Fediverse

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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

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

No, there's karma. I've had more than a couple guys point out mine is negative.

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

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.

Thanks, kind stranger! Here's an updoot and Reddit Silver!

Shit, I'm sorry. I had close to 1m before I bailed. It was all quality comment karma though. I just have no life.

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. . .