On a large subreddit with more than 100K users, it’s an unspoken rule that if a thread has more than 200 comments, don’t bother making a new comment because it will get buried by the default comment ranking and no one will interact with it. Nobody uses the “new” ranking because you’re only going to see the meaningless one-sentence comments from people who don’t care about visibility. Only reply to the top comments in the thread after that point if you want to have a discussion.

I really appreciate that Lemmy’s default comment ranking lets the most upvoted comments fall off the top of the thread after a while so that newer comments appear at the top instead. It prevents threads from looking like circlejerks where all of the top comments agree with each other and encourages people to add their thoughts in a new comment instead of dogpiling on the top comment. This combined with disabling the global karma count is what improves the discussion experience from Reddit most, in my opinion.

  • Drew Got No Clue
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    441 year ago

    And you can also easily see the number of upvotes and downvotes separately (not possible anymore with Reddit’s “improvements”) which can be very helpful in some cases

    • AndreasOP
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      231 year ago

      Worse, Reddit implements a “vote fuzzing” algorithm where the upvote count can’t be determined reliably. The degree of fuzzing is worse for accounts that are considered untrustworthy based on device fingerprinting, like accounts using the old desktop site and accounts using a VPN.

      • @spirals
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        151 year ago

        The vote fuzziness drove me insane sometimes, I just want to know the actual number.

        • z500
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          1 year ago

          I just refresh a few times, and I figure whatever the median number is is the real karma lol

        • Redex
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          11 year ago

          I mean, it didn’t really matter. The delta would be like ±10%, does it really matter? You’re more interested in the magnitude.

      • Drew Got No Clue
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        121 year ago

        While here you can currently enjoy the buggy, flickering upvote count doing parkour /s

      • Drew Got No Clue
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        91 year ago

        Some communities like beehaw have disabled downvotes.