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.
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.
The problem I think is that users do not distribute votes based on “quality” but by how much they like the content. Which is only the same in some people
It’s the same as with democracy, in theory we should elect quality politicians but we elect those we like
But hey this is long clear I guess since the implementation of Reddit decade ago
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.
I call that negative karma. Low karma is 0-200. 200 because that is a limit that at least some subs would use to limit new accounts from posting.
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.
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.
maybe my definitions of healthy and active are extremely biased, but these communities have several days-old posts with low numbers of comments and limited reply threads. not only that, but there’s lots of news articles about the industry but not much stuff about GAMES, be that random reviews, discussions, or memes.
Well it’s partly my bias too, because when I joined Lemmy about 3 years ago, lemmy.world didn’t exist yet and there were around a couple dozen new posts on All of Lemmy per day at the time.
I’m just really grateful for how much we’ve grown as a site, even if we’re still hardly anywhere close to the scale of modern corporate social media. But imo it doesn’t have to be, I like this.
Last one seems not to exist.
Lemmy.world is not federating with beehaw.org
Beehaw is quite toxic and for that reason, lemmy.world is not federated. I expect an angry swarm of people from Beehaw to send me death threats now to prove how untoxic they are.
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 🙂
urwelcom
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There’s multiple sorting types that you can choose for your feed. How do you want your content ordered?
Can you explain what you mean with farming upvotes makes sense? There is no part of the algorithm that takes into account how many upvotes the OP recently got, or is there?
I think they meant on a post-by-post basis. You can’t farm account karma, but you can farm upvotes on individual posts, for ego, I guess…
There is the vibe-check on Lemmy, though. I don’t believe the algorithm takes that into account.
There is no algorithm at all as far as I know, for better or worse. The closest is the “Scaled” sorting option, which takes community size into account to help boost smaller communities. But I’d hardly call that an algorithm, even though it technically is.
There is no point in farming upvotes here apart from feeding your brain’s dopamine response.
Piefed implements an “attitude” system which tracks up vote ratio and a few other simple metrics mods can use to identify bad actors
Nice! The more I hear about Piefed, the more I am inclined to check it out
Perhaps a creddit system (for gits and shiggles)
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.
Why the past tense? Is Kbin dead?
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,!
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.
Yep, it’s just a matter of time till karma system is getting implemented on here too
Why make this assumption? Is there a reason you believe we need that karma system? I genuinely can’t think of any reason, outside of corporate interest to push engagement.
It already exists, it’s just not shown.
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…
Any examples of this? It sounds terrible and should be addressed.
The downvotes prove your point. This topic needs more discussion, but most of the times when women bring this up, their comments get downvoted to hell. It’s quite a “gotcha” for someone to ask to see “examples” when most of the examples we’ve come across or created will be buried or have since been deleted.
Alternative question - for those that don’t believe this is an issue, when is the last time you came across a post on Lemmy that is specifically for/about women or women’s issues (especially one posted from a woman’s perspective)? Or even better, go ahead and make such a post. Watch how fast the downvotes come.
I expect this comment to be downvoted the same way as the parent comment was, the same way that past posts I’ve made and read about women’s issues have been downvoted on Lemmy. If men want this place to be inclusive for women, they have to do their part to support us - not downvoting our concerns, simply because they don’t experience the same issues, is the absolute bare minimum. Otherwise, why would we keep posting/commenting about our issues when doing so invites a downvote cascade?
Alternative question - for those that don’t believe this is an issue, when is the last time you came across a post on Lemmy that is specifically for/about women or women’s issues (especially one posted from a woman’s perspective)? Or even better, go ahead and make such a post. Watch how fast the downvotes come.
I’m not going to say it isn’t a problem, but this was just the other day and while engagement could have been better it didn’t seem to be met with downvotes and pushback.
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.
“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?
Our value comes from our superior bean-based posting economy.
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.
