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Shameful. Absolutely shameful.
Shameful. Absolutely shameful.
I will leave and block any instance that federates with Meta, including this one, and go start my own instance, and only federate with others that also block it if I have to. Don’t you dare allow their corporate garbage into our space 😠
It’s not actually a true representation of the community’s opinion of you though. And that’s kind of the problem. People and companies can and will rig those votes in their favor, distorting important political debates and wreaking all kinds of havoc.
Karma is an inherently destructive thing for many reasons. For people, it is a representation of other people’s approval of you, so they’ll do anything to boost that number as highly as possible, even going so far as to make fake karma farming accounts, create botnets to upvote themselves and downvote opponents in arguments, and post garbage content instead of engaging in meaningful conversation with other people. For corporations, it’s a marketing tool they can exploit to manipulate public opinion, by creating or buying high-karma accounts to convince people to buy shit, or to mass downvote people who point out flaws in their arguments or products, or figure out what they’re planning and try to call them on it. They can use karma to discredit opponents, astroturf, and even sway elections indirectly. It’s one of the reasons why civil and political discourse have completely collapsed in the USA.
That list is not exhaustive
That’s the kind of toxic mindset that killed Reddit.
You literally can just download the Lemmy program and install it on any computer you want to use as a server. I used to run Mastodon servers a few years ago, and it’s not without its hurdles, but with some Linux knowledge and a little bit of server admin knowhow, you absolutely could.
You’d need a computer you’re gonna use as a server, put Linux on it, then install NginX or Apache on it, then Lemmy, then set everything up and get a domain name to attach to the computer’s IP. Question mark, profit. It might be a bit of an oversimplification, but with some research and work, it can be done.
We could self-host using our own computers and infrastructure, and secure them from hackers.
Discourage people from using karma. You actually can turn off scores in your settings.
If any instance decides to put advertising on itself, leave immediately and get everyone else to do the same.
It’s not just a problem that can be ignored away. Troll and bot accounts that farm karma will ruin the site just as effectively as they did on Reddit regardless of whether people block them or not – their presence illegitimizes the site and ruins the atmosphere. No one wants to hang out on a site that is populated with them, they want a site with humans that want to talk to them for their own sake.
Like there are a myriad of reasons people need to be worried about this, and that people are being so flippant about it just because it points out something negative about Wefwef (not saying you are doing that) is deeply concerning.
Apps need to be pressured not to do that, but I agree with you that we need to speak to the Lemmy devs about the situation too. I’ll do that too, for now, we must address the fact that Wefwef, the most popular Lemmy app, is displaying karma scores when it really should not be.
🤔 Can instance admins actually stop apps from tabulating karma? How does that work? Do they ban the whole app or stop certain data from being accessible by the API or?
No one who has been on Reddit for a long time believes that. It doesn’t represent anything but someone’s skill at gaming a broken system, and people sacrifice what actually matters: well thought out social discourse for its own sake, because of it. It’s how people actually respond to it in the real world. It’s what we all saw with our own eyes.
Evil political groups exploit karma systems to cause destabilization in countries and game political systems; it happened here in the U.S. We remember that shit and we don’t want it repeated.
If there is no karma, that won’t happen, and we can enjoy what makes Lemmy shine: positive, meaningful conversation for nothing but its own sake.
The OG Lemmy site doesn’t keep post and comment vote totals, only Wefwef does, hence the thread.
I obviously don’t, but everyone else does, and it’s not even something most people can really help. Fucking social media corporations had their marketing departments come up with the stupid idea knowing that people would be addicted to the dopamine hit from being upvoted.
At least on the OG Lemmy site, being upvoted or downvoted doesn’t actually affect you. But an app purposefully bringing back something the devs did not implement in the first place for good reasons, is deeply problematic and people need to speak out against the practice.
We have a chance to break the cycles of the past and we ought to take it.
That was certainly the last straw, but it was a lot more than that.
That’s what they did here, and this app is bringing back the very same thing people here are trying to leave behind. It’s too dangerous to just allow them to do that, and I know for a fact I am not alone in that opinion. Framing something that is objectively destructive in terms of “something a population doesn’t like” is sus as fuck. What do you stand to gain from an app doing such a terrible thing?
No it doesn’t. People already do that on their own; all karma does is encourage all of the toxic shit we ran away from. Why would we shit all over a new community by repeating a senseless and destructive mistake?
As Lemmy picks up steam, more and more people will migrate over and leave Reddit in the dust. It’ll take a while, but it’s already starting to happen, and Reddit’s already starting to suffer negative repercussions as we saw with ad partners leaving them.
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