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 think the only way to really fix this is to make votes a limited asset that accounts have. There are forums where this has worked okay: bodybuilding.com forums has a reputation system where accounts are limited in what they can give to other voters.
As long as “karma” is unlimited it suffers from the same problems whether you count it in aggregate or not. As some other commenters have said, people still seek validation in individual comments. I know because I do too.
Removed by mod
I would imagine if you made karma points limited on the spender side rather than unlimited, then it might make users “try harder” to get validation, thus improving the quality of content on average.
Or it all could be bullshit and fail. Hard to say. You are right though, it’s all manufactured for engagement.
The problem I think is that users do not distribute votes based on “quality” but by how much they like the content. Which is only the same in some people
It’s the same as with democracy, in theory we should elect quality politicians but we elect those we like
But hey this is long clear I guess since the implementation of Reddit decade ago