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.
This right here.
I used to (a very, very, very long time ago) contribute on StackOverflow. How much? I haven’t even logged in for over 7 years (and didn’t contribute a good two years before that) and my account is still in the top 0.71% overall.
Let me tell you how I racked up that score.
I monitored the site in off-hours (easy to do with my time zone). I found new questions for the most popular programming language on the site (back then this being Java). I then did what the asker should have done: I Googled. I then wrote an answer (a correct answer: this is important) and got first-responder points.
And here’s the funny thing: I don’t program in Java. I hate the language. I know enough Java programming to be dangerous. VERY dangerous. But 18% of my points came from answering Java questions. A further 15% came from answering C++ questions which is at least a language I know … but also despise and won’t work with any longer.
This is how easy it is to game fantasy Internet points: whether “karma” or “gold” or whatever you like. And if you start providing these fantasy Internet points you’re going to start attracting people for whom high numbers of them are important and they will do what I did to the detriment of the ecosystem. (I mean at least in my case my answers were right. Disingenuous that I of all people answered them, but at least correct. This is not the case for all points whores.)