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.
- 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.

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.
- The hard truth is that long term, we likely need another way besides donations to keep the ecosystem alive.
  
  I would like to see some numbers first. Donations work fine for mastodon.
  Edit : here are mastodon.world financials https://blog.mastodon.world/
  
  Or maybe some people just can't imagine how this could work without being centered around money.
  Lemmy has been around for years. New instances are popping up as new users come in. So far, I haven't seen an instance suffering from lack of funds, but others being funded for months ahead, some even donating excess funds to Lemmy devs.
  All while topics like these pop up every other day. For me, it looks like catastrophization. Seeking solutions for problems which do not exist (yet? Not even sure about that).

I don't want the comments section to look like the inner cabinet of the North Korean army
- I like this comment. Let me award you the flaming golden sun of glory medal of the people.

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.)

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!
- “Thank you, kind stranger”
  
  Edit: Wow, I didn't expect this to take off like this. Thanks for all the upvotes! xD

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.
- It baffles me how people seem fixated on the gamification of a discussion and payment system, as if somehow we're not adults who can see that the servers cost money, they provide us value, and we should help defray the costs (directly, through donations/payments). Clear/transparent information on instance costs and available funding is all we really need. For the instance owners it would be nice to have some built in code to provide this as a common location so they can disseminate the info with as little additional effort as possible, ideally with hooks to several payment systems they can connect - esp given the global nature of the platform.
  
  Because, sadly, it works. Humans are social animals and gaining and displaying status is hard wired into us. You might not be interested in status in this way (but there are likely others just as irrational that you do), but enough people are such that this would likely generate a lot more money than just donations.
  
  as if somehow we're not adults who can see that the servers cost money, they provide us value, and we should help defray the costs (directly, through donations/payments).
  I really wish this was how humans worked.
  But then I remember people will regularly drive on state-maintained roads to their government subsidized free public healthcare, get treated the same day and then go home and write an angry internet post about how we have to cut taxes.

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

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?

Eew please god no.

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.

I hate the idea very much. Thanks for asking.

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.
- And the cost of storage? I get that the load is balanced, in a sense, but it still seems as though there will be significant costs if each server is going to keep all the posts that have been federated to. And the traffic itself just to remain in sync could also be fairly dramatic if we get to the size of Reddit. Unless I’m missing something about the technology, which could very well be true.
- I picked lemmy.world because my mastodon account is on mastodon.world and the admin has been good there. And because browsing and subscribing to communities off-instance is a huge PITA.

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.

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
- I agree.
  EDIT: WOW 1 LIKE??? THANK YOU STRANGER I'VE NEVER GOTTEN THIS MANY LIKES BEFORE!1!!1

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.

Lemmy core devs are actually employed full time to work on lemmy.
- What’s funding their salaries? Just donations?
  
  See this post. The work is sponsored by the NLnet Foundation

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/tedvdb
- Some at least do. The Lemmy backend devs have an Open Collective page and so does the Lemmy.world admin.

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 .
- The thing is, nobody donates. But they love their lucky charms. It's just a dark pattern.
  
  Who knows what’ll happen if they actually do implement something like it

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.

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.
- The way that steam handles paid reactions seems fine to me.
  
  Tying financial incentives to enabling bullshit is how you end up with bullshit-filled spaces.
  If online communities are important to you, support online communities. If commercialized doo-dads and thingamajigs are what's important to you, Reddit already exists. You not only can have what you want, but you can see what it leads to.

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.

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

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.

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

Here is an example of awards on Kbin.
- The KBin awards are akin to Stack Overflow's award system, which I don't mind, it's a small fun system on the side. Reddit's award system, on the other hand, can go back to the hell pit whence it came.
  
  I didn't mind the reddit version when there was only one award and it granted the awardee premium benefits for a month. I felt like that was a good balance. Not that I think lemmy needs that kind of system-- at least not yet.
- I'm still just not sure how I feel about Kbin
  Also allowing people to see who downvoted (sorry, "Reduced") them can't be a good idea as the site grows and attracts more trolls/unsavoury individuals.
  
  I don't understand your argument, wouldnt transparency in voting EXPOSE trolls? Pretty sure they've already caught some shenanigans that wouldn't have been so obvious without this functionality. So many instances (and even subreddits) just hide the downvote button, with the transparency if you dont like it dont downvote maybe install an extension that always hides the downvote button for just you.
  
  can’t be a good idea as the site grows and attracts more trolls/unsavoury individuals
  Edit: Nevermind, you answered this below.
  Is strikeout a thing? Let's see. Edit2: Nope.
  I'm curious as to what your actual concern is here. Like, what do you imagine will happen?
  
  KBin just shows the data that the ActivityPub protocol sends. Anyone could create their own instance and see all reduces.

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 hadn't thought of this trophy case idea. I like it. I still don't want awards that are in any way desirable. Like, I don't know I was reading Calvin and Hobbes this morning maybe a "noodle incident" type award. If you have a memorable post like the not pooping dude maybe an admin or mod puts that in your trophy case? I don't completely wake up for another hour but I like this train of thought you've put me on
  Edit: starting to wake up something about beans

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 @tigr@lemmy.world : 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.

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

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.
- Yes that gave a lot of people a lot of reddit coins, or whatever it is called, used to buy awards. But their reddit gold shold have expired a long time ago.
  
  It didn’t. I used the last of mine on the last dumpster fire AMA.
- Free awards are the ones ones spammed on random posts so if awards are added, they should be paid only.

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 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 think we should avoid paywalls as much as possible and if any, only add cosmetic purchases.

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.
- Funny how back in the 90s and 00s I could browse BBs without seeing a sea of ads, or any.
  Almost like user run communities don’t actually need to return a profit or recoup costs to be active.
  
  Doesn’t the fact that those sites no longer exist kinda prove they needed to recoup costs to stay active?
  
  might be because traffic wasn't as much. Also, i understand accepting and missing communities ran by not meeting ends. But implicitly demanding that may be a little too much. also, i imagine there wasn't nearly as much media traffic in those ages because images took that long to load let alone videos but i wasnt online yet.
- At least pretend to hold down your skirt geez.. 🤭
  
  huh?
- Honestly I think awards are a decent way of determining the quality of a post. If a Reddit post has a lot of awards it's a sign that it is especially helpful/interesting. I know there are exceptions and sometimes the flood of awards at the top of the post is annoying, but often it works for determining the quality.
  So people will aim to make posts of similar quality to get awards as well.
  Karma on the other hand is too easy to get so its leads to shitty reposts to get a lot of likes. But the people don't give awards to reposts that often.

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

- That brings a whole new set of problems with it unfortunately, including the huge amount of scammers and ponzi schemes in that space where you don't want your users exposed to it.
  KBin for one does have a Cardano module for it but understandably the dev isn't interested in using it themselves.

Forget useless awards, we need c̶r̶y̶p̶t̶o̶c̶u̶r̶r̶e̶n̶c̶y̶ tipping abilities baked in here.
Edit: never mind
- Yeah, replacing useless rewards with useless crypto. Amazing idea.
  
  yeah, money sucks
- crypto is the beanie babies for this generation. Some people are going to make a lot of money but a vast, vast majority are going to be the proud owners of something worthless that they spent a lot of money on.
  
  OK, thanks
  You don’t have to put your life savings in, just use it to send 5 bucks across the network the same way you use Venmo
- Just being decentralised doesn't mean they have anything else in common.
- Please, let’s not. Social media is best without any monetary incentives. If you want monetary compensation for your shit posts you can set up a Patreon or whatever blockchain equivalent you prefer. No need to embed it directly into the platform.
  Regarding cryptocurrency, it’s negatively viewed upon because it’s heavily infested with scams. There’s no trust in it anymore. Quite poetic, because “trustless” is one of its main buzzwords.
  
  I’m taking about creators like people who might use lemmy as their primary place to display the fruits of their efforts, be they photographers, artists, programmers, NSFW models, the list is endless. Integration of cryptocurrencies to pay people flies in the face of what these people currently must do, which is go to YouTube or onlyfans to profit, leaving these companies to take more than their fair share. Giving a way to pay people right here would grow the community and decrease reliance on these third party companies that indirectly pay people off the views they generate through ads.
  It’s just obvious, and whether or not people like it, crypto payments will get integrated in the l̶e̶m̶m̶y̶v̶e̶r̶s̶e̶ fediverse in time