Fediverse

Visible post and comment scores are still going to produce some of this behavior. You may not have a total karma but people will still get dopamine from seeing their posts getting upvotes and be reinforced in doing the same again. So the same mechanisms of social pressure and uniformisation are at play. The worst being when people delete their minority opinion comments because of the downvote pressure.

I wish that commenting would automatically upvote a post. It's far too late to fix the use of an upvote as approval of subject discussion and not just an agree arrow, but I often...no, I almost always forget to upvote the initial topic even after leaving a few paragraphs. One would hope whatever algorithm is used also considers activity and number of comments in a rating or suggesting it to others.

Lemmy is small enough, that without even seeing a karma total, some users have an unofficial "rapport", where I've seen them around enough to recognize whether they are the type to go against the grain, a perpetual troll, or a usually reasonable person with an unusually spicy take.

I just hope that Lemmy stays nice. I don't want it to reach 100 million+ users and be overwhelmed with RAGEBAIT and scams.

Really? I have like 15 meme communities blocked, and there are comparably very few niche communities.

Lemmy still relies on upvotes for ranking the feed, so, farming them makes sense, it's just isolated per each post.

And I believe the issue might get worse as Lemmy grows. The reason Reddit came up with karma and all that is because the more people you have on your platform, the more baddies you have to account for.

For now, Lemmy is small enough for a basic interpersonal reputation to mostly just work, but as it grows, we need something else. Presumably, not karma.