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.
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.
That was a horrible system. If you didn’t get positive karma on your very first post, your account was ruined because you could never dig yourself out.
I believe it’s an unhealthy habit, silencing unpopular people. Some of us low profile oddballs like to share our thoughts too
That’s true, but it’s gotta be balanced by limiting the fallout of extreme cases on other users
I do like the slow down, cowboy think and I’m pretty sure reddit had that extremely early on as well
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.
A lot of people can’t tell the difference and just assume that someone with an unpopular opinion must be trolling.