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.

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.

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[–] [email protected] 114 points 1 month ago (3 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.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You can turn vote counts off if you want to.

[–] [email protected] 51 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Yeah but I won't because I like dopamine.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 month ago (7 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 month ago (7 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"

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago

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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[–] [email protected] 59 points 1 month ago (9 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 month ago (5 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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (7 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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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago (7 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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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month 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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[–] [email protected] 52 points 1 month ago (13 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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[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 month 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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (2 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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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 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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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 month 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.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 month 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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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 month 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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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 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?

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month 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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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 month ago (6 children)

I just hope that Lemmy stays nice. I don't want it to reach 100 million+ users and be overwhelmed with RAGEBAIT and scams.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 month ago (5 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 month ago (20 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.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 month 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"

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (9 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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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 month ago (12 children)

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…

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 month 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”.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 month ago (5 children)

Give it another year or two and we'll have some website that tallies the karma of lemmy users. Clout is an insidious disease that grows like a social cancer.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 month 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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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 month ago

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

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago (2 children)

by ditching the Karma farmers

How, exactly? Decentralization aside, lemmy is a reddit clone, but on a smaller scale. The same human psychology that drives reddit also drives lemmy. I think your assessment is more applicable to mastodon because there you really have to figure out how to fill your feed with content.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago (6 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?

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago (4 children)

We have plenty of astroturfing bots & powermods here. Once karma becomes a worthwhile metric for some to filter by, it’ll be abused & manipulated here, too.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Downvoted. Not because I think reddit is better, but because this is clearly a circklejerk post, and what's more reddit than THAT???

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Downvoted your comment. Because announcing downvotes is very reddit.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I just wanted to let everyone know there is an option in your settings so you don't see upvotes or downvotes.

None of these imaginary points fucking matter.

So why don't you do yourself a favor and uncheck these boxes and not give a fuck what others think about your comment.

I know I have.

(Lemmy is rad as fuck)

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