Too many people are confusing the two. Whenever lemmy.ml or its devs do something stupid, people go “Lemmy is getting worse and worse,” or “I’m leaving Lemmy,” or worse, “I’m leaving for Beehaw.”
If you’re using Beehaw, then you’re using Lemmy. Lemmy is the software these instances run on. If you don’t like lemmy.ml, join another instances that have rules that match your philosophy. Some instance hosts authoritarian or fascist shit? Turn to another Lemmy instance. Lemmy.ml is not even the biggest instance. People who just joined and are unfamiliar with the platform will just think the entire Lemmyverse is run by autocratic admins if we don’t get our terminology right.
Lemmy feels as a aplha/beta product that we ar all testing right now. Nothing wrong with that, in fact, I like Lemmy more then Reddit. But you cannot expect everyone to love it right now.
For Reddit its clear: you sign up, you search for a community and you subscribe.
Here, you sign up (if you don’t get the spinning wheel). You search for a community. Oh, it is on another instance. What is a instance? Then you browse and see different Lemmy websites. You get confused, you heard something about Fediverse but what is it?
Also, there is no karma what important is for many users. Mod tools are extremly limited and all the apps you can use on mobile are in alpha/beta/in development.
There should be a easy to understand welcome page upon sign-up and I think this needs to be prioritized if we want to welcome (more) mainstream users. The post that explains how Lemmy works on c/lemmyworld doesn’t cut it.
Karma is important? The only “use” for it is to do what? users farm it so adding karma or something similar would just make this place worse
- it can be used to differentiate troll accounts from people that make generally liked comments
- it gives users a rush and encourages participation
- it can help with ranking
Now, that said, there are ways to game those things too, but that’s the concept and some of the bigger benefits.
A picture of a kitten in the appropriate general forum or a statement agreeing with the general opinion on a top comment on some politcal forum will get many times more Karma than a post on an expert forum that took 30 minutes to validate and write and is anchored on a decade of domain expertise.
Beyond it’s utility (for commercial social media sites) as a gamification element (a score, which incentivises people compete with each other in producing easilly digestible content that pleases the general population in a forum - which, note, doesn’t mean its correct, well researched or anchored in genuine domain knowledge), Karma, at least as done in Reddit, is near useless.
Maybe some kind of per-forum Karma or just a per-forum summary of the reception of past posts for a user might be useful, but “score”-Karma just indicates the ability to produce lots of content (so, produced quickly, hence almost certainly not validated) which is popular in large forums (which are invariably the generic ones).
I still receive PMs every once in a while from random people on Reddit thanking me for comments that I’ve posted years ago. Those comments have less than 20 karma combined. I also have a comment saying “Nice.” which contributes nothing and is sitting at almost 3000. Karma is meaningless.
In the r/CRSRacing2 sub (which I mod, kinda, until I can’t anymore) the karma is used to stop new joiners to ask the standard questions that are answered in the 1st post the get to see… (pinned)
But that’s about the only use I can think of. (other then useless bragging rights)
I’m not a karma whore, otherwise I would not post on Lemmy. But when you post something and you see that people agree with it is nice to see. I do not see the problem with karma.
User engagement is important, and karma is one way of driving that engagement. Pretending something’s not important from your high horse because you don’t understand it just makes you look like a spez.
I have never cared about reddit karma. According to someone in reply to my saying I’ll be gone July 1, “You have over a million comment karma. You’ll never go, you live here.” Well, all it took was an easy link in Plumbing for me to find and join my fellow Lemmings. I agree it should be an easier and clearer process to join, though!
I have accounts as far back as when Reddit became public and probably millions of karma across them. I eventually started cycling though new accounts every year to leave old baggage behind and get a fresh take on the place.
Karma and accounts are meaningless and karma was a nice way to trick your mind into valuing them way more than you should.
