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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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 hour ago (1 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] 1 points 57 minutes ago

Perhaps a creddit system (for gits and shiggles)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 16 minutes ago* (last edited 15 minutes ago)

Just value content

Lemming36: Here is a high quality 46 MB photo of a shiny bat poop straight to .world HDD

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 hours ago
[–] [email protected] 36 points 6 hours ago (9 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 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.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 6 hours ago (3 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] 3 points 2 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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 hours ago (2 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 48 minutes ago

maybe my definitions of healthy and active are extremely biased, but these communities have several days-old posts with low numbers of comments and limited reply threads. not only that, but there's lots of news articles about the industry but not much stuff about GAMES, be that random reviews, discussions, or memes.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 53 minutes ago

Last one seems not to exist.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (2 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

Ok...then what do you recommend for a varied random feed of news and posts from various communities?

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

For me it's to find new content (i block most news/politics communities since they're most of c/all) but there's a lot of attention and eyes to be gained from all.

But most of this, as i said; is buried by the generic popular content.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (1 children)

Well yeah, that's what ALL is right? The most generic stuff. You can browse communities and subscribe as needed.

If you are going to use all It might help to enable scaled sorting.

It boosts small communities in the sort.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 hours ago

I'll try, thank you 🙂

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[–] [email protected] 66 points 8 hours ago (1 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] 9 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

You can turn vote counts off if you want to.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 hours ago

Yeah but I won't because I like dopamine.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 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?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

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

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

I was offered $300 for my Reddit account once lmao

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 hours ago

Not crazy if you want to advertise on the down low. I worked a summer once doing that shit, it's insidious. Blockers don't even block someone pretending to like a product.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 7 hours ago

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

[–] [email protected] 21 points 8 hours ago (4 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] 16 points 8 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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[–] [email protected] 21 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

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

[–] [email protected] 17 points 8 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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 hours ago (9 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] 11 points 8 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"

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 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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[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 hours ago (2 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 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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