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.

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[–] dot20@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

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.

So HN is quite heavily moderated (just turn on showdead if you want to see the graveyard), and Tildes tries to keep the community cohesive with their invite-only policy (limiting growth).

Lemmy, on the other hand, allows open sign-ups and does not have a strong (HN-like) moderation culture. If anything, it has more of a Reddit-like moderation style, with a bunch of separate communities ruled by their own mods.

Therefore, it remains to be seen whether appeals to the userbase will prove effective as Lemmy grows. Note that as Reddits userbase grew, the quality of the discourse went down, Eternal September-style.

There are, though, still a couple of big differences between Reddit and Lemmy. The latter probably won't try to attract users by running big campaigns in mainstream media, like Reddit did in later years. On the other hand, there's the risk that Meta's Threads or other (future) big tech platforms might end up federating with Lemmy.

[–] wiki_me@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

tildes.net has something like a "superupvote" where you can mark a comment as exemplary and only do that once every 8 hours , and indeed i would say the average quality of content on tildes.net is higher then on lemmy (no offence intended).

Maybe lemmy should also implement a "super upvote", something you can give once a hour/day/week/month/year/decade or even "all time best" (which you could find by looking at a user profile), or just something where you pay some money , something like a "seriousness fee" (with the money going to the devs or instance admins or some charity).

[–] theodewere@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

it's an interesting comment, because this space (the whole fediverse i guess) still seems to be in its infancy and its users are still trying to figure out what it's good for.. the differences you call out are all relevant.. specifically the comment structure is healthier here than reddit, and less susceptible to brigading and trolling.. it's going to be interesting to see how it matures..

i think it's a more flexible and useful tool than most of the other things like it around, so i'm pretty confident the internet will find something interesting to do with it.. and probably sooner rather than later with all the fluidity in online populations..

[–] OpenStars@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

How is it less "susceptible" to brigading and trolling, or did you just mean that it tends to happen less here? ~~If anything I think it's more susceptible overall~~ (edit: thanks to ithas for reminding me that voting records are public - that actually help tremendously), but then again the need is substantially less too.

[–] theodewere@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

it's hard to quantify, but i've witnessed and defended against direct attacks of the typical kind that are pretty successful on reddit.. the structure here is just less useful to them.. discussion can carry on around their attempts to dominate a thread, and get the whole thing sort of flushed down a toilet of inane consensus.. the traffic is nowhere near as high, so it's hard to say how it will evolve..

also it seems easier here to shout down trolls, also due to the structural difference.. trollish behavior can be countered here pretty effectively with real discussion, where the voting mechanism on reddit makes it difficult..

i should note i use kbin, so my experience is different from a lot of other people

[–] OpenStars@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

ithas reminded me that voting records here are public - so that actually would make this place less susceptible, I had just forgotten about that aspect.:-) But the lower volume, and more importantly the signal-to-noise ratio, probably does most of the heavy lifting:-).

[–] theodewere@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

probably does most of the heavy lifting

i really don't think so.. again, personal experience.. and i'm not sure why you would feel confident in stating the opposite..

[–] ithas@artemis.camp 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

One thing I've been told in the past is that with public voting records you at least get an idea of if brigading is happening, where it's coming from etc. Though maybe that's just a giant list of randomly generated usernames but if it's coming from a single instance there are at least actions to take from that.

[–] OpenStars@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

Oh right, I actually forgot all about that, yes indeed that would likely help. Certainly anything is circumventable but presenting that kind of a barrier would help discourage it. Thank you for gently setting me straight:-).

[–] atrielienz@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Do you want engagement or not?

[–] cosmic_slate@dmv.social 2 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I want more quality engagement. If that means there are fewer comments, so be it.

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[–] sour@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

just unsubscri-

doesn't solve problem

[–] dylanTheDeveloper@lemmy.world -3 points 1 year ago

Capitalism has fallen billions must eat Bounty Bars

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