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 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 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.
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
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 isn’t money pal, it’s a digital commodity that doesn’t have a purpose other than to be traded. There is a reason crypto’s value is measured in actual currencies rather than it’s purchasing power, as you can’t really buy much with it.
Right but creators can exchange it for money to like, pay bills and stuff. Don’t be daft
Edit: you can donate to lemmy in crypto https://join-lemmy.org/donate
Why if it’s a scam?
Then why not just give them money?
Ok, should I write a check? Who do I make it out to? How bout direct deposit: just give me the bank account number. Why is lemmy anti-crypto?
“Why not just give them money?”
Because every way to do it is trackable and cryptocurrency offers privacy-protecting ways to pay people. This should be important to this community. Nobody batted an eyelash opening their wallets to Reddit for coins, awards and nfts, but crypto is the scam? Ok
Well you could always try to give cash ;)
Snarky remarks aside, I’m not saying crypto is inherently a scam (although I do think it is more or less reinventing the wheel). I think it’s less efficient than fiat currency at this point since you need to convert your crypto to make much use of it. I can see your point about privacy protection given that transactions and accounts are supposed to be anonymous (although I have some privacy qualms about all transactions being put onto a distributed public ledger), and anonymity can be necessary if you’re suffering from persecution. But with anonymity, how do you prove your ownership over your crypto assets should you lose access to your account, or have it stolen? That’s a very critical drawback to crypto.
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.
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.
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.
You’ve been awarded lemmy gold!
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?
They didn’t die off due to server costs. They died off because companies built for profit centralized sites and advertised them to get people to go there instead.
Easier for large number of people to congregate at a bar than at Phil’s house.
No.
They stopped running because it’s been 20-30 years and people moved on after a decade or two.
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.
Maybe but most of our content today is hosted off site, on YT or Imgur, etc. So that’s not a concern for current sites much either.
good point
At least pretend to hold down your skirt geez… 🤭
huh?
