Lemmy needs rewards a la Reddit

Artemis@sh.itjust.works to Lemmy@lemmy.ml – -17 points –

I think this should be prioritized in order to help with the insane growth and associated costs of Rexxit.

It may not make sense for 100% of proceeds to go to Lemmy devs, but something like 70/30 or 60/40 split (in favor of the instance host) would be a great idea to help us support the scaling effort.

Edit: I guess I'll take my L. This seems to be a pretty unpopular take, and I understand why. We'll see where things end up in a few months when these suckers start getting actually big

12

Here's a million Lemmy bucks

Inspired from the original Reddit silver, of course.

Implementing something like that for something as open source and decentralized as lemmy sounds tricky. People can already donate directly to both instances and the lemmy project.

Yes but to put myself in the shoes of your average social media user - a donation just disappears, although you get the warm fuzzy feeling for doing so. Buying rewards actually gives something (albeit very small) in return so we can show our appreciation towards others who are creating quality content

To expand on the idea:

Ideally this would incentivize devs who are hesitant about the cost of hosting to spin up a server, bringing us more instance options and helping to further decentralize the platform.

Right now fedi relies on donations, and it seems to be working, but at some point the growth could outpace the donations leading to large instances shutting down. Rewards on Reddit are dumb as shit cause they feed an amoral corporation, but on Lemmy they would directly support those who are lending their time, money, and expertise to the growth of the fediverse.

I get the pushback here cause reddit rewards have always been super cringe.. but I mean this isn't the worst idea

Right now fedi relies on donations, and it seems to be working,

Maybe for other social media platforms, for lemmy not so much (iirc they currently make about 7k a month, which isn't really good for two full time developers).

Feels like this would just be adding on a centralized feature to a system designed to be decentralized. If anything, it should be based on a decentralized system like Bitcoin or something.

Absolutely not. I hate that pay to win bullshit. We shouldn't be pushing for monetization that encourages or creates any sort of "premium user experience". That's corporate bullshit. Paying for the service should improve the service for everyone, not just for yourself or for some comment you want to feel superior to everyone else by "paid upvoting".

Then limit rewards to posts. And I specifically did not mention a subscription service for that reason.