Hey Fediverse,
I’ve been thinking about how we can improve lemmy and make it even more dynamic and supportive. Here’s an idea I believe could really make a difference: a paid awards and donations feature. Other fediverse platforms such as Peertube already support this thanks to plugins such as: https://github.com/dhk2/peertube-plugin-lightning
What’s the Big Idea?
Imagine being able to give a little back to those posts or comments that really made you think, laugh, or feel connected. Here’s how it could work:
- You come across a great post or comment.
- You give it an award, with a small donation attached.
- This donation gets split four ways: 30% to the poster, 30% to their instance admin, 30% the community’s moderators and 10% to the lemmy developers.
Why split it this way? Because it’s not just about rewarding great content. It’s also about supporting the people who keep our spaces running and vibrant.
Why the Lightning Network?
- It’s quick and cheap, perfect for small transactions.
- It’s decentralized and it’s becoming one of the best ways to support creators online (for example it’s becoming the de-facto standard for podcast monetization)
Why This Matters
- a direct way to support and encourage each other.
- Helps keep our communities and their admins going strong.
- It’s a small change, but it could really deepen our connections here.
- it gives a middle finger to Reddit, and we all want that :P
Wrapping Up
I really believe this could make Lemmy a more rewarding place for everyone. Let’s discuss and see if we can make this happen together!
Looking forward to hearing what you all think.
EDIT: it seems that most of the comments are focusing on the crypto aspect. I’m open to non crypto alternatives
Nope. No highlighting karma, and especially not karma actually worth something. That just asks for people who only care to game the system to start flooding the network. Your noise to signal ratio will plummet. And how will you handle it per instance? What's to stop someone from spinning up an instance of bots and auto voting on all of their stuff?
A million times no.
How so?
What reason would there be to do that that doesn’t already exist today?
Perhaps there is a little misunderstanding going on about what this proposal is about. Are you aware of Reddit’s feature where you can award certain comments with a small award that shows up as visual flare? I’m proposing the same feature, but in a more decentralized and user centric manner.
Awards encourage farming for them. It's human nature. And you attached actual money to them(the donations). So it has real value.
I don't care how you distribute it. It's a bad idea. It's a terrible feature of reddit that should have never existed in the first place. If Lemmy added this, I'd leave in a heartbeat.
Oh, and you asked for opinions, and then downvoted me for giving mine. Really bringing that reddit vibe over, huh?
I can see your point, but I think that the benefits outweigh the negatives and that we should somehow incentivize well thought out content, and in general I believe that micro donations should become more common on the internet. This is the best way in my opinion to encourage more people to use (and work on) decentralized systems. I have been a big proponent of donations for good content and good software for at least a decade
I did not downvote you, but in general I use upvotes and downvotes to show agreement or disagreement, it’s never personal