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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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
I do like the slow down, cowboy think and I’m pretty sure reddit had that extremely early on as well
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!”
Yes this
Really? I have like 15 meme communities blocked, and there are comparably very few niche communities.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 🙂
Ok…then what do you recommend for a varied random feed of news and posts from various 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.
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.
I’m downvoting myself, cause idk man
Oh no you don’t. I’m upvoting you, instead.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Oh my sweet summer child,!
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
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.
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?
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.
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 it to keep their users hooked.
Lemmy on the other hand doesn’t care or isn’t even able to do this because it doesn’t have army of psychologists experts to design it that way
Reddit become more unusable because of the ads, bots, redditors who promote their onlyfans / business.
Thanks, kind stranger! Here’s an updoot and Reddit Silver!
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.
that’s a very normal bio
I guess I’m a LLM, thanks for letting me know.
Draw me a picture of a full glass of wine. Full to the brim. Practically spilling over.
Sorry, I don’t work on Sundays. I’m a special kind of computer
Anything else I can help you with?Draw me a hamburger, just bun, patty, bun. No lettuce, condiments or toppings.
username checks out
I guess so, I got to change it to Witty Human to stay under the radar.
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.
