This is a theory that’s previously been stated in log/39-normie-hypothesis.gmi, but I think it’s worth expanding on as it’s become very relevant with the recent Reddit shit-show actualizing just how bad that website has gotten along with social media in general. I think the model demonstrate how the ’enshittification’ process is an inevitability with any social media that is run on a venture capital model. An online community can be like a village, where you have familiar faces, collective experiences, shared values and so forth.

Great writing on the current Reddit saga. The author put down in words a lot of things in my mind I couldn’t find the right words.

  • pre@fedia.io
    1·
    1 year ago

    @honeyed_coffee For the reasons the OP mentioned. Familiar faces, being recognized in a community instead of being just today’s main character.

    In a single large forum most participants are silent, as they must be or it’d be a cacophony. Many are silent out of worry that they need to say something good enough to impress a hundred thousand people, not just something interesting to their local 100 friends.

    On Fediverse things escape their local instances and their local forum-groups by boosts mostly.

    @Zigabyte

    • manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech
      3·
      1 year ago

      As karma mattered more you lost a whole subset of regular posters that felt kamra took a relaxing pastime and made it into a job. Karma was used as a kind of stopgap for the issue of managing the cacophony in a busy thread, which made the points matter even more and caused even more people to disengage.

      • RandomBit@sh.itjust.works
        5·
        1 year ago

        Personally, I found that karma led to self-censorship of any idea that remotely deviated from the group consensus.

        • manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech
          4·
          1 year ago

          Ofc! whats the point of posting anything when you have people actively work to suppress your thoughts and statements?

          Really user-based meta-moderation had been pretty much a disaster, not sure we need internet points at all, things worked great without them.

        • Honeyed Coffee@sopuli.xyz
          3·
          1 year ago

          Can you think of alternatives to voting, though? Sorting always requires some curating system that isn’t random but I can’t think of any that would be robust to group consensus

          • RandomBit@sh.itjust.works
            5·
            1 year ago

            I don’t think user voting in of itself is a problem. It’s the consequences of large negative voting that causes the real problems. In Reddit, a single unpopular comment on a popular subreddit could send a casual Redditor into negative karma which effectively shadowbans them from Reddit. As a result, you see people deleting their comments to stop the bleeding. Controversial opinions are punished severely.

            • Honeyed Coffee@sopuli.xyz
              1·
              1 year ago

              Fair enough. I always assumed downvotes were used to weed out/shadow-ban troll accounts more than suppress unpopular opinions but I’ve never seen that measure reduce the number of trolls in the long run

    • Honeyed Coffee@sopuli.xyz
      2·
      1 year ago

      I hadn’t considered the idea of small communities at all. It would be quite interesting to see how far this develops. Thanks for taking the time to respond