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.
Death to any comment that’s anything only communicating “I enjoyed this”.
“lol” “This made me laugh so much that I xyz!!” “This is perfect!” All useless. Upvote and move on.
If I couple copy paste a comment to any random parent comment and it still makes some sense, it’s a bad comment.
This
I think people should just comment whatever they want. Give me your off the top of your head thoughts. We dont need every comment to be an expert analysis.
Lemmy isn’t big enough to gatekeep content and when it becomes big enough most people won’t care about the gate keeping
I think lemmy only has two types of posts, these with less than 10 comments and ones hexbear folks posted in.
Honestly I’d rather have the 10 comment threads than the ones with the Hexbear crowd in them. Those threads are always a train wreck of shit takes, sealioning, and bad faith arguments.
deleted by creator
Our admin has been acting incredibly sketchy regarding them, not a fan.
deleted by creator
Given that this entire post and thread of comments is a discussion about the lack of quality comments in the fediverse, and the hexbear server has made more total comments than all of the other servers combined, surely you can follow my reasoning in allowing them to federate with us.
I obviously misjudged the extent of their misanthropy, but I don’t see what other course we could have taken. You yourself made a comment about not being in favor of defederation at the time, only to change your mind a day later.
How would you have handled that situation? Preemptive defederation? My assumption was that such an action would be viewed as paternalistic by many of our users, and contrary to our stated policies regarding defederation.
Well, I wouldn’t have called the discussion your users were having around defederation a “struggle session,” to start. Feels like you were trying to push your politics and it backfired. I didn’t feel any pushback from y’all when users overwhelmingly wanted to defederate from exploding-heads.
Well, I wouldn’t have called the discussion your users were having around defederation a “struggle session,” to start.
That was my mistake, I was unaware of the origin of that term and assumed it was merely a euphemism for a thread with a lot of arguing.
I didn’t feel any pushback from y’all when users overwhelmingly wanted to defederate from exploding-heads.
You clearly weren’t paying attention. It took us weeks to defederate from exploding heads, because we insisted upon having a democratic debate and vote where all users would be able to express their opinions on the topic. If you have time, you can pore through these threads and see how much pushback I gave regarding that defederation saga.
https://sh.itjust.works/post/564252 https://sh.itjust.works/post/611718
Also have a look at this post and this thread.
https://sh.itjust.works/post/433483 https://sh.itjust.works/comment/510653
There were at least two valuable users of this instance who left because they were outraged that it took so long to defederate EH, and they suspected myself and/or TheDude of being sympathetic to alt-right viewpoints and/or fascism.
https://sh.itjust.works/u/socialjusticewizard https://sh.itjust.works/u/Quill7513
Now, I have users such as yourself who accuse me of being a hexbear in disguise. The truth is, I am merely trying to make the right decisions for my server and Lemmy as a whole, and I believe that widespread defederation undermines the usefulness of this platform, so I resist it as a default. Although I seem to always end up looking like the asshole for not caving to the demands of the mob immediately, I believe that my philosophy regarding defederation is objectively the correct approach.
Lemmy.world and beehaw are servers that have consistently taken a safe, conservative approach of preemptive defederation. Sh.itjust.works and lemm.ee are servers that pursue more open-minded federation policies. It’s beneficial for Lemmy to have a diversity of options and spaces to cater to a diverse userbase with differing needs and expectations.
Perhaps this additional context gives you more reason to question my actions, but I believe that it vindicates me because it demonstrates that my decisions have remained consistent and are not politically motivated. I simply believe in seeing for myself what any given community is like, and I want to run a server for people of a similar mind. I’m not comfortable in an echo chamber where someone else decides what I get to see, and I want to treat my users like they are mature enough to make these decisions for themselves.
If you want to call me a naive idiot who doesn’t know anything about moderating online spaces, that’s a fair criticism, albeit a bit harsh. But please stop implying that I’m a tankie and/or fascist in hiding, because that’s simply not true.
Fair enough, I appreciate the in-depth response. For the record, I am generally against defederation. I was originally against defederating from exploding-heads, too. But you seemed to be taking a personal interest in maintaining federation with hexbear. I didn’t see a post from admins regarding exploding-heads as a “valuable asset.” Maybe I’m wrong on that. Just seemed like a far cry from our instance defederating from lemmygrad from its inception, due to y’know, the whole radical troll thing. I’m not interested in radical politics in my feed. And I expect most of our users aren’t, either. We still aren’t defederated from hexbear, despite a discussion, followed by a vote thread voting overwhelmingly for it. If a vote thread needs to be instigated by an admin, fine, please do it, most people will vote in the affirmative again. They could refederate at any time if they decide they’d like to “dunk” on us again. I’m not sure why we’re leaving them with the keys. Again, I do appreciate your response, and I appreciate that this is a pain in the ass, thankless job without pay, but the whole hexbear debacle has been pretty frustrating.
At times I’d joke to myself that I could predict what the upvoted comments would be.
That was no joke. It was a regular occurrence.
Reddit’s biggest strength was also it biggest draw back, its size.
If you came across a thread that was more than 30 minutes old, there was little point in making a longish, thoughtful and nuanced response as it would be burred at on page 4 and lucky to be seen by anyone. Let alone read by someone who would take it on board and reply to any points you made in a meaningful way.
The main way to gain any visibility was to reply to one of the top 3 or 4 comments, which often lead to a large number of actually replies that were correcting a minor error of fact in the comment, rather than addressing the point of the comment.
The response to this by some people was to hang out in r/new and post comments in the fresh posts in the hope of getting some visibility that way. The down side was there was still little point in spending 5-10 minutes (or more) writing a long form post as two things would usually happen.
1: The post would gain no traction, get lost in the flood of new posts and never be seen on the main tabs, so your reply would be unread.
2: The post would gain traction but in the 10 minutes you were writing a decent reply, the flood of the same jokes and one liners have already drowned out any real discussion.
Whether you cared about Karma or not, the sheer volume of comments and votes drove those that did to endlessly spam the same responses over and over again.It is a great example that at some level humans on mass are no better than the pigeons B F Skinner placed in his boxes endlessly hammering away at the button in the hope that this time a treat will pop out.
Now, I assume, many of us here have had a similar experience. While we may not have liked it, conditioning like that is really hard to break. Personally, I am willing to admit that my first thought was to hit add comment after only writing the first line of my response.
The only thing that is harder than forming a habit is breaking one that is maladaptive and not serving you well.
I really hate seeing hacker news all over lemmy. Stop telling me to go there. Stop telling me they’re better than me. If you like another site so much, use it. You will like me less.
OP if you want better comments, try asking better questions.
You can certainly respond in a less hostile manner.
I’m not telling anyone to go to Hackernews. I’m citing an example of another community where there is a higher bar for substantive content, much like how I cited Reddit as an example of what we shouldn’t strive for.
