There is a huge emphasis I see on just growing community size and creating an alternative to reddit.
Back in the day we used to hang out in irc chats with 5-10 active users or forums with few thousand users max. I made friends there I visted across countries. Years after Id log in and people would ask how you’ve been.
I had a reddit account for over 10 years and I dont think a single person would recognize my username. Its always felt like people aren’t talking to you but trying to appeal to the whole audience for points. Reddit exploits our psychology for attention but nothing humane is gained there. The super massive “community” ends up as a void where 99% of posts go completely unseen and any discussions suffer heavily from mod mentalities.
If this a place where even just ten people call home but feel good doing so, that is more good than a million being miserable. Maybe the best alternative is not to be reddit altogether.
Besides, good things have a natural tendency to spread, we don’t need to focus on it.
One of the major flaws of R*ddit was the upvote/karma feature, which turned posting into a performance and a popularity contes, as you’ve mentioned. I hope as Lenny and the fediverse develops, we can shed those features in favor of a more simple and equitable system.
In the end, we will always need a way to sort content. that could be from engagement, comments, or some kind of Karma system.
Its just unfortunate that that was then tied back into your account.
Using upvotes to sort content is one thing. That doesn’t mean the score has to be visible to everyone.
In principle I agree with karma turned posts into people gaming the system.
However, I’ve heard one of the struggles for Lemmy Communities is to keep people from lurking.
Karma might be a stupid feature but it is/was a cheap way of driving participation - it could help Lemmy (especially at this early stage). Even if karma encouraged people to just up voted, it still raised visibility on the more interesting topics.
I read this the other day and thought it could be a cool idea: https://phys.org/news/2023-06-social-media-distrust-buttons-misinformation.html
Sounds very cool. I haven’t read the study, but I think a key part of this is how the post is promoted. If more “trusted” posts are promoted, could the button effectively become the new like button? Can bots abuse this system? “Distrusting” a post demotes it? All those things have to be taken into consideration specially when accounting for bots and brigading. Nonetheless, looks promising