…And WTF events related to Karma led me to come back here, because Lemmy really surpasses Reddit on all points (even if it cruelly lacks users compared to Reddit).
On some subreddits, we ask to have a Karma in comments good enough on all Reddit to be able to publish one on the community in question (it happened to me on /r/iOSBeta). I don’t know you but these communities shouldn’t get involved in what I do on other Reddit communities, it doesn’t make sense.
Another problem is users who feel superior to others because they have a better Karma. There was a discussion on r/privacy that talked about alternatives to Fire Stick and Chromecast, and one guy had proposed Apple TV, another had replied that Apple was worse than Google and Amazon when it comes to data collection. So to this guy I told him that he would have to be a little clearer by giving evidence. And there, he answers me « You’re a fresh 0-Karma account, you bring proof ».
Well, that’s what Reddit is for me. A huge social game where only Karma allows you to express yourself freely. It reminds me of the episode of Black Mirror where everyone has social points.
In short, I stay on Lemmy.
Well, I think its not right to think that Lemmy is better than Reddit. Its just different. Both are susceptible to similar problems, and both suffer because of these.
For example, that this one community I once saw related to conservative American politics. Before I blocked it (I block all political communities regardless of what it is about), I took a look and every single post there was sitting at like -80 to -120 votes. And there were a lot of posts, like at least 75+. It is very clear that particular community was a victim of constant, repeated brigading, and the fact that it stayed like that must mean that either the instance admins have no power to stop brigading or they approve of brigading that particular community. Surely you can see how this is not a great concept if it suddenly gets applied to a community you happen to like or post in.
Additionally, in the not too distant past there was a problem with users spam posting CSAM all over Lemmy. Fortunately, the moderators were very fast to clean that up and remove the bad actors, but unfortunately because of the sheer volume of posts and limited number of moderators, some of us saw things you would actually never see posted on Reddit, and would probably not even see posted on 4Chan. Reddit, as unsavory as the place has become, has significantly more moderators that could work much faster to clean that kind of thing up, and they have more tools built into Reddit to prevent that. It was a growing pain for Lemmy, and likely one that Reddit had in its past as well. In the end it was a good learning experience for Lemmy instance owners and moderators alike, but when it happened it was not a fun time.
Lemmy still has the same problem Reddit has with its vote system. It can still be manipulated, it can still make people feel superior or insecure. The only difference is that SOME ui frontends have the option to hide vote scores. And from what I know communities cannot limit posts based on account vote score (but I may be wrong).
Lemmy is a nice alternative to Reddit, particularly of you are a politically left leaning person that has an unreasonable obsession with either Karl Marx or Linux, but to say that it is better than Reddit in every way completely ignores the fact that it suffers from the same problem Reddit does:
Humans can post basically whatever they want and can hide behind near complete anonymity.
That will always bring out the worst in people. It already happened here (as I mentioned before, and especially when Hexbear was going psycho on every other instance before they got majorly defederated), and it will probably happen here again. Just like Reddit.
We can’t even escape these problems per se, because communities irl end up developing the same way.