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.
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.
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.
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.
