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.
this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
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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"
I had a discussion about using the Slashdot style voting rather than the Reddit style.
It not only has the additional tag, it has the max "upvote" display limit of 5, and the display code will expand and promote the best rated comments, while hiding the garbage.
I think comments on most forums would benefit from there being no 'big upvote' number to chase, as well as making the highest rated comments in a thread of say, 200, more obvious.
No, it was only up or down, but you could also choose to add a descriptor, funny, insightful, informative, flamebait, troll, and a few others: https://slashdot.org/faq#meta3
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Yes this
Reddit become more unusable because of the ads, bots, redditors who promote their onlyfans / business.
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
I was offered $300 for my Reddit account once lmao
That's batshit crazy
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.
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.
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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.
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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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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"
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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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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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.
Ironically, this account's bio and its history is screaming "I am a LLM posting a bunch of AI slop".
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