Lemmy is small enough, that without even seeing a karma total, some users have an unofficial "rapport", where I've seen them around enough to recognize whether they are the type to go against the grain, a perpetual troll, or a usually reasonable person with an unusually spicy take.
this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
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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.
You can turn vote counts off if you want to.
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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.
For games, make sure you are subscribed to:
All are healthy and active, and I'm sure there are more. I suggest cross-posting stuff from a niche community you contribute to, to one of these, to bring traction to the smaller community.
maybe my definitions of healthy and active are extremely biased, but these communities have several days-old posts with low numbers of comments and limited reply threads. not only that, but there's lots of news articles about the industry but not much stuff about GAMES, be that random reviews, discussions, or memes.
Well it's partly my bias too, because when I joined Lemmy about 3 years ago, lemmy.world didn't exist yet and there were around a couple dozen new posts on All of Lemmy per day at the time.
I'm just really grateful for how much we've grown as a site, even if we're still hardly anywhere close to the scale of modern corporate social media. But imo it doesn't have to be, I like this.
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Pretty much any game or random hobby I'm on at the moment, I could count on finding a decently populated and active Subreddit. This is what's missing from Lemmy.
Yeah, but in this day and age we’re going to grow with easy-to-consume content e.g. memes. Once growth hits a critical mass then the niche communities will come.
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.
Ok...then what do you recommend for a varied random feed of news and posts from various communities?
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I think people really underestimate how much goes into getting these algorithms tuned on legacy social media to create this kind of niche engagement. Actually I think there's almost a cynical instinct here on Lemmy where that kind of effort would be rejected if it was seriously discussed.
With time we’ll get there! The more we slowly contribute to the niche topics, the more we’ll see these communities grow. I’m sure there are a sizable amount of people from Reddit looking for their niches on here to start growing more for them to fully hop over. I’ve got a good chunk of mine on Lemmy now, but still a handful of ones I haven’t found a comparable server for yet. If I understood running a server more I probably would have started a couple of my own for these topics.
Is there anywhere on Lemmy people can request for servers to get started? I think that would be helpful to have since missing topics are some of the barriers of entry for some people.
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That’s right! I said good shit in tech posts that was worth upvoting so others can see. Then there was an bad comment I wrote in patientgaming that deserved the downvotes and not worth reading.
Just value content
Lemming36: Here is a high quality 46 MB photo of a shiny bat poop straight to .world HDD
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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
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Reddit become more unusable because of the ads, bots, redditors who promote their onlyfans / business.
Just don’t be a woman on Lemmy.
Sure, most people won’t downvote or harass you just for being a woman (a lot will.. we didn’t get the best of Reddit at all, and I doubt the new adoptees are any better…) but they will often enough make things difficult even if they aren’t actively causing problems.
But men of Lemmy (aka the vast majority of the user base since they ran off all the womenfolk) don’t care. They see that as quality control or some dumb shit, because THEY aren’t interested in woman things, so nobody should be, or they think their “as a man” comments should be important or some shit... Whatever the post is about. If it doesn’t cater to them, it can fuck right off.
Which is why cis women make up <10% of the Lemmy side of the fediverse. It’s a disaster for women here.
But I wonder how long you’ve been here. Most of the posts of this nature are from very new accounts and they don’t know the problems yet…
The downvotes prove your point. This topic needs more discussion, but most of the times when women bring this up, their comments get downvoted to hell. It's quite a "gotcha" for someone to ask to see "examples" when most of the examples we've come across or created will be buried or have since been deleted.
Alternative question - for those that don't believe this is an issue, when is the last time you came across a post on Lemmy that is specifically for/about women or women's issues (especially one posted from a woman's perspective)? Or even better, go ahead and make such a post. Watch how fast the downvotes come.
I expect this comment to be downvoted the same way as the parent comment was, the same way that past posts I've made and read about women's issues have been downvoted on Lemmy. If men want this place to be inclusive for women, they have to do their part to support us - not downvoting our concerns, simply because they don't experience the same issues, is the absolute bare minimum. Otherwise, why would we keep posting/commenting about our issues when doing so invites a downvote cascade?
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Any examples of this? It sounds terrible and should be addressed.
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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.
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Yes this
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"
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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?
It’s because Reddit specifically optimizes the site so that upvotes give you the maximum dopamine and keep you hooked on it like a crack. Most corporate social media thrive on keeping their users hooked through cheap tricks.
Lemmy Marxist Leninist Stalinist Maoist dev on the other hand doesn’t care or isn’t even able to do this because he doesn’t have an army of psychology experts to design it that way
So no you don’t get anything out of karma but your brain thinks you do and every aspect of the site is built to maximise this. I hate it
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