They might also be meaningless internet points. Who knows.
Do the lemmy points actually matters ?
If you believe the points matter, they will, but only to some extent. If you couldn’t care less, you can also safely ignore the them completely.
I mean is it like a ranking system similar to Reddit?
Pretty much, yeah. The biggest difference is that the feed contains only the kind of stuff that should be there. Reddit likes to mix on some random trash that has nothing to do with anything besides engagement and ad revenue.
What if we could trade in our Internet points for some sick cosmetics 🤣
My profile already looks amazing, no need for mtx.
We all know that decorating your in-game character with cosmetics is the true endgame.
They’re really not meaningless though. For one thing, they allow moderators and admins to more easily detect trolls and bad faith actors. And on platforms or with add-ons that allow better tracking of vote history, it allows the user to more efficiently moderate their own experience, should they so choose.
Also, I think you’ve got to be kind of an asshole to not recognise that a little bit of validation from communities that you participate in is a nice thing to have and that downvotes can hurt to an extent, even if it’s not the same as getting physically slapped. And to be clear, I’m not pointing at you or anyone, I’m just riffing here. I haven’t even seen downvotes for a while now.
So yeah, I’d say they’re meaningless in a video game sense. You’re not going to win any prizes with them. But there’s a reason they exist, plus no one is immune to the effects of positive or negative reinforcement.
The first person to say the earth went around the sun got downvoted into oblivion… but they were still correct.
Upvotes and downvotes can be farmed by telling the various communities what they want to hear.
But, like you say, voting shows the level of interaction and traction your post gets - or doesn’t. I’m not sure there’s any other option at the moment.
When I first got on Lemmy, there were a bunch of discussions about getting rid of downvotes, and I thought this was a bad idea. For the most part, they do a good job of allowing the communities to self-moderate. Sure there are trolls that downvote everything, and they can rot in Hell, but they’re a very small majority. Generally speaking, up/downvotes provide an easy way to sort the wheat from the chaff in both posts and comments.
remember the heated discussions about the “proper” use of downvotes?
iirc there was a bloc of users who were very adamant that downvotes only be used for indicating the comment in question failed to adhere to the 1964 Chicago Manual of Style regarding commas or something, but everybody else was using it to say “don’t like it” and they were super-cheesed.
Damn! I forgot all about that! Maybe cause I didn’t take it seriously because no real publisher takes the Chicago guide seriously! MLA all day every day m-fers!
There are also trolls who constantly say controversial things. Looking at the downvote counter tells you something.
There are also people who… I don’t really know what’s going in the head of a person who intentionally insult everyone they come across. Did a nefarious little brother hijack that account or is that person really trying get some achievement about maxing out the downvote counter? Some people are a complete mystery. Either way, the downvote counter serves as a red flag.
Yeah, I don’t get it either. People who take joy in the anger of others are… a different breed.
Most people play Minecraft to build stuff. Other people just fill a village with TNT.
I guess those people also treat social media as a game of sorts. Instead of playing it the normal way, they try to find the most unorthodox ways to play it, and that results in a massive torrent of downvotes.
I don’t even know you have points on Lemmy. how do I check them
All depends on which app / UI you’re using I guess but it should look pretty much like Reddit almost everywhere. The only difference here is that there’s no grand total at the top of your profile like a high score. But when I was signed up on world, in the app I’m using you could see separate up and down vote counts for everything.
I thought about that too. If they were completely meaningless then why would they be used for sorting purposes. Turns out, they do mean something and they can be used for something.
I just disable “show votes” in settings and that’s it.
Ooh, so they can also be invisible internet points.
That just blew my mind, I didn’t even realize that was a setting.
I’ll sell you mine. Hell, I might even trade some points for a block of your finest cheese.
I’m afraid we’re fresh out of red leicester sir, it’s been on order for two weeks.
Haven’t been able to pay my bills with fake or real internet points yet. I can give you something equally worthless in return though. How about an AI drawing of a capybara?
If Muskrat signs up for Lemmy he will pay someone for a high upvote account.
You have a point.
You have many.
I love internet points they make me feel good
Whoever has the most points on Lemmy has to read the credits in a style of Clive Anderson’s choosing.
Whomever gets the most votes per month has to pay a share of the instance bill for the month
Now this is democracy
What happens to the ultra trolls who have a negative total?
Didn’t say it was limited to up votes. Just the total number.
And we should keep it that way. As soon as you can derive value from your profile karma and/or it means something, it’ll break any sense of earnest discussion some are trying to have in the first place.
Look at Reddit: any serious thread is peppered with might-be-funny one-liners in the hopes of catching some upvotes. This makes those threads harder to read through, although it does make for funny AI summary results.
It’s not just off topic banter to increase karma though. It’s also reposting old memes, jokes and stories that did well in the past to farm that sweet karma. Throw in some copied top-level comments too and some subreddits are basically perpetually living in déjà vu.
Let’s not try to aim for that.
Some of that could be karma grinding, but for the most part, that is probably just people having fun. Many come to social media platforms for recreational purposes.
upvotes go brrrrrr
Even more fake here because you can turn off down votes
But it is incredible the power those points have in our mind! Just now I’m being downvoted for a comment I did and I immediately felt the need to go there and justify the point I was trying to make. It took some effort to convince myself that I don’t care about that and that I don’t have to justify to those that didn’t understand my point.
Must confess, those points do seem to wield some strange power over my mind. Kinda scary actually. Some people have disabled those numbers entirely, and I’m beginning to see why.
Who will be the final boss in this battle?
I’m not following you. I see your previous comment was in a thread about video game bosses though?
It’s ok, it was a bad and unrelated joke.
I was just suggesting that the Lemmy system was better than the Reddit system, but that there might be a better system than this.
Lol that’s an interesting thought. I wonder what it would be like if instead of simply giving upvotes and downvotes, you could rate every comment/post on a scale of 1-10 or something. It probably wouldn’t work at all, but maybe there is some kind of system out there that would work better in the future.
Somewhere in these comments someone has said that it’s used to discriminate …ie “this account doesn’t have a very high karma” or not being allowed to comment in a sub cause you don’t a high enough karma.
Yes that is true on reddit. Not on Lemmy though afaik
Yeah, that’s what I meant…just didn’t include the word “Reddit”.
Dr. Integer Overflow.
My guess is, you’ll need 4 294 967 296 votes to start the boss fight.
