i’m doing it because I want to make the fediverse more friendly place, in hopes of making it more welcoming for new users, and the nicer place in general. But I wonder how much is just less bots.
i’m doing it because I want to make the fediverse more friendly place, in hopes of making it more welcoming for new users, and the nicer place in general. But I wonder how much is just less bots.
There was a time when Reddit showed not just the sum of upvotes and downvotes, but the counts of both. The best comments were always the ones with hundreds of both up and down.
Then they hid that, and you needed to use RES to resurrect the downvotes. Then they removed the separate downvote count entirely, replacing it with the controversial tag. Problem is that the flag didn’t differentiate between 5/3 (+2) and 5000/4998 (+2).
That was the end of Reddiquette, and the beginning of Reddit’s decline into mediocrity.
Do we know their reasoning behind replacing it with the tag?
They started inflating upvotes for sponsored content, about six years ago? It’s around when /popular/ became a thing. Posts with +1000 suddenly had +7000 or more.
Could an instance on Lemmy go commercial and try to do something similar? Let’s say .world continues to outgrow the others and in a year or two it’s time for them to capitalize on their size.
I guess at some point some instances will go “rogue” in one or more ways and it will be interesting challenges to the fediverse to deal with it.
Honestly I have no idea! Can instances fake numbers like Reddit did? I mean, they could use a bunch of bit accounts to fake upvoting and downvoting I suppose, but it’s all public info here instead of all being hidden.
Lemmy is AGPL, https://snyk.io/learn/agpl-license/ ie CopyLeft. The code is always free to use, modify & distribute. While commercialisation is permitted, it is ‘harder’ to enshitify or rather pointless because the code & all the modifications you make fall under the free licence - so people can still leave your instance & replicate it in a heartbeat. It’s designed to allow commercialisation by community driven donations - rather than selling anything. If the instance-owner wanted to go fully commercial & protect their code which has modifications for “sponsored content” , they’d have to abandon Lemmy & write everything from scratch - or give all that code with their modifications to the community - making it all rather pointless.