Fact is, the Lemmy ecosystem needs money to handle the growing server reqirements as more people migrate as well as the development cost of new features (I know Lemmy is OSS but the devs should still get some compensation for their effort).
Seeing how much some reddit users love awards so much that they cant stop giving money to Reddit to award posts protesting the api change, this could be a great way for users to voluntary support the ecosystem. It can be easily ignored by users not caring about them (clients could even add an option to hide them), but users liking the feature can go wild and this time the money goes to volunteers keeping this alive instead of greedy admins, power mods and investors.
Though there would be some big organization questions attached: attached:
- Which server handles the payment? A centralized one, the one where the post was made or the one where the user giving the award account was created.
- How will the money be shared between the Devs and the individual instances in a way that is fair but cant be abused easily.
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I’d like the idea if they either can’t be purchased, or the purchase goes toward your Instance’s hosting fees
I am more for going on with donations, with some kind of useless leader board for volunteering activities, to introduce some kind of “safe” and fun gamification.
I have no idea what this could be, I am not very good in creating games
Absolutely, use the Wikipedia model, ask for donations with a target to cover cost.
With an option for ongoing monthly donations (it’s membership, of sorts). I support a few indie spaces this way and really like it.
Yes that would absolutely make sense too.
I’d love to see an awards system! It’d be great to select the instance that receives the funds with the default being where their account is registered.
Letting users decide where the money goes to is much better yeah.
I think they should be able to set percentages. See here: https://lemmy.world/comment/1068820
I think it’s a distraction from the actual interactions. Same way karma is.
I’m all for supporting instances and open source developers, but any kind of reward for a donation creates wrong incentives. Donation is called a donation because it’s a gift without expecting something in return.
I fully agree with you, karma “whoring” is a serious problem on reddit, awards could lead to the same behavior here if implemented.
Donations are the best way to support the platform, if you want to be “visible” as donator, opencollective allows you to post a message about it, there’s also a sort of top donators page, that’s more than enough in my opinion.
I can understand the mindset, but I worry most people don’t think like this.
The thing is, that small rewards for “donations” will likely make the people much more willing to spend money in the first place. Even if it’s as small as a sticker on someone else’s post that costs the servers involved like a handful of API calls. But when a 1€ award is 3x as popular as the 1€ donation, it will greatly increase the funds available to the instance and, hence better servers, more features etc
There is a reason many YouTubers sell discord roles. Many people are willing to spend 5€/month for a stupid discord rank, so I don’t see why it’s wrong to profit of people willing to buy awards
If you prefer direct donation, having something like awards won’t stop you but if someone wants to buy that overpriced sticker, they can as well.
I’m not opposed to ways for people paying out of their own pocket to host to get some funds to help cover that, but I worry it’ll never be well implemented.
I think a good first step would be a default and built in way for server admins to add a small donations banner listing the hosting costs of their instances. That also does have issues though, of course. The person hosting is definitely putting in the most money, but other moderators and admins are contributing labour too.
It’s a tough subject, and many solutions would be rife with abuse. Shit sucks.
I agree with @[email protected] : Giving the user the power to decide where the money goes to is the best option. This eliminates the need for a centralised account with a system to spread the money, which would definitely lead to a lot of arguments.
The user could select something like 20% lemmy devs, 30% instance of community, 50% instance their created the account on. This way the user can decide who gets their “donation”
I don’t see how that’s any different than what we have now. I’m donating to the Lemmy devs, lemmy.world, and lemm.ee through their individual donation pages.
Unless your saying there should be a centralized option, but I don’t see a reason for that.
Why don’t server admins open OpenCollective accounts or something similar. It seems to work on Mastodon. I would be willing to pitch in to help finance the instance I’m on.
Your instance admin has https://www.buymeacoffee.com/tedvdb
You can verify the link here: https://feddit.nl/u/tedvdbSome at least do. The Lemmy backend devs have an Open Collective page and so does the Lemmy.world admin.
I’ve never wanted anything less in my life.
I have never used it on reddit. I have always found them useless
I used them a couple of times, I like them; I use them when the post I REALLY like doesn’t have much upvotes. Like when I see post with 24 upvotes that deserves 400+ I give it gold, so the user will still feel happy.
Disclaimer though, I received all my points from winning a big sub contest, I didn’t ever pay for them.
I don’t love the awards from Reddit, but I would like to see something like this (unpopular opinion, I know). Instances need funding.
I don’t care about what the awards are themselves, I care about the way the funding works. I would love to see the funds split in a two tiered system.
Here is a general example of my idea. When a award is purchased it gets split into two pots. One pot is a general pot that gets disbursed to those running the instances based on whatever metrics and intervals agreed upon. The other part gets assigned to the reward itself. So in this example let’s say an award costs one dollar. 90 cents would go to the pool to be split, the other 10 cents would be tied to the award. So if you award a post on an instance it goes specifically to that instance itself. Instances could even set a percent split with community moderators of the 10 cents. That way you could fund moderators (if that ever becomes needed)
You could even split part of the award reward with the commentor assigned to it… but that puts a weird feeling in my gut and I feel like it is a bad idea to monetize the content itself.
There is a lot you could do with this and a lot more would need to be fleshed out, so I am just thinking out loud.
I never cared for them on Reddit and used third party tools to remove or hide them.
I don’t like that they can be used to shop visibility.
I would like that it gives an opportunity to fund instances but I would hope we could discover another way to do this.
You’ve been awarded lemmy gold!
“Thank you, kind stranger”
Edit: Wow, I didn’t expect this to take off like this. Thanks for all the upvotes! xD
Edit 2: I can’t believe I’m getting so many updates, thank you everyone!!!
I’m really not looking for a Reddit replica. And um, being rewarded for a good comment isn’t really something I need. Or anyone needs. I think getting a cookie for a good comment can be left behind
Edit to add - I should have read the rest of the post more carefully, but I stand by my initial sentiment. Money needs to be funneled into those working hard on this, but I don’t know, I don’t want more and more Reddit features coming out
I pass. Gamifying social interactions leads to abuse and lowers the quality of posts, comments, reports, etc. It’s a streamlined path to enshittification.
Only user-provided 🏅🐭 awards here, at most.
Even “user-provided awards” should be kept out. It provides nothing substantial to the conversation.
It’s like saying “This 👆”, “I agree”, or “Take my upvote!”, all of which can be expressed by simply voting on the comment, which actually has an impact.
Fully agreed. That’s why I said “at most” because that’s the worst I’d tolerate, but I still think upvoting is already enough.
Can we leave the karma system and awards with Reddit? Allowing voting in comment sections for pseudo-moderation by the users is good, but when it turns into a scoring system the conversation devolves into a competition to see who can craft the most palatable opinion to get the most imaginary internet points.
Despite all my thoughtful and helpful comments I made in my 11 years on reddit, you know what my top comment was?
- Comes in
- Kills the Queen
- Tanks the economy
- Leaves
What a legacy.
47k updoots, and 27 awards.
This right here.
I used to (a very, very, very long time ago) contribute on StackOverflow. How much? I haven’t even logged in for over 7 years (and didn’t contribute a good two years before that) and my account is still in the top 0.71% overall.
Let me tell you how I racked up that score.
I monitored the site in off-hours (easy to do with my time zone). I found new questions for the most popular programming language on the site (back then this being Java). I then did what the asker should have done: I Googled. I then wrote an answer (a correct answer: this is important) and got first-responder points.
And here’s the funny thing: I don’t program in Java. I hate the language. I know enough Java programming to be dangerous. VERY dangerous. But 18% of my points came from answering Java questions. A further 15% came from answering C++ questions which is at least a language I know … but also despise and won’t work with any longer.
This is how easy it is to game fantasy Internet points: whether “karma” or “gold” or whatever you like. And if you start providing these fantasy Internet points you’re going to start attracting people for whom high numbers of them are important and they will do what I did to the detriment of the ecosystem. (I mean at least in my case my answers were right. Disingenuous that I of all people answered them, but at least correct. This is not the case for all points whores.)
THANKS FOR THE GOLD KIND STRANGER.
I think it’s interesting to look into but it might be abusable. The payment system will be so complicated on top of the legal issues that one would need to deal with.
Upvotes are fine for now.
