What if we could trade in our Internet points for some sick cosmetics π€£
this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted, clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts: 1
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My profile already looks amazing, no need for mtx.
Honestly, that way for obtaining flair and shit would be preferable to spending actual money. Especially if I could turn them in for a physical Lemmy shirt to wear IRL.
We all know that decorating your in-game character with cosmetics is the true endgame.
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.
I agree. At the very least they say "this many people liked what you said or posted enough to click this button", and that is far from meaningless.
When I first got on Lemmy, there were a bunch of discussions about getting rid of downvotes, and I thought this was a bad idea. For the most part, they do a good job of allowing the communities to self-moderate. Sure there are trolls that downvote everything, and they can rot in Hell, but theyβre a very small majority. Generally speaking, up/downvotes provide an easy way to sort the wheat from the chaff in both posts and comments.
remember the heated discussions about the "proper" use of downvotes?
iirc there was a bloc of users who were very adamant that downvotes only be used for indicating the comment in question failed to adhere to the 1964 Chicago Manual of Style regarding commas or something, but everybody else was using it to say "don't like it" and they were super-cheesed.
Personally:
Upvote = I like it or it contributes well to discourse
Downvote = repeated trolling (first comment gets a pass, as do unpopular opinions, but doubling down on unambiguous and apolitical truths doesn't), spam, scams, etc.
Sure, that makes sense.
To me, voting is mostly a sorting tool.
I may upvote to make sure a great comment is higher than the good comments around it. I may even disagree with the comment to some extent, but I'm still going to upvote, because I think it adds something important to the conversation and more people should read it. However, there are also situations when I upvote to show my approval.
There are also trolls who constantly say controversial things. Looking at the downvote counter tells you something.
There are also people who... I don't really know what's going in the head of a person who intentionally insult everyone they come across. Did a nefarious little brother hijack that account or is that person really trying get some achievement about maxing out the downvote counter? Some people are a complete mystery. Either way, the downvote counter serves as a red flag.
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.
I don't even know you have points on Lemmy. how do I check them
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.
I love internet points they make me feel good
I hope Lemmy's internet points never become a thing people view as important. The way people act on Reddit to get a handful of up votes is embarrassing.
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I just disable "show votes" in settings and that's it.
Ooh, so they can also be invisible internet points.
That just blew my mind, I didn't even realize that was a setting.
Lemmy.world users can't unfortunately (it arrived in 0.19.4 IIRC)
Wait wait, global karma is a thing now� If so: not a good change. I thought it was a great idea to omit that, tbh.
I've been thinking recently that Lemmy would simply be better off without any comment votes. I've heard some instances disable them, but it still seems to be the norm. Group think already has enough pull given human nature. It doesn't need a boost.
I mean I donβt think showing votes on posts and comments is inherently badβ¦ but aggregating them to a user across instances seems not only technically challenging from a protocol sense (given that (de)federation and blacklisting is entirely in the control of the server admin), but also a feature that should be intentionally omitted. Itβs genuinely not a useful metric in terms of building communities, which I think the lemmy stack should (and does) consider to be an essentially overriding priority.
I've been able to exchange some of my points in the Lemmy Store for a rub on tattoo.
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And we should keep it that way. As soon as you can derive value from your profile karma and/or it means something, it'll break any sense of earnest discussion some are trying to have in the first place.
Look at Reddit: any serious thread is peppered with might-be-funny one-liners in the hopes of catching some upvotes. This makes those threads harder to read through, although it does make for funny AI summary results.
It's not just off topic banter to increase karma though. It's also reposting old memes, jokes and stories that did well in the past to farm that sweet karma. Throw in some copied top-level comments too and some subreddits are basically perpetually living in dΓ©jΓ vu.
Let's not try to aim for that.
Some of that could be karma grinding, but for the most part, that is probably just people having fun. Many come to social media platforms for recreational purposes.
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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.
Since 0.19.4 you can hide downvotes in your settings. Unfortunately LW still runs 0.19.3
if you're using Voyager it's a setting you can change to just show upvotes.
Must confess, those points do seem to wield some strange power over my mind. Kinda scary actually. Some people have disabled those numbers entirely, and Iβm beginning to see why.
I'll sell you mine. Hell, I might even trade some points for a block of your finest cheese.
I'm afraid we're fresh out of red leicester sir, it's been on order for two weeks.
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For those that don't know this is in reference to Reddit's process of "vote fuzzing". Most explanations online explain it as altering the votes to prevent things like rigging the vote or an individual going to someone else's page and down voting everything they've posted or commented. I think in reality it's more obtuse and erratic. I don't know if the level of "fuzz" varies based off the age of the post or the total number of votes.
If we don't have fake internet points, then how will we know what to think? Won't somebody think of the pointsβ½ π
Whoever has the most points on Lemmy has to read the credits in a style of Clive Anderson's choosing.
Whomever gets the most votes per month has to pay a share of the instance bill for the month
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