this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
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Lemmy feels as a aplha/beta product that we ar all testing right now. Nothing wrong with that, in fact, I like Lemmy more then Reddit. But you cannot expect everyone to love it right now.
For Reddit its clear: you sign up, you search for a community and you subscribe.
Here, you sign up (if you don't get the spinning wheel). You search for a community. Oh, it is on another instance. What is a instance? Then you browse and see different Lemmy websites. You get confused, you heard something about Fediverse but what is it?
Also, there is no karma what important is for many users. Mod tools are extremly limited and all the apps you can use on mobile are in alpha/beta/in development.
There should be a easy to understand welcome page upon sign-up and I think this needs to be prioritized if we want to welcome (more) mainstream users. The post that explains how Lemmy works on c/lemmyworld doesn't cut it.
Karma is important? The only "use" for it is to do what? users farm it so adding karma or something similar would just make this place worse
Now, that said, there are ways to game those things too, but that’s the concept and some of the bigger benefits.
I still receive PMs every once in a while from random people on Reddit thanking me for comments that I've posted years ago. Those comments have less than 20 karma combined. I also have a comment saying "Nice." which contributes nothing and is sitting at almost 3000. Karma is meaningless.
Nice.
Have an internet point
Nice.
A picture of a kitten in the appropriate general forum or a statement agreeing with the general opinion on a top comment on some politcal forum will get many times more Karma than a post on an expert forum that took 30 minutes to validate and write and is anchored on a decade of domain expertise.
Beyond it's utility (for commercial social media sites) as a gamification element (a score, which incentivises people compete with each other in producing easilly digestible content that pleases the general population in a forum - which, note, doesn't mean its correct, well researched or anchored in genuine domain knowledge), Karma, at least as done in Reddit, is near useless.
Maybe some kind of per-forum Karma or just a per-forum summary of the reception of past posts for a user might be useful, but "score"-Karma just indicates the ability to produce lots of content (so, produced quickly, hence almost certainly not validated) which is popular in large forums (which are invariably the generic ones).
I like the idea of a karma or score on a per community basis. I'm reminded of the web forms that Reddit replaced; the karma-like systems some of them had worked pretty well.
I'm new and know nothing, but doesn't not having karma make it less attractive to bots? If there's nothing to farm...
Bots farmed karma on reddit because mods on some subs tied rights to participation to minimum karma. So bots were sent elsewhere, where mods were more relaxed, and farmed until they reached the target sub's karma requirement. Then the accounts were sold to advertisers and astroturf campaigns to sway posts or sell up/down votes.
Without karma there's no incentive to do any of this. I'm sure there are spammers and farmers thinking how to exploit lemmy right now. But just not having karma is a massive advantage. I still think that admins and mods should be able to see some user stat that aggregated bad behavior. Like number of removed posts, removed comments, downvotes, blocks from other users and bans from communities and instances. That way they could decide their actions based on the user reputation, as trolls and spam accounts would accrue a bad reputation really fast, and would encourage users to engage in the moderation process.
True, not having karma is detrimental for advertisers and excellent for users. Let's hope it never gets introduced.
In the r/CRSRacing2 sub (which I mod, kinda, until I can't anymore) the karma is used to stop new joiners to ask the standard questions that are answered in the 1st post the get to see... (pinned)
But that's about the only use I can think of. (other then useless bragging rights)
Yeah but this could be solved with a slightly more complex bot that tries to determine if a post is a question from the FAQ instead of just blocking new users.
Oh, in that sub users can read, reacts to posts and all kind of goodies, just not post new messages until they have enough karma. When they have been on Reddit for a while, they already have karma. That stuff is site wide, not just per sub. (and alas, automod isn't that good)
I'm not a karma whore, otherwise I would not post on Lemmy. But when you post something and you see that people agree with it is nice to see. I do not see the problem with karma.
Its a gamification tactic to keep people addicted to Reddit. It's definitively not a good thing, in my opinion
This is aggravated on Reddit by karma based moderation, e.g. minimum karma to post. This resulted in bots that repost popular content and / or copy popular comments to farm karma so they can bypass these tools.
Having moderated on Reddit, there's a good reason for min karma to post. It cuts spam account posting massively.
I have no doubt it used to work, but if you've ever browsed /popular or /all, it doesn't work any more. Bots farm karma for a few weeks, then hits 30 or 40 different communities with the same crypto spam. The bot gets banned, and another takes it place.
Rarely if ever browsed /r/all, I'm referring more to the niche subs that would get T-shirt spam all the time. Seemed to work well on that for a long time.
I agree!
Doesn't seeing upvotes on a certain post, as it is now, give you that feeling?
It does. But as I said it is not a really important feature for me. It is 'nice to see' but nothing more than that.
The only use for Karma on reddit is to enforce groupthink by making people with unpopular opinions wait 10 minutes on every post.
It is an alpha product. That's why the version number starts with a 0.
To be fair Reddit felt like a beta product for it's entire lifespan too
yeah I remember the reddit interface being uninuititve, confusing, and really hard to learn when I started out. I just got used to it
lol you’re not wrong, having a filter of sorts will keep the zombies out for a while. People forget that Reddit was at its best when it was a smaller website.
Nerds rescuing defeat out of the jaws of victory.
I mean, now I'm not on reddit I had plenty of time to read, try things and figure it out a bit.
Exactly. It's not a flaw, it's a litmus test. If someone is not willing to figure it out, then they're probably not the kind of people most would like to have a conversation with in here.
I have never cared about reddit karma. According to someone in reply to my saying I'll be gone July 1, "You have over a million comment karma. You'll never go, you live here." Well, all it took was an easy link in Plumbing for me to find and join my fellow Lemmings. I agree it should be an easier and clearer process to join, though!
I have accounts as far back as when Reddit became public and probably millions of karma across them. I eventually started cycling though new accounts every year to leave old baggage behind and get a fresh take on the place.
Karma and accounts are meaningless and karma was a nice way to trick your mind into valuing them way more than you should.
Reading all this just made me realize there's no karma! I never even thought about it. Crazy. I definitely would prefer this system.
But I do agree it may deter other people.
I... have a guide in my instances sidebar explaining those concepts to people.
You cant possibly expect people to take on the heavy onus of glancing slightly to the right. /s
You are giving more credit then I normally do. I have just started to assume people can't read at all.
I'd be so mad at you right now if I could read what you wrote.
It needs to be a pop-up and pop-under ad to get their attention, then the close button needs to be tiny and in a different part of the window to really keep their attention, and then it needs to loudly read the text of the window contents to make absolutely sure they've gotten the message.
Failing all this the text needs to be animated in an obnoxious way until they put their cursor/finger in the ad space so they really read it in case their audio is muted. /s
You can't assume most users even see the sidebar. It doesn't show up on the Jerboa app.
I think I understand a bit more, but could you answer a question for me? If my acct is on lemmy.world and we are defederated from beehaw, does that mean I can't subscribe to their instances? The subscribe pending kinda throws me.
You try to reply and it says you are not logged in there or something.
Well yeah. I'm sure they had a plan for growth. And I'm also sure Reddit screwed that up. They're doing their best.