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.
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.
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
Why the past tense? Is Kbin dead?
Sadly yes
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.
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.
You can turn vote counts off if you want to.
Yeah but I won’t because I like dopamine.
heres 1 (one) dopamine unit for you then
Down votes mean I am reaching the correct audience for that specific content
Maybe. They might also mean you’re an idiot.
Slashdot used to have a multidimensional voting system that would allow you to up or down vote something based on whether it was funny/insightful/correct, etc (can’t remember the dimension). I wish we had something like that. Sometimes it would be useful to mark a comment as “funny, but also wrong”
No, it was only up or down, but you could also choose to add a descriptor, funny, insightful, informative, flamebait, troll, and a few others: https://slashdot.org/faq#meta3
Right, thanks. Still a super useful system, IMO, though I’m sure better versions are possible.
Welcome: Quarkvotes
Up, down, charm, strange, top, bottomUp/down = Usefulness or relation to topic
Charm/strange = Agree/accurate or not
Top/bottom = Love/HateI vote you up-charm-top, btw
Not a bad set! I would add something related to “funny”.
Also, separating agree (opinion) from accurate (factual) would be nice. But I guess you gotta keep it somewhat simple.
I turn my phone sideways and then my upvote is in a different dimension.
Maybe. They might also mean you’re an idiot.
If I am wrong sombody will generally probide a rebuttal tho but deff happens
I had a discussion about using the Slashdot style voting rather than the Reddit style.
It not only has the additional tag, it has the max “upvote” display limit of 5, and the display code will expand and promote the best rated comments, while hiding the garbage.
I think comments on most forums would benefit from there being no ‘big upvote’ number to chase, as well as making the highest rated comments in a thread of say, 200, more obvious.
Genuinely curious, does that mean that, for you, getting downvoted gives you dopamine/a sense of accomplishment?
Your above comment is in the negative when I’m making this comment. Does that feel good? Again, genuinely curious, hard to put a non-judgemental tone in writing.
I can’t relate to that feeling, upvotes and downvotes to me show how much a community agrees or disagrees with what I’ve said. Either what I said isn’t right for the community I posted it in or maybe just a generally unpopular opinion if I’m getting downvotes. Might make me reflect but usually no big deal, I’m mostly here for the discussions, memes and current events. Outside of trolling I don’t really see how getting downvoted might be seen as a good thing by a poster.
Does that feel good?
I just want the absolute value of my comment’s karma to be high. That means it has been read at least that many times.
If people down vote but are unable to provide a coherent rebuttal, that means that they are rage down voting.
I guess getting people to rage can feel validating, knowing that I’ve made someone rage quit a game feels satisfying for sure.
I don’t personally feel that way about sites like Lemmy/Reddit/Social-media in general where things are more discussion and social-interaction based though. I guess for my kind of discourse goals, if I’ve made someone angry rather than laugh or understand my perspective, I’ve done a bad job.
Not necessarily, I usually downvote comments where there are enough rebuttal replies but I still disagree heavily with what’s being said. I am able to provide the Nth coherent rebuttal but I’m just either lazy or I don’t want to contribute to the spam.
Oh my sweet summer child,!
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.
Anything else I can help you with?Draw me a hamburger, just bun, patty, bun. No lettuce, condiments or toppings.
Sorry, I don’t work on Sundays. I’m a special kind of computer
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.
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.
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.
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”
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.
At some point so much right in the actual social guide to using the internet
It’s not about being elitist.
What’s the difference? They shouldn’t be doing it.
They will do it so long as not doing it greatly increases the amount of busywork, spam moderation and troll moderation.
They will do it so long as not doing it greatly increases the amount of busywork, spam moderation and troll moderation.
Then they are unfit to be moderators because they are subtracting value from free discussions. I would much rather have to little moderation than lazy heavy handed moderation.
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.
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.
I do like the slow down, cowboy think and I’m pretty sure reddit had that extremely early on as well
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.
Unpopular opinions deserve to be silenced? Terrible idea. We already have way too much group think.
Hey, I’ve got unpopular opinions. No, it’s usually someone who is trolling.
It’s far from perfect but of the people I’ve seen, they are usually so bad that they are damaging dialogue, not fostering it.
Usually it’s eventually reversed if they are not a troll. People here are pretty decent and upvote most things.
I believe it’s an unhealthy habit, silencing unpopular people. Some of us low profile oddballs like to share our thoughts too
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
That was a horrible system. If you didn’t get positive karma on your very first post, your account was ruined because you could never dig yourself out.
This may not be an inherently bad thing given that low karma accounts tend to be trolls.
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.
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
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!”
It doesn’t accumulate and display anywhere though, does it?
I think there might still be one or two apps that show a total.
Downvoted. Not because I think reddit is better, but because this is clearly a circklejerk post, and what’s more reddit than THAT???
Thanks for letting us know
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.
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.
Reddit become more unusable because of the ads, bots, redditors who promote their onlyfans / business.
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. . .
Well, and also because I can express my hope that a piano fall on Spez’s head.
And we’re allowed to say Nazi’s are bad
It’s comparing lemmy to Reddit, not to the twitter zombie
Sadly Reddit has been toeing the line and has been banning any accounts for “threatening violence” for any support of Luigi no matter how peaceful or non-violent or ANY criticism of Elon The Musky Husky
Heck even before my account was banned I was warned for “advocating violence” just for saying “It’s understandable to wanna punch Nazis”
You can’t ask a social network to support ideas that involve violence and murders. I know Luigi is a hero for many but it was an illegal action. You can think any monarchy is anacronyst nowadays, but you can’t go and shoot any of those useless humans that think they can be called king or queen like we were living in mediaeval times
And remember that any insurance system is not that different from a national system, you can convert one into the other any time. The problems is with shitty brains which can go and spread their shitty ideas either here or there. Since national system can be so corrupted, it’s ok to have a private way to clean them up from time to time.
It’s not that I want Reddit to support violence, it’s that I want Reddit to support free speech
Let me suggest you don’t become too attached to a mainstream digital tool
You just get the occasional weirdo from a weirdo instance arguing otherwise
yeah, and you can luckily just block their instance
Also, smaller servers means that it’s easier to spot criminal communities and boot their asses. Also individual servers can be cracked down on for hosting evil content, without all of Lemmy being destroyed.
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.
Thanks, kind stranger! Here’s an updoot and Reddit Silver!
