this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
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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.

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[–] oce@jlai.lu 90 points 16 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] TachyonTele@lemm.ee 16 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

You can turn vote counts off if you want to.

[–] zqps@sh.itjust.works 29 points 13 hours ago

Yeah but I won't because I like dopamine.

[–] sunzu2@thebrainbin.org 6 points 16 hours ago (5 children)

Down votes mean I am reaching the correct audience for that specific content

[–] naught101@lemmy.world 34 points 16 hours ago (5 children)

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"

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.

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[–] RampantParanoia2365@lemmy.world 47 points 14 hours ago (9 children)

Really? I have like 15 meme communities blocked, and there are comparably very few niche communities.

[–] fxomt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 34 points 14 hours ago (4 children)

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.

[–] AugustWest@lemm.ee 10 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (5 children)

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.

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[–] Rentlar@lemmy.ca 8 points 11 hours ago (6 children)

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.

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[–] RampantParanoia2365@lemmy.world 6 points 10 hours ago

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.

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[–] FrostBlazer@lemm.ee 7 points 11 hours ago

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.

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[–] AnarchiaKapitany@lemm.ee 29 points 6 hours ago (6 children)

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.

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[–] Allero@lemmy.today 24 points 9 hours ago (6 children)

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.

[–] socsa@piefed.social 6 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Piefed implements an "attitude" system which tracks up vote ratio and a few other simple metrics mods can use to identify bad actors

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[–] cm0002@lemmy.world 24 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (1 children)

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

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[–] Rentlar@lemmy.ca 24 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] Rhaedas@fedia.io 23 points 16 hours ago (6 children)

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.

[–] Skavau@lemm.ee 17 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] naught101@lemmy.world 6 points 16 hours ago

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.

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[–] TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 20 points 16 hours ago (3 children)

I don't get the karma hangup thing. Like.. Lemmy does have Karma, but we just don't culturally make it a priority.

[–] wittycomputer@feddit.org 16 points 16 hours ago (4 children)

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.

[–] gedaliyah@lemmy.world 13 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

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"

[–] Skavau@lemm.ee 9 points 16 hours ago (4 children)

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.

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[–] catloaf@lemm.ee 7 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (4 children)

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.

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[–] Skavau@lemm.ee 5 points 16 hours ago (7 children)

This may not be an inherently bad thing given that low karma accounts tend to be trolls.

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[–] naught101@lemmy.world 8 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

It doesn't accumulate and display anywhere though, does it?

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[–] remon@ani.social 19 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (1 children)

"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?

[–] BradleyUffner@lemmy.world 10 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

Our value comes from our superior bean-based posting economy.

[–] TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee 17 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (1 children)

idk about you but psychologically i never chceckef my ksrma scote but still pay some attention to how an individual comment/submission is perceived. cuz i took the time to write it and it's cool if people like/understand it and it's "important" if they dont (at least important to my rat brains)

as a departure from this mentality, i will not edit the typos

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[–] MemmingenFan923@feddit.org 17 points 15 hours ago

Reddit become more unusable because of the ads, bots, redditors who promote their onlyfans / business.

[–] rglullis@communick.news 13 points 16 hours ago (18 children)

Ironically, this account's bio and its history is screaming "I am a LLM posting a bunch of AI slop".

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[–] pineapplelover@lemm.ee 12 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

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?

[–] LandedGentry@lemmy.zip 8 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

I was offered $300 for my Reddit account once lmao

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[–] PanArab@lemm.ee 9 points 3 hours ago

The lack of karma is definitely a plus. Zionist trolls can downvote all they want, no one cares. In fact, there isn’t much of an incentive for any to invest in “downvote farms”.

[–] MITM0@lemmy.world 7 points 12 hours ago
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