How would you feel about awards on lemmy?

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.

Could we like, not immediately talk about monetisation 1 month after leaving reddit? If you want to support your instance host, you can ask for a way to donate.

I don't want the comments section to look like the inner cabinet of the North Korean army

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.

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.

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

You've been awarded lemmy gold!

Just donate if you want to support your server.

Awards are special actions reserved for people who pay, that don't improve the platform anyway. It's enshittification.

please no!! reddit looked like las vegas with that award system. terrible idea!

Eew please god no.

this

Edit: thank you for the gold, kind dear gentlesir or gentlemadame.

Edit2: wow I never expected to wake up to so many awards, who'd knew my most updooted comment would be about this?

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.

The growing server requirements..

I think like 99% of people picked accounts on the top 10 servers, and there are hundreds of more servers out there that have only a few users. Why do you all flock to the same server (Lemmy.world in particular) and then go "shit this is getting expensive guys". :)

Fediverse. Federated. Not Centralized. Not Reddit.

This technology supports speeding out, so many people (instance admins) share the costs.

I hate the idea very much. Thanks for asking.

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

Can't we just stick with normal donations instead of turning this place into a sea of rainbow vomit.

Could be a good way to fund servers, but I'm not sure how they can make it not sketchy as fuck. No way I'm trusting payment info to some random dudes server.

Wouldn't mind having a safe option to throw a dollar or 2 to a favorite server and get a nice shiny badge on the profile.

I don't want to see award speeches here on Lemmy. For example: OMG! THANK YOU FOR THE GOLD KIND STRANGER!!!!1111

Please no rewards. This is not reddit. I think a donation system would be much better way to go about it.

Let the content and conversations just happen. It's more organic that way.

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.

Permanently Deleted

Lemmy core devs are actually employed full time to work on lemmy.

No awards please

I don’t believe that awards should exist on comments or posts, but i do want the devs to gain some money off of this.

The best choice would probably be for them to set up ways to donate to them in my opinion .

I have never used it on reddit. I have always found them useless

I've never wanted anything less in my life.

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 think donations by themselves are fine. They don't need to have fancy stuff attached to them.

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.

Replace "rewards" with "emoji reacts" and "needs money to handle growing server requirements" with "appreciates your donations to help cover hosting costs" and I think you may be on to something.

I'll only feel good about awards if they're shitty

I think the idea is fine but the label of "awards" kinda sucks. Reddit often had them misused (e.g. giving wholesome on non wholesome posts). I like how discord frames it's super reactions and think it would be a better system. Only the name, the way they should act should be largely the same, I don't want animated reactions like discord does.

Here is an example of awards on Kbin.

On a serious note, I think the best implementation would be like a "trophy case"(like reddit) , where each instance can give any user an award for any reason that they can display in their user page. Doesn't get in the way of discussion, but gives you a sense of pride and accomplishment. (heh)

Unlike reddit, these award should be able to be turned off individually , since you don't want rogue instance admins to give you offensive "awards" for your user page.

You also shouldn't be able to see awards from defederated instances to prevent trolling.

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 think making likes and dislikes public is bad enough. You can probably guess how that applies to "gold".

How about this: groups of instances hosts get together once a year and host a large fundraiser where they then distribute funds proportional to who needs them and then any left over funds go intk a bank where they wait until servers need further funding.

Everything would be open and logged for auditing just like how things are currently anyway.

I’d like the idea if they either can’t be purchased, or the purchase goes toward your Instance’s hosting fees

Nothing is free on the internet. Its high time we accept that and choose to consciously and directly support services we use. It's just cleaner that way. It's also the only way to keep the internet free(free as in freedom).

Think of it like donating to Wikipedia - once I was able to give back, I started giving back. Soon, I hope to start contributing to lemmy OSS.

This is not even taking into consideration the practical issues with awards like the amount of dev and effort needed to create and manage a payment and "donation distribution" system.

I only gave awards after getting ones that gave me points to give awards, and then gave them either to sad posts or when someone said to someone else, I wish I had an award to give you so take this emoji! (🎖️) so I'd cover for them, as that was appropriate.

This is to say, I suck at awards protocol, and will write fancy comments whether I'm getting awards or not.

Much of the awards you see given out on Reddit was free. It was given out I think back when Alien Blue was bought out.

tl; dr: if you don't want to see seas of ads, awards are the better choice, in my opinion.

honestly, i would be fine with it. I'm not entirely sure what's the big philosophical deal, donations are harder to get, and I'm not so sure as many people are going to voluntarily go and visit the donations page. on the other hand, if the award option is immediately there within the post, one is much more likely to give it. lemmy can simply not sustain itself on the long run solely on donations, especially considering the mass of media content that may be posted. instances can run on them for now. i would prefer them running on dumb awards than on ads instead, and the mole of ads required to make up for the money needed could be really high we'd get reddit level advertisement. hell nah. also, it incentivizes the user on posting quality content if they see the chance of shiny lemming medals, maybe.

I have an idea. Now I thought about it. Lemmy will allow the server owner to create a "paid" community. The name of this community will be like "helpforlemmy.world" or "coffeeforruud". People will pay to be able to subscribe to this community. These communities will be passive and only people who want to help will have sent money by subscribing.

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.

This would be a good time to start using digital currency.

ETH or BTC or USDT or even XMR would be fantastic ideas.

Forget useless awards, we need c̶r̶y̶p̶t̶o̶c̶u̶r̶r̶e̶n̶c̶y̶ tipping abilities baked in here.

Edit: never mind