tl;dr: let's stop the generic and almost-irrelevant-doom-and-gloom karma-harvesting one-liners that can be copy-pasted between any two articles written in the last century
Background
Anyone who has used Reddit for any decent period of time is probably aware of the drill -- when you create an account, unsubscribe from the defaults and find the smaller communities. It will end up in a better experience.
Why were people told to dodge the defaults? They were the largest subreddits. But because they were large, the quality was often regarded as "meh" due to post and comment quality.
How bad was it? You'd find news posted about something, then you'd click into the comments, find they're something to read, then move on.
A week passes and an article on a similar subject comes up. You click into the comments and a sense of "Is this deja-vu?" is felt. Is this comment thread for the article this week, or the article from last week?
Turns out, the discussion was too generic. It wasn't uniquely thought provoking to the article posted. The comments didn't offer much and could be copy-pasted between many news posts spanning any given year.
Reddit became boring after picking up on this pattern, especially as this became the norm on so many communities. The comments served as candy for feeding a doom-scrolling habit. At times I'd joke to myself that I could predict what the upvoted comments would be.
Why do I bring this up?
I've noticed that commentary in the most popular communities have been flooded with unsubstantial commentary as of late -- the type of commentary that could be copy-pasted between almost any two articles in a given month. It feels like cheap karma acquisition, even though Lemmy doesn't really incentivize karma.
The Lemmy community has a lot of energy and a lot of people who want to see it succeed. I do too.
So what should we do?
I am advocating that we collectively try to put in more thought in our discussions. I think Hackernews (sans the occasional edgy political take) and Tildes might be worth learning from. Let's make it a goal to contribute content that others may learn from and do away with the copy-paste doom-and-gloom comments.
Just unsubscri-
Yes, the popular refrain to a lot of concerns about Lemmy is "just unsubscribe from those and join another community". I disagree that is the right solution. This isn't limited to just one or two communities of a given type and what habits are created in one community easily spread to others due to the very large overlap in users.
This is, for sure, an issue carried over from Reddit, but it's also a byproduct of another issue we carried over from Reddit: Most posts have a substantive issue.
Obviously not every community has this issue, but so many of them seemingly serve as nothing but news aggregators and do absolutely nothing to promote engagement or discussion. It is no surprise that the quality of comments has dropped when there are entire communities that are just copy-pasted news sludge with no other sense of community or engagement.
When the content on your website feels disposable then people will treat it as such. Lemmy as a whole has this exact same issue as Reddit does, which is not surprising because Lemmy is basically a clone of Reddit. I made a post on Beehaw a while ago about how the instance lacked any sense of community and I've seen similar sentiments expressed in other instances here and there. People, such as myself, who expected something better from Lemmy and getting frustrated when we can't find it. There was a supreme opportunity presented to us when the Reddit migration began, to make new communities and spaces for discussion of a higher quality than Reddit could ever provide but Lemmy completely squandered that. Lemmy sucks - and that's because it clones so much of Reddit... which also sucks.