On Reddit, you had the "fake internet points". On Lemmy the points are totally real, but still worthless.

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If Muskrat signs up for Lemmy he will pay someone for a high upload account.

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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.

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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.

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Dr. Integer Overflow.

My guess is, you’ll need 4 294 967 296 votes to start the boss fight.

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Yeah, that’s what I meant…just didn’t include the word “Reddit”.

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I love internet points they make me feel good

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I'm afraid we're fresh out of red leicester sir, it's been on order for two weeks.

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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.

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upvotes go brrrrrr

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if you're using Voyager it's a setting you can change to just show upvotes.

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Personally:

Upvote = I like it or it contributes well to discourse

Downvote = repeated trolling (first comment gets a pass, as do unpopular opinions, but doubling down on unambiguous and apolitical truths doesn't), spam, scams, etc.

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Wait wait, global karma is a thing now…? If so: not a good change. I thought it was a great idea to omit that, tbh.

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Sure, that makes sense.

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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.

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To me, voting is mostly a sorting tool.

I may upvote to make sure a great comment is higher than the good comments around it. I may even disagree with the comment to some extent, but I'm still going to upvote, because I think it adds something important to the conversation and more people should read it. However, there are also situations when I upvote to show my approval.

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What if we could trade in our Internet points for some sick cosmetics

🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️

Honestly, that way for obtaining flair and shit would be preferable to spending actual money.

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We all know that decorating your in-game character with cosmetics is the true endgame.

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I've been thinking recently that Lemmy would simply be better off without any comment votes. I've heard some instances disable them, but it still seems to be the norm. Group think already has enough pull given human nature. It doesn't need a boost.

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I mean I don’t think showing votes on posts and comments is inherently bad… but aggregating them to a user across instances seems not only technically challenging from a protocol sense (given that (de)federation and blacklisting is entirely in the control of the server admin), but also a feature that should be intentionally omitted. It’s genuinely not a useful metric in terms of building communities, which I think the lemmy stack should (and does) consider to be an essentially overriding priority.