I’m a long time Lemmy lurker and occasional Redditor. Since the Reddit influx, I’ve watched the frequency of shitty Reddit-type behavior, e.g., combative comments, trolling, and unnecessary rudeness, just sky rocket.
I’m happy to have more content on Lemmy, but I wish the bad actors and assholes would have stayed on Reddit.
Yes, I realize the irony of posting this on a new community that’s basically a Reddit transplant.
I disagree. I was here before the migration and I really wanted to like it. However, there simply wasnt enough content and most threads were barren. Now, there are full deep discussions everywhere about loads of different topics. I’ve come back to a far better product than I previously experienced, despite a few more bad actors.
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Humans and lemmings are natural enemies… Like humans and redditors… Or humans and other humans! Damn humans, they ruined humanity!
Do you remember the great day of suffering, when humans tricked some of our brothers and sisters off a cliff, just for their own entertainment! shame on humans.
^ Disney documentary makers, I believe…
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You humans sure are a contentious bunch.
You just made an enemy for life!
Seeing the low-quality comments starting to appear is disappointing.
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I think he was joking
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Shut up nerd.
You forgot the /s.
Idk why you’re swinging for low hanging fruit. Your 10 day old account speaks to a Reddit migrant as well.
Ironic.
Honestly anyone with an account younger than lemmy.world I’d easily count as a reddit migrant.
Of course, federation makes it hard to figure out exactly when they first created an account anywhere, especially since lemmy.world has only existed since like June 2.
BUT I WUZ HERE WHEN IT WASNT EVEN COOL
I’m a long time Lemmy lurker and occasional Redditor
Lurker isn’t the same as contributer, but I don’t think OP fully counts as a reddit migrant
Who cares. They still have a point.
It’s an alt.
It’s not reddit, it’s body count. I used bbs’s in the late 70s, fidonet in the 80s/90s, internet when gopher was new, and it’s all sweetness and love when the crowd is small and gets “worse” when more people show up.
That’s in quotes because it’s not worse, it’s more. Aside from trolls who require the anonymity etc, assholes are just people you don’t like. Their friends like them.
It’s why scaling is so important and to have tools to keep communities small and manageable.
Facebook’s moderating one billion people is a stupid made up problem that will be solved by it dying of bloat.
This 100%. I have read forums from back the 2000s and people still flame as if it was a Reddit thread, thrilling.
You’re absolutely right. Reddit was the source, but it really could have been people from anywhere.
I do wonder if Reddit’s culture does affect the attitudes of those coming over, though. One thing I saw all the time on Reddit was the unhelpful critic: the guy who was more than happy to tell you you’re wrong, whether or it not doing so is warranted, contextually inappropriate, or even makes sense, and only that you’re wrong - they add nothing else to the conversation. I’ve had a TON of those recently; there’s even one in this thread. I used to see them here every so often but never like this.
Unfortunately I think this just reflects human nature. The more people you have the more people you have at the fringes who are aggressive, or trolling or even just selfish or insensitive.
Also it’s easy to come across rude when posting in text - anyone who works with colleagues via email will find the same problem of one meaning being intended but a different meanong (such as tone) being read by the recipient.
When you have a small community your names become familiar and there is something personal about the interactions. Once the you have a huge community people become anonymous and that allows bad behaviour to flourish. I barely ever saw a name twice on reddit and that’s happening here too. I got to the point on reddit where I’d post a comment but I wouldn’t ever read the replies as I was fed up with dealing with the negativity.
My hope for the fediverse is that there will be multiple versions of the same communities so that we can have closer knit versions of communities as alternatives to the 1m+ chaotic versions. Small communities are where you can achieve decency and kindness more consistently.
Also I assume that unfriendly behavior, and atmosphere it creates, discourage unaggressive or less typical posters from participating in conversations. So those insensitive people will end up being overpresented in the comment section.
That is expected isn’t it? Both sites are driven by people, and people can be an assholes. Doubt we can do too much to drive them out.
Seeing the low-quality comments starting to appear is disappointing.
Always downvote all bad content - that’s why the arrow exists.
I think this is a symptom of having a scoring system for comments. If you gamify your social interactions, people will try to play the game (meaning low quality comments, dad jokes, or anything that will grant them easy votes) instead of having actual discourse.
That ignores the effect of bad actors who will do it regardless though. There may actually be something to using such a score, at least as a qualitative if not quantitative measurement of trustworthiness, like for anyone with a magazine-specific karma score in the negative and spread out over at least ten comments, start hiding their comments by default (like still visible but you have to click to expand now), and allow the mods to decide what their communities rules will be.
Irl it’s like: punch me in the face once, twice, three times, and eventually ten times, and maybe one day I’ll finally start to think about considering making a plan of action to help you realize that there may be consequences… one day! (maybe) That could help so that if a troll is popular in one place but always shits outside of where they live, those receiving the raw end of that deal could have a way to automatically deal with it?
On second thought though, it’s probably too easily gamified, especially by alts created for explicitly that purpose, like it’s not that hard to make 10 accounts. But aside from minor UI concerns, something like that could actually change whether/how often someone feels welcomed to go visit a site.
Even back in the old forum days, we had replies akin to “yes, this!” “agreed!” “no” that don’t contribute much to the discussion.
So I don’t think it’s the scoring system that is at fault, but rather it’s just human nature. Sometimes people simply want to be a part of something, and those meaningless phrases help to accomplish that.
Oh, definitely. However I’m not so sure that these are the low quality comments they’re talking about. I believe it’s the ones that are being posted just to get that quick upvote in order to feel more validated.
I came across one earlier that was about as low quality as it gets. It was a thread about some big car accident and the only reply was “/c/fuckcars”. No commentary on the actual article, no attempt at starting any actual discussion, just a pithy one liner that serves no purpose other than grabbing some upvotes and killing any chance of discussion. I still haven’t seen TOO much of that yet but I find it weird that someone would make the effort to come to the fedi just to do the same low effort shit they were doing on Reddit. It’s disappointing but at the same time, my short time on the fedi has been filled with far more actual conversation than most of my time on Reddit was.
Omg this!
/s
I haven’t noticed it too much but I feel like everyone is so used to how Reddit was that it would take some work and a collective agreement between users on the fediverse to shun the low quality comments.
I do remeber that somewhat working on Reddit for a while, but yeah once it became big enough there was no stopping the shitty comments.
It sounds terrible but I hope the ux doesn’t improve, as it acts as a barrier to entry to a lot of the shit-tier Reddit users.
If you want to stop more people coming, just go and tell people on Reddit to come here.
The trick though is that when you do, give them url’s for both Lemmy and Kbin. From what I saw, doing that somehow made understanding this place so difficult that 95% of people would just start shouting abuse at whoever did it and refuse to ever entertain the idea of switching. :p
I got here
Sometimes you want to support a post or comment but have nothing to say. Comments increase engagement scores on most platforms
In my experience the only ones caring about engagement scores are advertisers. If you agree with a post/comment you don’t actually have to press any button (upvote, like, heart, etc) or even reply to it. We’ve been conditioned to do it because they have found a way to profit off of our “uh huh” and “yeah that’s right”. I’m not suggesting it’s all bad, I’m trying to put it into context.
Sure and it might not be a thing here in Lemmy but there’s a lot of users conditioned to behave this way
Seeing as your account is the same age as mine, it seems you’re a reddit refugee as well.
All we can do is behave well and try not to be a jerk. And not try and invite the same type of reddit behavior to lemmy.
I came over in the reddit migration.
I have to admit, the thought definitely occurred to me when I first joined and had a look around, that the people that were already here before would be getting swarmed by masses of redditors that may well not have the same “site-culture” as the people who were here first. I’m actually surprised that this is the first post that I’ve seen complaining about it.
I mean it, I was legitimately expecting a ton of pushback from the existing fedi community over this, and was really surprised when it never seemed to materialize.
For my own experiences of being here (I’m on kbin), this place has been really good-natured, with a better level of well intentioned discussion than what a lot of reddit had, so it’s been a really nice experience so far. What I don’t have though, is any experience of what it was like before we all invaded en-mass, so I have nothing to contrast it with. I can totally see how someone wouldn’t be happy with what’s happened though, the migration has to have changed the space a lot for everyone that was here before.
One thing about my personal experience of how it is here though is that when I first joined I tried to do the thing that you first do with a reddit account, you know, where you immediately un-subscribe from all default subreddits and only join things you’re actually interested in (so, niche subs, etc). Found out that it isn’t quite how it works, but that the subscribed feed is pretty much exactly that but baked-in as standard. I’ve then spent almost my whole time on the subscribed feed since (unless actively looking for new stuff).
So the quality that I’ve experienced here is probably more down to my personal selection of subscribed communities rather than a more holistic view of the platform as a whole. There’s the caveat to everything I just said, I guess.
So yeah, I’m kinda sorry that this happened to you, and I’d also prefer if those people (I’m referring to the bad-actors and arsehole’s side of things) would have just stayed where they were too, but I’m not sure what to do about it other than just blocking/unsubscribing to the communities in question, or blocking the individual accounts of bad actors. I doubt that the second is even remotely scalable though if the userbase gets significantly larger.
The lack of pushback was because lemmy hadn’t really formed its own discrete culture and community. There just weren’t enough people for that to happen. Lemmygrad is probably the only exception, as they formed a community and have been around for a while. And yea, they’re looking at the rest of lemmy as a kind of Reddit hellacape now. Literally they post memes about people just shutting all over the place. And, they’re not entirely wrong, as you hint at.
It’s a little bit of a shame. As arguably it was necessary. But also, it’s arguably been too rushed. Building up communities and spaces is probably best down more slowly and organically. Lemmy probably went through two steps of growth in one short period. Mastodon by comparison had already had migration events prior to 2022 that had built up site-culture, though that has been somewhat overrun by some Twitter culture, but I think a cultural fusion is happening. Many parts of lemmy however are now basically subsets of Reddit culture. Not bad but not great.
Interestingly, the dynamics between tech and culture are manifesting, where the tech and and interface differences between Reddit and Lemmy (eg no karma) are forcing cultural changes, as is the federation aspect.
lemmygrads problems with the fediverse are not with combative comments, trolling and unnecessary rudeness, they gleefully partake in each
lemmygrads problems with the fediverse is liberals doing it too
I discovered Lemmy around 2019 or 2020 and loved the concept but was put off by the density of commies, so I didn’t create an account and participate but I would check the site around once a year to see if the community had taken off yet.
2020: Is it the year of the Federated Reddit yet? Nope, still commies and dead threads.
2021: Is it the year of the Federated Reddit yet? Nope, still commies and dead threads.
2022: Is it the year of the Federated Reddit yet? Nope, still commies and dead threads.
2023: Is it the year of the Federated Reddit yet?YES!
And I am so glad to never have to see the depressing and miserable “culture” that was Lemmy from 2019 to mid-2023 again.
“I mean it, I was legitimately expecting a ton of pushback from the existing fedi community over this, and was really surprised when it never seemed to materialize.”
I mean I joined pretty early, I think beehaw was topping the charts with 400, (4k?) Users. I’m pretty sure the complaints did happen but we’re pretty immediately drowned out
As one of those redditors, I take offense to that.
And yet, I totally agree.
Former redditor also checking in, side eyeing my own existence.
This is something we as mods for communities can combat. It’s a rule I enforce across my communities, posters who engage in hostility and attack people have their comments removed. Simple as.
People can discuss things, that’s fine but the second conversations devolve into personal attacks that is not okay.
We have the power to decide how we want the communities we have to grow and what behaviour we want to discourage. Sometimes people just need a little push in the right direction.
We can also all do our parts without mod intervention by being just decent and not engaging in the same toxic behaviour. You can also report comments to mods. It really helps us out to get reports in for comments/posts that break the rule as we may not always see it due to our instances etc…
Reddit -> Lemmy transplants are circlejerking about how evil Spez is, how Reddit is “doomed”, or how much they hate people like Musk.
Oh my God, yes. It’s like hanging out with thousands of recent divorcees. They just. Won’t. Shut up.
It’ll be interesting to see how this progresses but I’m hoping the asshole fraction gets bored and leaves. We’ve always had assholes and trolls but not like this. I’ve been just calling the assholes on their shit, hopefully it helps drive them out.
I think that it’ll get better over time, for structural reasons: since Reddit is a big instance with lots of users and only a few admins, the admins give no fucks on how you behave there. (And if you’re banned by a mod, you create another username and problem solved.) Here however individual users are more precious for their instances’ admins, so admins have more reasons to keep their instances clean of people likely to piss off other people. And, even if they don’t, I predict that instances with notoriously rude individuals will get defederated. The net result is that those users will have low visibility for other users.
What concerns me the most is not combative, trolling, and unnecessary rude users. It’s the stupid - users who are able to reason but actively avoid it. It’s the context illiterates, the assumers, the false dichotomisers, the “I dun unrurrstand” [with either an implicit “I demand to be spoonfed as per my divine right”, or an “I disagree but I’d rather pretend that I’m a stupid than outright say it”] and the likes. People tend to pat those users on their heads and talk about esoteric stuff like “intentions”, but I don’t think that they should be socially accepted here, as they drive the dialogue level down and make the place less fun for other users.
It might be different if there was noplace else for them to go. But why does EVERY place on the internet - Reddit, Twitter, Facebook/Threads - all have to cater to it? Can’t there be just ONE place where we hold ourselves to a higher standard? Maybe this means we’ll see fewer posts / comments / “activity” - but is that a bad thing, necessarily?
Still, as I learned how to drive, I realized something: if you leave a space somewhere, someone will fill it. If we want to build something different, it will require expended effort to make that happen.
Federated networks are, by design, not able to be constrained by one set of rules and standards. The place you are looking for is Tildes, a centralized, invite-only, text-only website whose selling point is “high quality discussions” and very harsh moderation against anything that does not fit their standard of “high quality”.
I’m not sure if you want to hear this from me or not, but your answer seems to me to be an example of the Binary Fallacy, or Principle of False Dilemma, where you assume that there are only two sides, with no room for subtly or nuance in-between.
For instance, as on Reddit, here too individual communities could moderate according to different principles, depending on the magazine and what they wanted. At least, even Reddit used to have that, so I’m guessing it’s actually possible here as well.
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Just don’t be surprised when you have no users.
Depending on which are those standards, you might get a lot of users. We had examples of that even in Reddit, where a few subs (like r/AskHistorians) had fairly specific rules that boil down to “don’t be a moron” and they were still fairly popular, even in a site that could as well have as slogan "lasciate ogni ragione, voi ch’entrate"¹. That’s because not even the stupid benefit from the others’ stupidity, so they still gravitate towards environments with higher standards².
So what !OpenStars@kbin.social said might be actually viable; the Fediverse (or at least, some chunks of it) could hold itself to a higher standard. The question is how; perhaps through instances? User culture? Or even UX changes that make context harder to ignore and stupid shit sink to the bottom (against the Fluff Principle³)?
(At those times I really want a c/TheoryOfTheFediverse…)
- give up all reasoning, you who enter.
- I believe that this is one of the things that make well-kept gardens die by pacifism.
- “on a user-voted news site, the links that are easiest to judge will take over unless you take specific measures to prevent it.”
First, actually reading before speaking? And going to the trouble of citing your references?! This is absolutely an example of what I was talking about in terms of holding ourselves to higher standards. I get it - it is outright fun to share memes and short quick snippets, and there is room and value for doing that too, in line with the context that is offered (some posts call for more serious discussions, memes call for just fun, but oftentimes an article/thread can have responses of both types), and I do that myself too even, but there should also be room for deeper thoughts as well? Which by their nature tend to be downvoted or at least ignored, b/c people are not always in the mood for a wall of text, even if thoughtfully and lovingly crafted.
One example could be to add to the upvote system (or on kbin there is a “boost” that is the true upvote, actual upvotes are not counted even though they are displayed - yes it is complicated!:-D) a new thing like “favorited” or “loved”. Yes, people would game that too, but maybe if you could only use one of those a day, or ten per month or some such, then people would have an incentive to hold those in reserve (people could still game it with alts, so like anything else, it may need some attention, but perhaps that is not enough of a criticism to simply not move forward and start doing it?). Netflix similarly now has “up=like”, “down=did not like”, but also “double up=LOVE”. Implementing that across the Fediverse could allow distinctions between content that you merely agreed with, vs. content that needs special distinction as being LOVED. Even Reddit allowed awards, to meet that same need. Btw, I nominated your comment in the m/BestOf magazine for a vaguely similar effect, except that magazine has extremely little traffic (I am not even subscribed to it myself, although in my defense I do keep trying but it always goes to a new page displaying the single word “Error” whenever I try), and also it is far too much effort to do for every post that is worthy of such distinction.
I almost hesitated to respond with these thoughts, b/c who am I to suggest something that I am not willing to implement into actual code? That said, my responding to your existing comment seems a different matter, since you do seem interested in this topic, rather than an entire post requesting/demanding that something be done.
I wrote out a somewhat long-winded I suppose explanation of my personal experiences that led me to believe what I do, but I exceeded the character limit so I will have to post it separately, at which point you can peruse it at your leisure or just skip it if you’d rather.
More importantly though, if you are interested, here is an - I think - extremely insightful article about the short-term blurting types of comments, which again I do myself, we all do, acting to drown out serious discussions: https://kbin.social/m/BestOf/t/113715/The-Ennui-Engine-or-how-chasing-short-term-gratification-drains-our. I am not sure that I hold out any hope for change, but at least I enjoy trying to educate myself on such things for the sake of my own sanity:-).
We mostly agree on memes and other “just for fun” material: it’s fine if it’s there (I like it too). The only problem is when it drowns the deeper content into a sea of fluff, as it often happens in social media.
but maybe if you could only use one of those a day, or ten per month or some such
What if its value decrease with usage?
For example. Let’s say that the feature is called “fav”. And that “favs” are taking into account, for sorting purposes. Each poster gets 100 “fav points” a day.
If the person “favs” a single piece of content, that content is boosted by 100/1 = 100 fav points. If the person favs two, each gets boosted by 100/2 = 50 points. And if the person indiscriminately favs 1000 pieces of content through the day, each is boosted by only 100/1000 = 0.1 fav points, so practically nothing.
This wouldn’t impose a hard limit on how much you can use the feature per day, contrariwise to your idea, but it still makes you use the feature consciously - because you know that favving one more piece of content will make all the others that you’ve favved through the day count less and less. I feel like this could address the fluff principle in a way that simple votes (or boosts, double upvotes etc.) don’t: not using the feature would backfire (the points go to waste), but using it indiscriminately would also backfire.
I’ve read the Ennui Engine article. I feel like the author touched a good point, perhaps this is all a result of us taking the internet as “it is not serious / real life, then it doesn’t really matter”. This mentality somewhat worked in the 00s? Not any more though. The proposed solution feels unfeasible though, as it expects people to do the right thing, that’s like herding all cats into the same direction; we might need smarter solutions than that. (Even then, thanks for sharing this text, I think that it bullseyes the problem on the descriptive level.)
Thanks for the nomination in the mag!
As mentioned, this is part 2 of 2, which I am going to try to be more diligent about NOT giving such long-winded replies, but in case this is of interest, at least this way you’ll have the choice of whether to read it or not:
Even if the person speaking has -10000000 karma (at that point it would be a wonder they were not banned already, but setting that aside in this hypothetical:-), let their voice carry equal weight than someone else with that amount of positive karma. And I get that, I do, so long as there are only like 20 comments that’s a GREAT way to get along. Except actually no, even then while the “average” situation could handle it well (you simply read through all 20 to find what you want, discarding the rest), it seems to me like even then it would be heavily vulnerable to a purposeful worst-case trolling scenario where someone writes up content to look like it is valid, and it requires some DEEPER digging to avoid spreading misinformation? Like if some tells you to drink bleach, and someone ELSE tells you to NOT drink bleach, who will you listen to? The guy who spent 10 years getting a degree specifically in medicinal matters, or the guy on the TV screaming at you? (legit, a couple of people ACTUALLY did drink bleach, upon being told that it cured Covid from an authority figure, that is a REAL STORY I told just now - and it was only a precursor to what came next with the Ivermectin scenario, in-between which one of my family members even thought she got Covid and went outside to “soak up sunlight” trying to cure it, misunderstanding that direct sunlight onto the actual virus like on an exposed surface would sterilize said surface, but that sunlight cannot penatrate someone’s lungs to kill it!? oh, and it was below freezing temps when she did it too) On the other hand, this isn’t a “news” site, this is “social media”, so what the goal is should perhaps be thought of very much differently. I like the idea of equal access for everyone who is honestly engaging in the due-diligence process… the problem, as you mentioned for the Ennui Engine article, is when people do not do that.
And speaking of, I seem to recall its’ ending quite differently - while it did acknowledge that while that may very well be the only solution that has any chance of working, even so, it continued on to state as you and I are also doing now that people simply will not do it. So that, as they say, is that. All you can do is engage, or not engage, with the mindset of heavy skepticism. And engaging less overall is preferable, plus more to the point, doing so with intentionality (like you have half an hour to kill and want mindless meme entertainment, then time-box it and go for it!:-P) is what prevents its worst effects on a person, much like alcohol that can be used to relax muscles, ease breathing passages, warm a person up after coming in from the cold - in short has valid, even medicinal uses, as well as horrible outcomes for those who allow it to get the better of them.
Though I do wish that there was an algorithmic way to help prune through all the “popular” content for the real stuff. As I took over the mod position of a small (couple of) gaming subs, I read articles written by former mods who had put a lot of thought into that, as they watched Reddit turn from a discussion forum into a social media site. Guides, FAQs, discussion megathreads, and the like are higly desirable content for people to read, yet Reddit refuses to allow more than 2 pinned posts, and even those only show up when sorted by Hot. Also, NO MATTER WHAT you tell people, they will ADAMANTLY REFUSE to follow the simplest of directions - e.g. if a “Guide” flair is meant to be reserved for those articles that are among the top 1% of all posts for a given year, people not only will slap it onto their sinlege-semtanx misplellddded “guides”, but they will will even slap it onto their QUESTIONS “hey uh, I haven’t played for a whole month, and despite seeing the pinned post CLEARLY stating This Is What To Do If You Have Not Played In The Past Month, I would like to ask: what should I do, you know, since I have not played in the past month?” (sadly, if they were trolling, I could not detect it - some at least seemed quite genuine in asking thus). I suspect that such an algorithmic way might not exist, since it too would rely on people to uphold even the slightest set of standards, at which point it is perhaps doomed to failure? But it is an interesting problem for me to think about latey:-). The solution for the Guides matter btw was to shift the content away from Reddit and migrate it into an external wiki, which allowed for significantly easier discoverability. Not that it lessened the sheer flood of questions asking for it in the slightest (noticeably at any rate), you understand:-).
Speaking of people misusing a feature, I think the very act of “faving” something would be misappropriated - if it was meant to be what the user thinks is good, then people applying different definitions of “good” would be working at cross-purposes. e.g. someone who claims that the holocaust never happened could either be making a wildly popular and perfectly acceptable statement, or else the exact opposite, depending on context. THAT issue… seems insurmountable to me, personally, unless a LOT more effort went into implementation. Maybe if it were something like an automated cross-posting / nomination process to the BestOf magazine, that could work? So one user could nominate the comment to a Best-Of mag, another could nominate the same comment to a Worst-Of one, still another could nominate it to a Most-Silly one, etc. Just like crowsourcing restaurant reviews!:-) In any case, people barely use that mag as it is, so it seems a nonstarter at least atm, and also, look out vulnerable restaurant reviews turned out to be:-(.
We almost might need like a separate voting system - one for “likes” and another for “something else”, so that when you sort, you can either see the “popular” stuff, or you could shuffle past that and get to the “other”. In Reddit, I think that was mostly accomplished by having each sub be the arbiter of its own policies - so something “popular” in r/AskHistorians would NOT be so popular in r/Memes, and vice versa. Good fences make good neighbors and so on. Although mods and users alike would also decry even in a place such as AskHistorians how end-users would abuse the upvote, turning it into a “like” button where you click it if you agree with the content, rather than indicating its relevance to the discussion. Also relevant is how large the communities are, so like if r/AskHistorian had only, lets say for ease of theoretical discussion “100 active members” (or rather, that being a useful approxomation thereof, like 100 people that contribute daily, or 200 people that contribute every other day, or 5-700 people that contribute once a week, and so on), while if r/Memes has “1 million active members”, then even inside a post within the r/AskHistorian sub, if the users of r/Memes were to ever see it somehow (it appearing on r/All lets say), then they could unintentionally brigade the smaller community, completely overwhelming their normal likes and dislikes with artificial ones, even (and highly likely) entirely unintentionally.
Potentially that could be solved by using sub-specific karma, like someone’s vote who has been in the sub for ten years could carry substantially more weight than someone who literally just joined a moment ago, made a reply, then immediately unsubscribed. The down-side there is that someone who had been in the sub for ten years would have to be careful to not throw their weighting around willy-nilly, and drown out people who have “only” been there like 2 years. The devil is in the details indeed, to working out such a system.
Although people on the Fediverse seem ADAMANTLY opposed to any such system of weighted voting, despite the best intentions. I think the argument goes: let the content be the deciding factor. …
And… I am exceeding the character limit again. I guess I should be more diligent about cutting back on my social media, as that Enui Engine article said:-), and if a response is worth writing, then I should find a way to do it within the limitations provided. That said, I’m going to allow myself to do it one more time b/c it is nearly midnight and I’m too tired to rewrite it, and having come this far it seems better than simply not responding at all?
The question is how; perhaps through instances? User culture? Or even UX changes that make context harder to ignore and stupid shit sink to the bottom (against the Fluff Principle³)?
A simple and obvious solution is just to adopt the rules of communities on reddit that manage to maintain a average quality of content (askhistorians? r/science?), and building features that help with that (multireddits , so you will have different feeds for “fun” and “important”, or user tags) , reddit enhancement suite features could also be helpful.
adopt the rules of communities on reddit that manage to maintain a average quality of content
The problem I see is that those communities usually had very specific goals; e.g. r/askhistorians wasn’t intended for discussions, it was more like “ask something in specific, get a specific answer”, so it’s hard to apply the same rules for communities with other goals.
And frankly, r/science was a bit of a dumpster fire.
I might be wrong, but I feel like we need to instigate a different mindset here, so perhaps user culture would be the way to go? That means scolding users for acting as dumbarses, instead of playing along their entitlement (a la Reddit).
Fully agree on the features.
I’d like to emphasize another advantage we have–the general sense of self-rule and control. We actually have a modicum of power here, we’re not just fueling profits for some spez. We can move around, organize however we wish.
This creates a naturally higher morale environment. I think things are a little, oh, excited right now, but I expect we’ll probably settle down a little bit over the next few months, as people settle in more.
The trolls, though, those are here to stay I’m afraid. Internet is the internet, you need a private community to truly guarantee none of them forever. And even that doesn’t always work. Hackers and bot attacks too, also here to stay. We’re big enough to be a decent target now.
I suspect part of it may be due to the type of content we’re seeing. It feels like low-effort meme and shitpost communities are dominating the feeds, and that’s going to attract a certain low-effort audience. I’ve been blocking them liberally but they just keep coming.
