Too many people are confusing the two. Whenever lemmy.ml or its devs do something stupid, people go “Lemmy is getting worse and worse,” or “I’m leaving Lemmy,” or worse, “I’m leaving for Beehaw.”
If you’re using Beehaw, then you’re using Lemmy. Lemmy is the software these instances run on. If you don’t like lemmy.ml, join another instances that have rules that match your philosophy. Some instance hosts authoritarian or fascist shit? Turn to another Lemmy instance. Lemmy.ml is not even the biggest instance. People who just joined and are unfamiliar with the platform will just think the entire Lemmyverse is run by autocratic admins if we don’t get our terminology right.
User engagement is important, and karma is one way of driving that engagement. Pretending something’s not important from your high horse because you don’t understand it just makes you look like a spez.
gamification does drive engagement, though not necessarily the right kind.
In my obervation things that incentivise people to produce lots of simple content to please the masses (and hence net lots of social-media-game-points) significantly decrease the signal-to-noise ratio of the site, with the result that when people are actually trying to find some information or figure something out (rather than just seeking mindless entertainment) they have to wade through lots and lots of meaningless. ignorant and low-effort fluff to find it, and it might not even be there because the kind of people producing the quality (measured in knowledge terms, not “production quality”) content have left.
Just look at Youtube.
User engagement is important, yes, but since we do not have ad targets here, I think most people are okay with less content as the cost of the overall quality being higher. At least that is my hope.
Maybe one free award you can give out a month. The award doesn’t do anything. Just a token someone keeps tallied on their account forever.
As a giver of that award I would be a lot more picky about handing it out than an upvote since I only get one a month and can’t even buy anymore to give if I wanted. No one would hand that out for a generic, cliché comment or a pun thread. (Unless you REALLY like puns)
Ideally if you see someone with multiple awards you know they are someone who contributes hopefully quality content.
I guess someone could bot themselves a bunch of awards… but what can you do?.