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

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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.

StudSpud The Starchy

If we don't have fake internet points, then how will we know what to think? Won't somebody think of the points‽

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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.

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Ooh, so they can also be invisible internet points.

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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.

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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?

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You have many.

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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.

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What happens to the ultra trolls who have a negative total?

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Is gouda fine?

Björn Tantau

And my axe!

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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.

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I don't even know you have points on Lemmy. how do I check them

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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.

slazer2au

Didn't say it was limited to up votes. Just the total number.

Blaze (he/him)

Overview - gi1242 - kbin.earth

content aggregator and micro-blogging platform for the fediverse

(kbin.earth)

Reputation points 7099

Moderated 0

Blaze (he/him)

Since 0.19.4 you can hide downvotes in your settings. Unfortunately LW still runs 0.19.3

Blaze (he/him)

Since 0.19.4 you can also hide downvotes in your settings.

Blaze (he/him)

Lemmy.world users can't unfortunately (it arrived in 0.19.4 IIRC)

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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.