this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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It's the pendulum swing of pretty much every community on Reddit.
It happened to basically every big sub on Reddit once reaching a large enough size.
I could never wrap my head around the concept of "karma farming"
If it wasn't being used as a means for ego, there is monetary motivation. During the migration off reddit there was some discussion in the fediverse about how/where you could sell your reddit account and for how much depending on the karma.
Why are legitimate accounts valuable? Basically, if you're a company and you want to shill your products without spending money on ads, you can do "native marketing". It's basically spreading word about your product through normal comments and posts on social media, attpting to blend in with natural discussion and legitimate product reccomendations by real people. There's also some studies that indicate that people are more receptive to this sort of thing than more traditional marketing.
It's easier to masquerade as a real person when you can buy an account in good standing that has "real person" posting habits from before it was sold to you.
Like most subreddits it devolved over time, but hailcorporate used to be pretty good at calling out this sort of stealth marketing, like when posts would make it to the top of the picture based subs with product placement in the background. Like "I thought I could trust my new puppy home alone finally, but I came home to this" picture of a torn up couch, but the coffee table has fast food bags on it placed with the logo clearly visible. Sometimes they even reported groups of shill accounts by documenting coordinated changes in posting behavior across groups of accounts.
Man I remember watching this happen in realtime to r/AbruptChaos. There were two simple rules 1.the video must start out calm 2. there must be an abrupt moment where multiple things start happening at once. It slowly went from every post being great, to more than 90% of them being chaos the entire video or only having one bizarre event. Idk if it was moderation getting loose or karma-farming or both but hopefully its a while before that starts happening here.
Yeah! And it helps that there is no karma here. We just give a hoot about preservation and sharing. :)
I hope Lemmy never adds karma, or an aggregate score, or anything like that. The up/down votes on posts and comments are good enough.
Some third party apps add up the score and I hate it. Hoping they all add a setting to hide it.
I don’t mind a score, I’m just so happy there’s no fucking awards here. Those were such a plague, and I was so happy Apollo let me turn them off.
I never understood the karma thing... guess I'm old school - post to help others where you can and let that be the "karma" you are known for.
Even though it's meaningless I have seen some people in different communities voting down comments and posts they don't agree with like on Reddit which is unfortunate.
For the piracy community I hope it doesn't just turn into passive aggressive comments directing people to the megathread all the time.
I like helping people dig for obscure stuff
I’ll say I really only see downvoted for hugely unpopular or untrue opinions relating to the API stuff that happened over at reddit. Other than that everything mostly seems positive. I have stayed off political communities for the most part so far though.
That's my strategy too, but it seems like people just can't help themselves from dropping some political comment in non political discussions. It's so tiresome.
Sooo using the downvoted button for its intended use? I’ll never understand why people get mad when they use the dislike button for stuff they dislike lol
Original function and concept was to use the downvote exclusively as a spam filter. There's a reason those "I only work 5 hours a week and make 6 figures" posts you see on Instagram never happened on Reddit. They all got buried and hidden at the bottom
If you go to a subreddit without custom css on old.reddit and hover over the downvote button you'll be told to only use it for things that "don't add to the discussion".
I don't think it's for what you don't "like" but whether it was correct or relevant to the topic. So upvotes push important and relevant info forward. But I could be wrong.
you're right according to official reddiquette. the intended use of the downvote button is to de-emphasize irrelevant content and content that otherwise doesn't contribute to the conversation
i have seen it argued that its intended use use doesn't matter versus how the majority of people actively use it, similar to language and symbols. usage evolves with time, so meaning evolves with it. personally i prefer the intended usage but i can see where ppl who make this argument are coming from.
the lemmy instance i joined doesn't have a downvote button at all!
edit: here's the official reddiquette archived on the wayback machine
Your average reddit user stopped reading at the words "take a moment". Sad, but true.
tbh, i'd be surprised if most people ever even bothered to even open the reddiquette or terms of service or anything else. i'm not trying to put anyone down or be condescending -- i didn't read any of this when signing up either! i only knew about it because i read discussions about how votes should be used on reddit lol
it's true, most people are lazy and don't read and intuitively assume the downvote button is a dislike button. it's unfortunate, but i don't know if anything can reasonably be done about stuff like that because i don't think it's going to change that people don't read agreements or rules or guidelines before using a platform or program or service.
I don't think it's for what you don't "like" but whether it was correct or relevant to the topic. So upvotes push important and relevant info forward. But I could be wrong.
I know what you’re saying, but I feel like it does both tbh
Don't you think things might become muddled if it serves both purposes? How often do you see people on Reddit admitting they were wrong or compromising versus arguing and when one side concedes just downvoting the other persons comments?
On a sidenote one thing that bugged me about Reddit was people making a comment that agreed with another comment but added nothing but still getting up votes because people agree with it. For example "This" with nothing else.
Think a large part of it is context driven and what kind of community it is. I know in more serious threads, more helpful information was usually upvoted. But I get you, Reddit (the default subreddits especially) got too big for its own good and became the muddied groupthink mess it is today, and I definitely agree that those kinds of comments add nothing to a discussion. I suppose one kind of solution here would be to implement the boosting system like they have at kbin and have that as some "helpful/insightful" button, but I don't think people in general would agree to one standard just like that. They're more likely going to keep doing what they're used to, and that's the voting system. Not sure how to really tackle the problem myself 😅
Def agree a
boostbutton would make more sense and makes the intended purpose clear. At the end of the day I really only care that useful and insightful comments float up to the top.I haven’t downvoted a single thing since joining here. I feel like all I did on Reddit was downvote, there was just a deluge of irritating nothing-comments and posts there. There’s such better discussion here. I’ve already discovered some awesome stuff (like movie-web.app, holy shit) and had some great advice from nice folks about where to go for information on stuff I wanna do.
I hate to say it, but I think the relative inaccessibility of Lemmy makes the community wholly better. Reddit’s decline really began when any cunt with shit views could easily download their app, make an account in two seconds, and spew hate all over. Before that, it was just nerds like me who sat at their computer all day to chat.
Unfortunately I feel like that hate and those shitty views are going to spread here soon. I've already seen some people unnecessarily gate keeping over niche topics which is one thing but there's also hateful communities. I can block them but another always seems to spring up.
I hope Lemmy doesn't put in karma-like points here. Some people make a shit post to farm that karma.
But dopamine addict monkey brain love number go up!
You might be right about the cycle but there is certainly value to keeping a community small IMO. That chase for higher and higher numbers gets old and evidently has an inverse correlation to post quality.
I think it’s less about keeping the community small and more about not incentivizing karma or whatever scoring equivalent exists.
That's where the mods kick in. That's why Askhistorians are awesome and some other subs are not.
Subs die or prevail with the mods at hand. If the users grow, but the mods do not, and it becomes too much for the mods to handle, it will fall. It's easy logic.
The problem isn't the quantity, the problem is moderation in regards to the quantity of the userbase.
This might be a problem for shititjustworks. Where lemmyworld has been expanding their mod team and admins, I haven't seen posts of shititjustworks doing the same. They seem to be struggling with a subset of exploding-heads users posting horrid things and signing up under new accounts when banned, which doesn't help.
Also, some might suggest bots, and scripts to auto-remove comments and posts to help for moderation. While this might indeed help, there still needs increase in mods eventually if the userbase grows, but maybe less more than it is needed without any scripts.
Think like this: You need to go from point A to point B. You can do it walking, you can use a bicycle, or you can use a car. All of them needs energy (moderators). Some more than others. If you use tools, you need less, but still you need to use it. And if the distance of these two points become bigger, you need more energy, but of course a car helps tremendously, but still you need to focus on the car and use energy.
So a 1 person moderators with all the tools, bots and filters won't help much if there is an user-base of millions in the community.