this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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Reddit Was Fun
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Discourage people from using karma. You actually can turn off scores in your settings.
If any instance decides to put advertising on itself, leave immediately and get everyone else to do the same.
Out of curiosity, how will Lemmy pay for itself is it continues to grow? What's the long term plan? Donations?
It works for wikipedia, and that's a big, monolithic organization. The distributed nature of Lemmy makes it more possible to run off donations, because individual instances are smaller and require less exotic hardware. They don't have to store the entire corpus of Lemmy content, etc, etc. Smaller instances means less human resources and attendant management. I think most of these instances are still run by volunteers as passion projects.
I don't think that will work as instances start getting to the million user mark. 10M... I'm interested to see 1) if Lemmy actually gets that big and 2) if users condense on one or a handful of super-instances or some other form of organization develops.
I can imagine, for example, Electronic Arts starting their own instance for arms-length game sites that might attract a large swath of people, or Nikon sponsoring an instance that specializes in photography and imaging-related communities.
If Lemmy gets huge and begins to face this issue, I'll be glad for it, even if whatever solution has shortcomings. Let's see those million users.
I wonder if it would be possible to create an explicitly ad-supported instance of Lemmy that would insert unobtrusive ads into its feeds.
I do think there could be an audience for that if it meant the instance was reliable, performant and well moderated.
I'm sure it's possible, but maybe this is a good time to reflect on what that would mean for the experience. Sure, maybe you wouldn't mind, and maybe some other users who do would filter them out client side, but personally it feels like ads even if they start innocuous, eventually evolve into something invasive, deceptive, or both. At a certain point, if people aren't clicking through and buying, the advertisers aren't making money. It becomes almost a predatory relationship with the host trying to squeeze money out of the users whatever way they can.
Maybe not everyone could, but I feel a lot of people would rather throw in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on rather than deal with that.
Just out of curiosity, what is your argument against using karma?
Karma is an inherently destructive thing for many reasons. For people, it is a representation of other people's approval of you, so they'll do anything to boost that number as highly as possible, even going so far as to make fake karma farming accounts, create botnets to upvote themselves and downvote opponents in arguments, and post garbage content instead of engaging in meaningful conversation with other people. For corporations, it's a marketing tool they can exploit to manipulate public opinion, by creating or buying high-karma accounts to convince people to buy shit, or to mass downvote people who point out flaws in their arguments or products, or figure out what they're planning and try to call them on it. They can use karma to discredit opponents, astroturf, and even sway elections indirectly. It's one of the reasons why civil and political discourse have completely collapsed in the USA.
That list is not exhaustive
A big part of the problem that led to bot spam and karma farming wasn't the existence of karma but the fact that most of Reddit treated karma as a proxy for legitimacy, so it was often used for Reddit accounts that were going to be sold off for astroturfing purposes.
I've always followed the old reddiquette: if the comment is contributing to the discussion, upvote it. Even if you disagree with it. Reddiquette used to be a big part of reddit, but stopped maybe 10 years ago
But I like my meowmeowbeans!
I don't think karma was ever really that big of an issue, the problem was the belief that karma meant something. Mods and admins treated karma like it meant legitimacy, like a sybil test, and it's not. Also the upvote/downvote system got so destroyed by misuse and a complete disregard for reddiquette, and often gets combined with karma, but that's a seperate issue.
The points never really mattered until people decided they did.
Thanks for the reply. I'd never really cared about my Karma so it is interesting to hear about the issues it can cause. I think your right, Lemmy would probably be a better place without it.
All my homies hate comment Karma
When you say karma, do you mean having visible post/comment scores or visible total user scores - or both?
I can see the argument against visible post scores as it can lead to dogpiling, but I do think it can provide a valuable indication for what the community consensus is around that post.
Regarding total user scores, I don't see the harm at all.
Personally, I quite liked the feedback karma gave on Reddit.
I thought they were talking about how what goes around comes around /s