Max

back when reddit was not just a meme shithole, karma was used to motivate people to post quality content. 90% of the stuff posted on reddit nowadays would get downvoted into oblivion back then. typo in the title or image caption? downvoted. repost? downvoted. low effort? downvoted.

but with growing popularity the flat number of (usually young) users grew that hat other quality standards grew and these kind of faults were ignored. meme became bigger, and there was a general shift in reddits userbase. they changed the algorith to calculate your score and suddenly you could get just so.much.karma from cheap posts.

some communities became very strict in their content to avoid shitposts. some used karma to prevent trolls participating in their subs. nowadays high karma accounts are being sold as they can be used to participate in subreddits with a high reputation (due to participation limitations) and upvoting/downvoting and commenting on certain post can very heavily skew its visibility and impression of the discussed topic on “neutral” users.

so yea, karma used to be a good thing (good content motivation), became a bad thing (karmawhoring), which was still utilized for good things (participation limitation), which led to even worse things (karmafarming bots).

lemmy will have to deal with this sooner or later. there will be bots brigading communities on certain topics and there need to be some kind of indicators to distinguish honest users and trolls.

ok sorry :(

i am just worried that the idea of karma on lemmy starts to gain traction :D

thats another thing. no internet points, so no bots to farm them. upvotes really only indicate the quality of the post or comment that receives the upvotes. no way to use the total number of points to claim validity of your posts or to brag with them.

that being said, at one point we will need to figure out a way to identify and prevent bots that just post propaganda. while we wont have the problem of karmawhoring bots, they dont have the need to karmawhore and can try to spread their propaganda immediately.

I feel the same, but it helps to not just browse “subscribed” but to also check out “local” and especially “all”

You can also take a few minutes and check out the “communities” overview and join those you recognise by name or browse a few of them to decide if you want to join them.

It does not matter on which instance most of the time. Also, I am subscribed to similar communities on different instances, cause why not. Worst case scenario: I get duplicate news.

Another comment in this thread you might already have seen by now:

https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/17100252

And there were other instances mentioned in other threads as well.

Some problems are not tied to a platform, but to their users. Power hungry people try to grab power where they can. If they can’t be mod on reddit, they move to Lemmy. Here they can try to grow “their” space. If a topic already exists on one instance, they can move to another and shape the narrative and enforce rules how they like.

if that is your primary motivation, i have bad news for you… you might have to move on. here you will get bans for downvoting “the wrong” comment or post as well.