karma is heavily abused by botters, spammers, and used as an excuse by reddit/mods to filter out people they dont like.
this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2026
327 points (96.1% liked)
Fediverse
42527 readers
171 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, Mbin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration)
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Just don't post any real shit post in the sublemmy shitpost. That will get you a ban. Only picture of fairies and unicorns are allowed for these poor sensitive souls. I though lemmy would be more educated than reddit but unfortunately there are a small group of loud little bitches everywhere ruining the world for everyone else.
People actually cared about Reddit karma?
That's one of fediverse's most underused selling points. Karma farming is impossible here.
What if we aren't coming from Reddit? I had good karma way before the internet ever existed because I tried my best to treat the world around me with love and respect. Now that I'm older and knee-deep in the world's tech I find I've become a bit irascible. Maybe that's more a product of age than social engineering. I hope so.
Then you simply won't feel the usual pressure to perform that people worried about karma feel before posting anything.
Maybe that's why people on Lemmy are also sort of extra curmudgeonly. They can be without facing algorithmic consequences.
Deleting a post because it got downvotes? Who are these babies who can’t take people not liking them?
Sometimes down votes are a sign that you're saying things people don't want to hear or the right things but on a crazy instance, but sometimes down votes are a chance for self reflection where you have to ask yourself "Am I the asshole?" and in the latter case yeah I'm probably just going to delete it. No apologies though, I'm not looking to be a saint here.
Yeah like that time I commented on horshoe theory on a tankie sublemmy (honestly my fault. That's like smoking next to the pump at a gas station) which really pissed off a lot of tankies lol.
It doesn't even take that. Sometimes it just takes one opinion literally anywhere that one tankie sees that hurts their feelings, and they brigade away. It's totally random. I've enjoyed them doing that on shitposts and memes on sub's totally unrelated to .ml madness.
It also makes me think that there's only actually like 10 or 20 tankies that each cycle through 30 accounts each, and one guy in Beijing that runs the "Propaganda: Other Platforms" desk coordinating of all. Or maybe that's just a function of their groupthink. Hard to say.
I'm still new to Lemmy but yeah I've noticed that too. They show up anywhere they see stuff they don't like.
What's kind of fun is you can basically summon them by saying "Trotsky wouldn't have been better than Stalin" three times in a mirror.
"Numbers, math, measures, and money were all independently invented my numerous civilizations because they are all usefull things."
I mean, that's a skill issue on your side.
Yeah I'm new here if it wasn't obvious by my prior comment haha
I will say in their defense that some people delete their comments/posts not because they care about "karma" but because they now feel they were wrong and are genuinely embarrassed or think that its continued presence is just an annoyance to other people.
That said, imo, unless you realize you've broken a rule in posting it or literally just posted by accident, it's healthier for yourself and the community to simply e.g. edit in a correction and a "mea culpa", even if you continue to get dogpiled for it.
I delete them when I don't have the energy to argue with people online about things. They can be the one terminally online. I'm not chasing them down that rabbit hole. Especially when you get comment after comment replying to you and you know they don't want to argue in good faith and you're just signing up to get cyber bullied by a brick wall.
I have, in the several years I’ve been here, deleted only a handful of comments - pretty much exclusively as a result of me being in a terrible mood and/or too drunk and commenting something very stupid or dickish, then reading it the next morning and going “what the fuck was I doing 🤦♂️”. That is thankfully vanishingly rare for me lol
As someone with social anxiety for some people seeing a large negative social response to something you said or did, even if just abstractly represented by a number, can be pretty distressing 🤷🏻♂️
I generally leave stuff up unless its misleading or something, but I can empathize with why someone would take it down
people not liking them
Half of lemmy:
load more comments
(8 replies)
I get that but there's also a certain "ugh" when a bunch of .ml folks find a post and want to yell at you about it.
Honestly the folks at .ml are actually kinda chill compared to that one instance with the bear.
So you'd rather be in a forest with a mali than in one with a bear?
Nah I'd pick like 500 bears first
We all gotta find out about the .ml someday.
For sure. But it's just tiring to get notifications for hours of someone yelling about shit libs or something.
load more comments
(3 replies)
load more comments
(4 replies)
I was on reddit for 10 years and have been on lemmy for 3. I'm still not sure what this is really supposed to mean.
There is absolutely a "lifetime" karma score available for users, its just not centered in peoples bios like it is on lemmy. But it absolutely exists..
And if people want to go for high scores more power to them. Get that dopamine where you can queen.
I think their point is that on reddit, life time karma impacts the comment placement order; showing more comments from higher karma accounts. So I guess weirdos would delete comments that started to get negative votes on reddit so they weren't seen as undesirable by the algorithm.
Also, aren't there some subreddits that let you post if you have a certain amount of karma?
load more comments
(7 replies)
RESPECTABILITY POLITICS IS EVERYTHINNNNNNGGGG
I don't think it's just downvotes that are the reason posts are deleted. What's being ignored, is what follows after downvotes. And that is, users being antagonistic over nuanced posts because the posts don't contain the kind of brainrot-meme-lamejoke kind of content that is the norm.
And it is never a good feeling getting dogpiled on for absolutely no reason other than just not appeasing to whatever expectancy that is there. Additionally, when there isn't enough activity aside from that, people can feel like 'what's the point?' because they simply don't have enough numbers of people engaging.
So this creates this discouragement within them to keep bothering.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Devastating? Jeez.
If you want to make a code change proposal, go ahead and make one. Otherwise, deletion is a feature offered to Lemmy users to use as they see fit. In fact some earlier (unrelated) proposals to speed up the software were rejected on the grounds that deletion is required to actually scrub the entry from the database, rather than simply making it inaccessible through the web. The scrubbing requirement may have been abandoned by now though.
I half remember a Lemmy client (~~Voyager~~ Jerboa?) with a user setting to automatically delete any post or comment that the user makes after 7 days or something. It had nothing to do with karma. I didn't use that setting but it seemed reasonable to me. Lemmy is a discussion forum not a long term archive.
I do like the idea of adding a wiki feature to Lemmy, to hold info of long term value to a community. Reddit already has something like that.**
The comments under the post is content that other users contribute to. It's very frustrating to be having what amounts to a conversation in the comments just for OP to thrash the whole thing. There's also the problem that a lot of deleted posts are bots probably building a "unique" dataset to sell after (just a hypothesis).
No reason why we can't just have the body and the username removed from the post while keeping the comment section imo.
Yes I see what you're getting at. IDK how a software change proposal would be received. It could be that the devs think that the other comments on the thread could somehow identify the original poster or the topic. On at least one reddit subgroup there's a bot that does that on purpose (copies the original post and maybe the author name into a thread comment). The reasons for the bot might be specific to the subreddit.
I like the suggestion in your last sentence. Some deletions might be humans knowing their posts are being used to build unique data sets to do whatever the miner wants to do with them.
Deleting a post doesn't delete the comments, it just makes then undiscoverable/inaccessible. See https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/5525
load more comments
(4 replies)
Is that why??? Oh man I was wondering why some people did that. Deleting their posts before I even have time to reply
view more: next ›