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.
  • BrikoXEnglish
    1002·
    1 year ago

    I think it’s a distraction from the actual interactions. Same way karma is.

    I’m all for supporting instances and open source developers, but any kind of reward for a donation creates wrong incentives. Donation is called a donation because it’s a gift without expecting something in return.

    • Ulu-Mulu-no-die@lemmy.worldEnglish
      19·
      1 year ago

      I fully agree with you, karma “whoring” is a serious problem on reddit, awards could lead to the same behavior here if implemented.

      Donations are the best way to support the platform, if you want to be “visible” as donator, opencollective allows you to post a message about it, there’s also a sort of top donators page, that’s more than enough in my opinion.

    • lesnake@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      125·
      1 year ago

      I can understand the mindset, but I worry most people don’t think like this.

      The thing is, that small rewards for “donations” will likely make the people much more willing to spend money in the first place. Even if it’s as small as a sticker on someone else’s post that costs the servers involved like a handful of API calls. But when a 1€ award is 3x as popular as the 1€ donation, it will greatly increase the funds available to the instance and, hence better servers, more features etc

      • lesnake@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
        84·
        1 year ago

        There is a reason many YouTubers sell discord roles. Many people are willing to spend 5€/month for a stupid discord rank, so I don’t see why it’s wrong to profit of people willing to buy awards

        If you prefer direct donation, having something like awards won’t stop you but if someone wants to buy that overpriced sticker, they can as well.