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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[–] oce@jlai.lu 113 points 1 week ago (17 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.

[–] TachyonTele@lemm.ee 22 points 1 week ago (1 children)

You can turn vote counts off if you want to.

[–] zqps@sh.itjust.works 51 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yeah but I won't because I like dopamine.

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[–] RampantParanoia2365@lemmy.world 54 points 1 week ago (9 children)

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

[–] fxomt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 43 points 1 week 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.

[–] AugustWest@lemm.ee 11 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week 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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[–] Rentlar@lemmy.ca 9 points 1 week 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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[–] AnarchiaKapitany@lemm.ee 51 points 1 week 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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[–] eran_morad@lemmy.world 32 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Well, and also because I can express my hope that a piano fall on Spez's head.

[–] RoamingWanderer@mander.xyz 28 points 1 week ago (4 children)

And we're allowed to say Nazi's are bad

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[–] Allero@lemmy.today 30 points 1 week ago (8 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.

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[–] Rentlar@lemmy.ca 28 points 1 week 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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[–] TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee 27 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week 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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[–] Rhaedas@fedia.io 23 points 1 week 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.

[–] Skavau@lemm.ee 18 points 1 week 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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[–] cm0002@lemmy.world 23 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week 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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[–] remon@ani.social 23 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week 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?

[–] BradleyUffner@lemmy.world 18 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

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

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[–] gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 22 points 1 week 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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[–] TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 21 points 1 week 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.

[–] wittycomputer@feddit.org 17 points 1 week ago (12 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.

[–] gedaliyah@lemmy.world 14 points 1 week ago (10 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"

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[–] catloaf@lemm.ee 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (8 children)

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.

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[–] rickyrigatoni@lemm.ee 19 points 1 week 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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[–] MemmingenFan923@feddit.org 18 points 1 week ago

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

[–] PanArab@lemm.ee 17 points 1 week 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”.

[–] rglullis@communick.news 13 points 1 week ago (6 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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[–] pineapplelover@lemm.ee 12 points 1 week ago (4 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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[–] surph_ninja@lemmy.world 12 points 1 week 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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[–] tauren@lemm.ee 12 points 1 week 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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[–] UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml 9 points 1 week 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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[–] MITM0@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago
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