Cab companies can afford to hire a dedicated mechanic to handle those kinds of problems. That makes even more sense when you consider they purchase mostly similar models over the years. An individual finding a transmission problem will take it to somewhere that is likely inexperienced with those problems and they get overcharged as a result.

Depending on your location, many municipalities are starting to cover the costs of installing EV charging stations at apartments. They usually ask you to pay a monthly fee for the service.

That sounds like a Stingray.

It doesn’t really matter that much if the Lemmy protocol itself doesn’t build the html - there is still a process that involves multiple steps that may or may not be server side in order to build the comment trees that we see.

There’s a node, yea! Oh hey… that node has children! Awesome! All of those exclamation points are either server side or client side lookups. Hurray! Oh look it’s a wikiepedia article. No exclamation point lookups allowed.

Wikipedia’s page serves simple. The documents get edited and processed into html when submitted.

Lemmy dynamically builds the html for every single http get.

That’s a very different cost for a server.

Maybe it has to come down to gold. The servers cost money to run, and people come here to share. So those who share get gold and those who do not must purchase gold. It may even be that the amount of page views per some unit of time must be paid for with gold, whether gifted or purchased.

I am afraid that the fediverse will be taken over my moneyed interests who can afford to run the servers indefinitely and promote content that no one wants. This would at least allow the user driven servers to survive.

Then instead of using up/down votes, we could use flags. Flags for “Funny”, “Insightful”, etc, and one of those flags could be “Gild” that must be purchaseable. Those flags could be used in a similar manner to up/down votes, but with more granularity. Certain communities could automatically sort by “Helpful” or “Funny” based on their desires. Communities could even create their own custom flags.

An alternative would be to move toward a flag system instead of up/down votes. Funny, Insightful, Helpful, Unhelpful. Then the users could choose if they want the funny shitposts or the useful comments.

I think karma was used as a way to indirectly help their promotions. High karma accounts would have higher prominence on big subreddits, so their posts were more visible and thus more profitable. Reddit (company) wanted big communities, so the problem was a non-problem to them because it drove fake engagement and made their metrics look more valuable from a sales perspective.

Personally, I like that the individual posts and comments have up/down votes. That allows the community to self moderate to some extent. That lightens the load on moderators to police bad content, while simultaneously promoting good content. It also means that the community rules do not need to be so heavy handed as to suppress dialog - take /r/conservative as an example.

But I do not believe that those votes should carry over to any kind of metric that affects users or communities in other ways. Perhaps a hidden metric available for moderators is useful for identifying problematic posters. But any kind of publicly visible metrics turn into some obnoxious internet point scoring game that invites shitposters and spammers and bot farmers.