I hope Lemmy's internet points never become a thing people view as important. The way people act on Reddit to get a handful of up votes is embarrassing.
this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
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Is never counted as a total right? As long as it stays that way it shouldn't.
I've seen some front ends for Lemmy total it.
Yeah it exists in the metadata, so certain front ends can display it and other platforms like Mbin and PieFed show it as a reputation score or something like that.
I think the way that Lemmy handles it is perfect, there's no reason to display the cumulative score and it definitely acts as a barrier to free and open discussion because people start censoring themselves and judging other users by their profile rather than the things they actually say.
I don't think it is in Tesseract or Alexandrite but I feel like I vaguely recall Jerboa, the mobile app, having it.
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They're really not meaningless though. For one thing, they allow moderators and admins to more easily detect trolls and bad faith actors. And on platforms or with add-ons that allow better tracking of vote history, it allows the user to more efficiently moderate their own experience, should they so choose.
Also, I think you've got to be kind of an asshole to not recognise that a little bit of validation from communities that you participate in is a nice thing to have and that downvotes can hurt to an extent, even if it's not the same as getting physically slapped. And to be clear, I'm not pointing at you or anyone, I'm just riffing here. I haven't even seen downvotes for a while now.
So yeah, I'd say they're meaningless in a video game sense. You're not going to win any prizes with them. But there's a reason they exist, plus no one is immune to the effects of positive or negative reinforcement.
When I first got on Lemmy, there were a bunch of discussions about getting rid of downvotes, and I thought this was a bad idea. For the most part, they do a good job of allowing the communities to self-moderate. Sure there are trolls that downvote everything, and they can rot in Hell, but they’re a very small majority. Generally speaking, up/downvotes provide an easy way to sort the wheat from the chaff in both posts and comments.
remember the heated discussions about the "proper" use of downvotes?
iirc there was a bloc of users who were very adamant that downvotes only be used for indicating the comment in question failed to adhere to the 1964 Chicago Manual of Style regarding commas or something, but everybody else was using it to say "don't like it" and they were super-cheesed.
Personally:
Upvote = I like it or it contributes well to discourse
Downvote = repeated trolling (first comment gets a pass, as do unpopular opinions, but doubling down on unambiguous and apolitical truths doesn't), spam, scams, etc.
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I thought about that too. If they were completely meaningless then why would they be used for sorting purposes. Turns out, they do mean something and they can be used for something.
I don't even know you have points on Lemmy. how do I check them
All depends on which app / UI you're using I guess but it should look pretty much like Reddit almost everywhere. The only difference here is that there's no grand total at the top of your profile like a high score. But when I was signed up on world, in the app I'm using you could see separate up and down vote counts for everything.
The first person to say the earth went around the sun got downvoted into oblivion… but they were still correct.
Upvotes and downvotes can be farmed by telling the various communities what they want to hear.
But, like you say, voting shows the level of interaction and traction your post gets - or doesn’t. I’m not sure there’s any other option at the moment.
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I just disable "show votes" in settings and that's it.
Ooh, so they can also be invisible internet points.
That just blew my mind, I didn't even realize that was a setting.
What if we could trade in our Internet points for some sick cosmetics 🤣
My profile already looks amazing, no need for mtx.
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I'll sell you mine. Hell, I might even trade some points for a block of your finest cheese.
I'm afraid we're fresh out of red leicester sir, it's been on order for two weeks.
Is gouda fine?
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I've been able to exchange some of my points in the Lemmy Store for a rub on tattoo.
rub on
( ͡ᵔ ͜ʖ ͡ᵔ )
For those that don't know this is in reference to Reddit's process of "vote fuzzing". Most explanations online explain it as altering the votes to prevent things like rigging the vote or an individual going to someone else's page and down voting everything they've posted or commented. I think in reality it's more obtuse and erratic. I don't know if the level of "fuzz" varies based off the age of the post or the total number of votes.
Even more fake here because you can turn off down votes
I'm pretty sure you can do that on individual subreddits as well. Do you mean on an instance wide level?
Admins have the option to disable it on a per instance basis.
Since 0.19.4 you can also hide downvotes in your settings.
And we should keep it that way. As soon as you can derive value from your profile karma and/or it means something, it'll break any sense of earnest discussion some are trying to have in the first place.
Look at Reddit: any serious thread is peppered with might-be-funny one-liners in the hopes of catching some upvotes. This makes those threads harder to read through, although it does make for funny AI summary results.
It's not just off topic banter to increase karma though. It's also reposting old memes, jokes and stories that did well in the past to farm that sweet karma. Throw in some copied top-level comments too and some subreddits are basically perpetually living in déjà vu.
Let's not try to aim for that.
Some of that could be karma grinding, but for the most part, that is probably just people having fun. Many come to social media platforms for recreational purposes.
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Whoever has the most points on Lemmy has to read the credits in a style of Clive Anderson's choosing.
Whomever gets the most votes per month has to pay a share of the instance bill for the month
Now this is democracy
What happens to the ultra trolls who have a negative total?
Didn't say it was limited to up votes. Just the total number.
I love internet points they make me feel good
But it is incredible the power those points have in our mind! Just now I'm being downvoted for a comment I did and I immediately felt the need to go there and justify the point I was trying to make. It took some effort to convince myself that I don't care about that and that I don't have to justify to those that didn't understand my point.
Since 0.19.4 you can hide downvotes in your settings. Unfortunately LW still runs 0.19.3
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If we don't have fake internet points, then how will we know what to think? Won't somebody think of the points‽ 😭
Who will be the final boss in this battle?
I'm not following you. I see your previous comment was in a thread about video game bosses though?
It’s ok, it was a bad and unrelated joke.
I was just suggesting that the Lemmy system was better than the Reddit system, but that there might be a better system than this.
Lol that's an interesting thought. I wonder what it would be like if instead of simply giving upvotes and downvotes, you could rate every comment/post on a scale of 1-10 or something. It probably wouldn't work at all, but maybe there is some kind of system out there that would work better in the future.
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Dr. Integer Overflow.
My guess is, you’ll need 4 294 967 296 votes to start the boss fight.