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”.
this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
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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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"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.
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/@wittycomputer@feddit.org
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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
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
what do you want to discuss post it, no one has a montery incentive to make this site work for you, if you want it to do you gotta do it yourself, commentings a good step, now make a post about what you want to discuss so theres a more recent post on that community about it
Well it's partly my bias too, because when I joined Lemmy about 3 years ago, lemmy.world didn't exist yet and there were around a couple dozen new posts on All of Lemmy per day at the time.
I'm just really grateful for how much we've grown as a site, even if we're still hardly anywhere close to the scale of modern corporate social media. But imo it doesn't have to be, I like this.
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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.
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.
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.
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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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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.
You can turn vote counts off if you want to.
Yeah but I won't because I like dopamine.
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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 ?
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…
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.
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?
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.
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Any examples of this? It sounds terrible and should be addressed.
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