Why Lemmy is so superior to Reddit: No Karma, Just Value Content
Why Lemmy is so superior to Reddit: No Karma, Just Value Content
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.
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)
I just hope that Lemmy stays nice. I don't want it to reach 100 million+ users and be overwhelmed with RAGEBAIT and scams.
Instances will rise and fall, but we can always just crack open a cold one with each other and open a new instance.
No more switching services... finally!
Bots are already the ones posting most of the articles here. Disguised #ads are also on Lemmy and will become a problem if ever Lemmy grows substantially (which I don't believe will ever happen).
It will get corrupted, but we'll find the right crowd then, this shit always happens.
Ragebait here is saying you like Windows for its open design.
Same here, I like lemmy too, I just wish more people would use it
Then why are there so many beans and jeans on my front page?
Just Value Content
Literally right there in the title.
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.
Well, and also because I can express my hope that a piano fall on Spez's head.
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.
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.
Not really, because votes are only counted on a "by content" basis in any way that I'm aware of that is used
I put an edit since many had the same rebuttal.
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.
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.
It has already happened with this piece of cancer.
https://join.piefed.social/2024/06/22/piefed-features-for-growing-healthy-communities/
Find people who have low karma
When someone is consistently getting downvoted it’s likely they are a problem. PieFed provides a list of accounts with low karma, sorted by lowest first. Clicking on their user name takes you to their profile which shows all their posts and comments in one place. Every profile has “Ban” and “Ban + Purge” buttons that have instance-wide effects and are only visible to admins.
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.
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
I liked my karma back on my old reddit account (before being banned from supporting Luigi), but that is because I had the account for 12 years and invested too much time into it.
So far I'm enjoying the laid back nature of lemmy. Hopefully there will be more engagement, maybe some UI updates too. But overall I'm liking the switch. The conversations and posts feel more real.
I got banned for my support of Luigi as well. 15 year account over there. Sometimes you gotta say goodbye to a friend.
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.
For all the problems with karma it did allow for effective filtering. With most accounts on Lemmy being harder to create with captcha and approval it might not be needed
I disagree.
All bots and astroturfers had no problem getting 500 karma or whatever with one /r/funny repost. Which just meant new users can't contribute and every subreddit is left with power users and trolls.
This would be even easier to game on Lemmy as it's much more open and federated so getting 500 karma by a bot would be super easy.
The only reliable way to moderate is manual review with technical fingerprint. I work in online fraud detection.
Yeah i just hope it stays that way and users stay genuine. A while ago i noticed some users who were really stubborn about some weird agenda. Not sure if bot or just stupid human.
Also, nicole (the fediverse chick) is turning into a problem.
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”.
"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.
fun fact: i'm allergic to beans (i think), but i still like it here
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.
Piefed implements an "attitude" system which tracks up vote ratio and a few other simple metrics mods can use to identify bad actors
"bad actors" simply means "unpopular or politically incorrect opinions". Fuck that.
Nice! The more I hear about Piefed, the more I am inclined to check it out
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?
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.
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.
Perhaps a creddit system (for gits and shiggles)
There's multiple sorting types that you can choose for your feed. How do you want your content ordered?
I have a question though:
On Reddit the same post won't usually show up twice in my feed (unless it's a repost). So once you've seen it, Reddit notices that and kind of marks it as seen I guess.
Using Lemmy however I happen to see the same posts over and over again for days. Is there any way to fix this?
In addition to what's been said, I prefer to sort by top 6 hours in everything, and I get plenty of good fresh content all the time that way.
It's one of two things
-
Your app doesn't hide things that are marked as read. This is typically a setting you can choose.
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The same content is being posted to multiple communities or multiple instances (if you are watching global feed). This is not something that can be fixed I think.
- Apps could save a list of visited posts; and check for every post in your feed whether you had already visited a crosspost of it before. But it'd have to be implemented i guess.
I've heard certain clients or servers are able to spot crossposts and reposts, and mark them as crossposts/reposts. I definitely know that the app I use does not.
I think it's doable. It'd likely require hashing posts so that Lemmy apps can keep track of those hashes.
I have the same issue
Sometimes it’s the multiple posting, sometimes it’s just old posts that are still active and getting comments. Like 2 day old posts. Since they get so many comments still it’s likely that lots of other people are seeing them too
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I would like some tips as well. Currently i’m using voyager, which has a ‚hide read‘ function (for posts you’ve opened) and other than that I swipe hide posts that i’ve „seen“ manually.
Jerboa has an option to mark posts as read automatically (when scrolling over it)
I've never had that experience with reddit. I see so much again
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.
Meh, I'll leave down voted posts. It's the mods around here who don't seem to want to leave them up.
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"
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.
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.
Yeah it's got that old forum type feel still.
Isn't Karma essentially just the delta between upvotes and downvotes you get with some sort of weighting thrown in?
Because you can very much get that delta on here, it just isn't visible in the default Lemmy interface. If you look at your account through an Mbin frontend for example you can see the "Reputation points" value in the sidebar: https://fedia.io/u/@[email protected]
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.
Really? I have like 15 meme communities blocked, and there are comparably very few niche communities.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think people really underestimate how much goes into getting these algorithms tuned on legacy social media to create this kind of niche engagement. Actually I think there's almost a cynical instinct here on Lemmy where that kind of effort would be rejected if it was seriously discussed.
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.
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?
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.
We have that here too. FlyingSquid comes to mind.
I did count my likes from some top liked comments or posts of mine before. It kinda feels the same as karma, to me.
I'd say that people always find some way to get addicted to something, in whatever.
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.
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.
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.
Reddit become more unusable because of the ads, bots, redditors who promote their onlyfans / business.
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"
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.
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.
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!"
Just value content
Lemming36: Here is a high quality 46 MB photo of a shiny bat poop straight to .world HDD
did you mean: beans ?
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.
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?
It’s because Reddit specifically optimizes the site so that upvotes give you the maximum dopamine and keep you hooked on it like a crack. Most corporate social media thrive on keeping their users hooked through cheap tricks.
Lemmy Marxist Leninist Stalinist Maoist dev on the other hand doesn’t care or isn’t even able to do this because he doesn’t have an army of psychology experts to design it that way
So no you don’t get anything out of karma but your brain thinks you do and every aspect of the site is built to maximise this. I hate it
Yes this
Quality content? You mean the exact same stuff that’s on Reddit, often copied directly from Reddit?
800,000 “Trump bad! Look at this latest bad thing Elong did!” posts a day is not quality content
Be the change you want to see.
You mean the exact same stuff that’s on Reddit, often copied directly from Reddit?
No. We mean all the stuff that Lemmy gets that Reddit either doesn't get at all or gets a day later than Lemmy.
“Trump bad! Look at this latest bad thing Elong did!” posts a day is not quality content
This bad thing that Trump did looks like very worthwhile content.
Ironically, this account's bio and its history is screaming "I am a LLM posting a bunch of AI slop".
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…
I'm not saying you're wrong, but I (as a cis guy) haven't seen anything againt women. Do you have any examples?
I've not had a problem here, do you have examples of this? Not saying it does not exist, more curious as I've found this space a lot kinder than reddit.
"Which is why cis women make up <10% of the Lemmy side of the fediverse. It’s a disaster for women here."
I mean I can believe that since it's based off of Reddit but do you have a source for that?
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.
I know multiple IRL women who don’t share your complaints about Lemmy. Maybe people are shitty to you because you’re shitty to them.
That's how it is anywhere that doesn't have any real moderation. There are those actively seek to harass anyone who isn't right leaning cis hetero white male. Lemmy like every other modern social platform is an open air forum available to the entire 7 billion population of the world. Moderators don't see 99% of the posts. And 99% of what they do see, they don't take for than a few seconds to consider. The nefarious abusers are almost always more subtle than moderators give thought to. This allows harassment to run rampant. This is a fundamental issue with social media. As as I'm concerned it's an intractable problem (brought you by free speech absolutist libertarian bros).
That's as opposed to the traditional internet boards where posting was orders of magnitude lower volume. Site administrators and moderators cared about fostering a good community. Moderators saw a not insignificant portion of the content posted. Not just reports. Forum members used one pseudonym. No throwaways like the reddit/lemmy paradigm. What you posted was attached to you as a person. Therefore there was consequences to being an asshole. In other words deterrence.
Also I find it kind of amusing how they out themselves for their simpleton world view. I've noticed a pattern where they take superficial readings of a post to identify keywords/phrases. Then assign identity to that user. Then engage in harassment based on that.
For example say I posted something that was sympathetic to women. Ergo they assume I am a woman. And they engage the usual framework of belligerent replies appropriate to that assumed identity. I know for certain the key words in the second sentence of this comment already has triggered someone for sure.
Edit: The prior replies are just *chefs kiss*. I can't tell if they're being intentional or if they're just that dumb. I guess that's part of the fun isn't it.
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?
when is the last time you came across a post on Lemmy that is specifically for/about women or women’s issues
The same amount of time I came across a post that is about men's issues. A really long time. The vast majority of comments should not be about identity politics, unless it is a feature of the specific community.
I just got downvoted for asking for an example of this. I have been using Lemmy quite a bit in the last month (way more than I should) and I have never come across what you're talking about. I might be wrong, I haven't seen all the posts created on Lemmy, that is why I'm asking for an example.
If I make the claim that 4chan is full of racist, nazi fucks, that is easy to verify and provide examples of in a few minutes. Similarly, the burden of proof should be on the one making the claim.
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.
No, the downvotes are because nobody was victimizing her here but she went off on a rant and called me horrible things that I don’t deserve to be called. Sexism can go in any direction and I don’t tolerate any of it.
Any examples of this? It sounds terrible and should be addressed.
Shit, I'm sorry. I had close to 1m before I bailed. It was all quality comment karma though. I just have no life.
Thanks, kind stranger! Here's an updoot and Reddit Silver!
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.
Mbin has karma though (for Lemmy users too). So karma farming is certainly a possibility in the fediverse.
No, there's karma. I've had more than a couple guys point out mine is negative.
For context for the people downvoting this: Lemmy doesn't have karma, but Mbin does and it shows karma for Lemmy accounts too.
I think some apps will request all of your comment history and manually calculate karma but it’s not tracked by lemmy
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. . .
Oh my sweet summer child,!
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.
