Lemmy’s design is focused on quality content by ditching the Karma farmers and addicts. No more chasing upvotes—people here actually focus on real value instead of feeding the ego.
EDIT: I know there are upvotes and downvotes, but the problem with Reddit is you can’t post in most communities if your karma or reputation is bad. This is a big problem because herd mentality prevails there and if ypu have unpopular opinions you’re basically censored.
Lemmy isn’t designed to milk ypur dopamine with notifications every 10 upvotes, so you focus more on posting valuable cont instead of farming for approval and upvotes.
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.
But should they?
One of the things I miss about reddit (and slashdot before that) was that if you got downvoted/downmodded a lot in a short amount of time, it would tell you to slow down (, cowboy). It helped to limit the damage when someone would go on a troll spree before they got banned.
Some subreddits did implement a “you must have x karma to post” rule, or account age, which I wasn’t always a fan of, especially if it was karma within a certain subreddit. I understand the logic, that it was intended to make people read the community before posting, but I’m not sure if it hit the mark. But it did limit brand-new spam accounts, which are already here on lemmy.
Some communities use a “santabot” to auto-ban accounts with more downvotes than upvotes. I’ve never seen it happen to someone who didn’t deserve it.
Unpopular opinions deserve to be silenced? Terrible idea. We already have way too much group think.
Hey, I’ve got unpopular opinions. No, it’s usually someone who is trolling.
It’s far from perfect but of the people I’ve seen, they are usually so bad that they are damaging dialogue, not fostering it.
Usually it’s eventually reversed if they are not a troll. People here are pretty decent and upvote most things.