Why Lemmy is so superior to Reddit: No Karma, Just Value Content

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.

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"
- Genuinely curious, does that mean that, for you, getting downvoted gives you dopamine/a sense of accomplishment?
  
  Your above comment is in the negative when I'm making this comment. Does that feel good? Again, genuinely curious, hard to put a non-judgemental tone in writing.
  
  I can't relate to that feeling, upvotes and downvotes to me show how much a community agrees or disagrees with what I've said. Either what I said isn't right for the community I posted it in or maybe just a generally unpopular opinion if I'm getting downvotes. Might make me reflect but usually no big deal, I'm mostly here for the discussions, memes and current events. Outside of trolling I don't really see how getting downvoted might be seen as a good thing by a poster.
You can turn vote counts off if you want to.
- Yeah but I won't because I like dopamine.

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.
- 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.
Blocked? Why? If you don't want to see them why are you subscribed to them?

I mean if you want niche communities you create them and subscribe to them right?
- Browsing the global/all feed is one way to find new communities, and some people just like using it in general rather than defaulting to a subs-only view.

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.
- Might also discourage people from feeding the trolls.
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.
One feature I liked about Kbin was that my own comments weren’t upvoted automatically

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

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"
- This may not be an inherently bad thing given that low karma accounts tend to be trolls.
- notify you every time you get 5 upvotes
  
  wat
  
  Is that a new thing? I'm pretty sure it didn't do that before I left.
It doesn't accumulate and display anywhere though, does it?
- I think there might still be one or two apps that show a total.
It doesn't have karma in the sense that there is a publicly displayed total of every post and comment you made so you can point at your profile and be like "look how much karma I have!"

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

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

What makes you say that?
- Bio: "Your Digital Workshop. We build websites and host them, as well as create content for your social media."
  
  Posts: all on a bunch of different communities. All of them short, just one or two sentences.

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?

I was offered $300 for my Reddit account once lmao
- That's batshit crazy

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

Yes this

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.

Oh my sweet summer child,!

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

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

I think some apps will request all of your comment history and manually calculate karma but it’s not tracked by lemmy
Checks out

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. . .

south park smug

...what do you think "karma" is?

Downvoted. Not because I think reddit is better, but because this is clearly a circklejerk post, and what's more reddit than THAT???

Downvoted your comment. Because announcing downvotes is very reddit.
- I'm downvoting myself, cause idk man
Thanks for letting us know