophical deal, donations are harder to get, and I'm not so sure as many people are going to voluntarily go and visit the donations page. on the other hand, if the award option is immediately there within the post, one is much more likely to give it. lemmy can simply not sustain itself on the long run solely on donations, especially considering the mass of media content that may be posted. instances can run on them for now. i would prefer them running on dumb awards than on ads instead, and the mole of ads required to make up for the money needed could be really high we'd get reddit level advertisement. hell nah. also, it incentivizes the user on posting quality content if they see the chance of shiny lemming medals, maybe.
Why don't server admins open OpenCollective accounts or something similar. It seems to work on Mastodon. I would be willing to pitch in to help finance the instance I'm on.
I don't love the awards from Reddit, but I would like to see something like this (unpopular opinion, I know). Instances need funding.
I don't care about what the awards are themselves, I care about the way the funding works. I would love to see the funds split in a two tiered system.
Here is a general example of my idea. When a award is purchased it gets split into two pots. One pot is a general pot that gets disbursed to those running the instances based on whatever metrics and intervals agreed upon. The other part gets assigned to the reward itself. So in this example let's say an award costs one dollar. 90 cents would go to the pool to be split, the other 10 cents would be tied to the award. So if you award a post on an instance it goes specifically to that instance itself. Instances could even set a percent split with community moderators of the 10 cents. That way you could fund moderators (if that ever becomes needed)
You could even split part of the award reward with the commentor assigned to it... but that puts a weird feeling in my gut and I feel like it is a bad idea to monetize the content itself.
There is a lot you could do with this and a lot more would need to be fleshed out, so I am just thinking out loud.
Replace "rewards" with "emoji reacts" and "needs money to handle growing server requirements" with "appreciates your donations to help cover hosting costs" and I think you may be on to something.
I think it's interesting to look into but it might be abusable. The payment system will be so complicated on top of the legal issues that one would need to deal with.
I’d love to see an awards system! It’d be great to select the instance that receives the funds with the default being where their account is registered.
On a serious note, I think the best implementation would be like a "trophy case"(like reddit) , where each instance can give any user an award for any reason that they can display in their user page. Doesn't get in the way of discussion, but gives you a sense of pride and accomplishment. (heh)
Unlike reddit, these award should be able to be turned off individually , since you don't want rogue instance admins to give you offensive "awards" for your user page.
You also shouldn't be able to see awards from defederated instances to prevent trolling.
I'm not opposed to ways for people paying out of their own pocket to host to get some funds to help cover that, but I worry it'll never be well implemented.
I think a good first step would be a default and built in way for server admins to add a small donations banner listing the hosting costs of their instances. That also does have issues though, of course. The person hosting is definitely putting in the most money, but other moderators and admins are contributing labour too.
It's a tough subject, and many solutions would be rife with abuse. Shit sucks.
I think the idea is fine but the label of "awards" kinda sucks. Reddit often had them misused (e.g. giving wholesome on non wholesome posts). I like how discord frames it's super reactions and think it would be a better system. Only the name, the way they should act should be largely the same, I don't want animated reactions like discord does.
How about this: groups of instances hosts get together once a year and host a large fundraiser where they then distribute funds proportional to who needs them and then any left over funds go intk a bank where they wait until servers need further funding.
Everything would be open and logged for auditing just like how things are currently anyway.
I only gave awards after getting ones that gave me points to give awards, and then gave them either to sad posts or when someone said to someone else, I wish I had an award to give you so take this emoji! (🎖️) so I'd cover for them, as that was appropriate.
This is to say, I suck at awards protocol, and will write fancy comments whether I'm getting awards or not.
I have an idea. Now I thought about it. Lemmy will allow the server owner to create a "paid" community. The name of this community will be like "helpforlemmy.world" or "coffeeforruud". People will pay to be able to subscribe to this community. These communities will be passive and only people who want to help will have sent money by subscribing.