tl;dr: Be excellent to each other, do something constructive here?
I’m not sure anymore where the Threadiverse is headed. (The Threadiverse being this threaded part of the Fediverse, i.e. Lemmy, MBin, PieFed, …)
In my time here, I’ve met a lot of nice people and had meaningful conversations and learned lots of things. At the same time, it’s always been a mixed bag. We’ve always had quite some argumentative people here, trolls, … I’ve seen people hate on and yell at each other, and do all kinds of destructive things. My issue with that is: Negative behavior is disproportionately affecting the atmosphere. And I’d argue we have nowhere enough nice behavior to even that out.
I don’t see Lemmy grow for quite some time now. Seems it’s now leveling off at a bit less that 50k monthly active users. And I don’t see how that’d change. I’m missing some clear vision/idea of where we want to be headed. And I miss an atmosphere that makes people want to join or stay here, of all of the places on the internet. The saying is: “If you don’t go forwards you go backwards”. I’m not sure if this applies… At least we’re not shrinking anymore.
And I’m always unsure if the tone and atmosphere here changes subtly and gradually. I’ve always disagreed with a few dynamics here. But lately it feels like we’re on the decline, at least to me. I occasionally keep an eye on the votes on my comments. And seems I’m getting fewer of them. Sometimes I reply to a post and not a single person interacts. Even OP seems to have abandoned their post moments after writing it. And also for nuanced and longer replies, I regularly don’t get more than one or two upvotes. I think that used to be a bit better at some point. And I see the same thing happening with other peoples’ comments. So it’s not just me writing low-quality comments. What does work is stating simple truths. I regularly get some incoming votes with those. But my vision of this place isn’t spreading simple truths, but have proper and meaningful discussions, learn things and new perspectives or just mingle with people or talk. But judging by the votes I observe, that isn’t appreciated by the community here.
Another pet peeve of mine is the link aggregator aspect of Lemmy. I’d say at least 80% of Lemmy is about dumping some political (or tech) news articles. Lots of them don’t generate any engagement. Lots of them are really low-effort. OP just dumps something somewhere, no body text added, no info about what’s interesting about it. And people don’t even read those articles. They just read the title and react (emotionally) to that. In the end probably neither OP nor the audience read the article and it’s just littering the place. Burying and diminishing other, meaningful content. (With that said: There are also nice (news) discussions going on at the same time. And Lemmy is meant to be a link aggregator. It’s just that my perception is: it’s skewed towards low quality, low engagement and random noise.)
A few people here also don’t really like political debate. And there’s no escape from it here on Lemmy since so much revolves around that. And nowadays politics is about strong opinions, emotions and emotional reactions. And often limited to that. The dynamics of Lemmy reinforce the negative aspect of that, because the time when you’re most incentivized to reply or react is, when it triggers some strong emotion in you, for example you strongly disagree with a comment and that makes you want to counter it and write your own opinion underneath. If you agree, you don’t feel a strong emotion and you don’t reply. And the majority of users seems to also forget to upvote in that case, as I lined out earlier. And we also don’t write nuanced answers, dissect complex things and examine it from all angles. That’s just effort and it’s not as rewarding for the brain to do that as it is pointing out that someone is wrong. So it just fosters an atmosphere of being argumentative.
Prospect
I think we have several ways of steering the community:
- Technology: Features in the software, design choices that foster good behavior.
- Moderation: Give toxic people the boot, or delete content that drags down the place. Following: What remains is nice people and not adverse content.
- The community
I’d say 1 and 2 go without saying. (Not that everything is perfect with those…) But it really boils down to 3: The community. This is a fairly participatory place. We are the ones shaping the tone and atmosphere. And it’s our place. It’s kind of our obligation to care for it if we want to see it go somewhere. Isn’t it?
So what’s your vision of this place? Do you have some idea on where you’d like it to go? Practical ideas on how to achieve it?
Do you even agree with my perception of the dynamics here, and the implications and conclusions I came up with?
I think something which would benefit the tone or ‘culture’ here would be to make it immediately and publicly clear that a negative interaction is unwelcome. Rather than get into a pointless debate with a troll, simply reply “This is a rude and/or low-effort comment which nobody wants here.” It might not make much difference to the troll but for anyone else who reads it it creates and reinforces expectations about behaviour. The same thing goes for positive contributions; make sure to comment letting people know when you value their contribution.
I wouldn’t mind if moderation was more heavyhanded too. If someone is rude and abusive, block them from posting on the community, regardless of the point they may be trying to make. In that respect I would like to see more moderators from the community
I’m sure technical things could be done to help too. Perhaps letting users switch off visibility for posts/comments that have received a certain proportion of downvotes for example.
I couldn’t agree more strongly… I mean we kind of have that already. Everytime I see something that has a score of like -40 because of all of the downvotes, I think they got their just punishment and it’s clear that no one likes what they wrote. I think it’s superior to replying because it doesn’t give that person any reply to start an argument. Just silence and downvotes. But however we decide to do it, i think we should be very open and upfront with what’s expected behavior. And I’d like to see that happen more often.
PieFed has that feature. Comments with a score less than -10 (I think) just collapse. I think we need more of those features in Lemmy and the respective apps.
Neat idea. Would be cool if the threshold could be configured by the user too (though a recommended default value would be wise).
I think it should be proportion and not net score. Ie. If after atleast 8 votes have been cast >70% are downvotes, comment is collapsed.
Oh, forget what I said. I was going to write a lenthy reply… But in fact it is configurable in the user profile. -10 is just the default value.
Being able to do this in Lemmy and configure it would be amazing. In Piefed’s implementation does it leave ‘orphaned’ responses to the hidden comment visible or does it hide those as well?
They collapse as well. But PieFed is pretty open to new ideas. If someone likes it differently and decides to address it, it can probably be changed.