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No, it’s not a joke. I’m frustrated and I’m probably not choosing my words carefully.

This community has had steadily falling engagement - our last 3 weekly threads have had a grand total of 1 (excellent and well-articulated) response, and the number of topics not generated by myself (or the other mod) since the inception of the community has also been 1.

Very few people want to actually talk. From what I’ve seen, the masses want the same things that they wanted on Reddit:

  1. Memes
  2. Articles they don’t read (but will bitch about endlessly) that reinforce their opinion
  3. Angry responses to someone (who may be trolling) that reinforce the current politics of the reader (that they couldn’t have given a fuck about a few years ago until it became heavily politicized)
  4. Shitty easy jokes
  5. Personal politics circlejerking

I hate that I can see a hundredth point-free meme post and view 200 replies on it. I hate that it’s just the same talking points being strawmanned over and over again in every thread. I hate that any point outside common groupthink is downvoted to oblivion and buried instead of discussed.

The reason I’d like to back away from Lemmy seems to be the same reason I started this community: we need more people who can articulate points, and less downvoting, but it doesn’t seem to be getting better.

Maybe one day, but today is not that day. Lemmy needs to mature in more ways than one.

  • Rimu@piefed.social
    81·
    8 months ago

    Can you think of any software features that might address the issues you raise?

    I’m building a lemmy alternative and greatly prefer ‘actual discussion’, too.

    • Ace T'Ken@lemmy.caOPMEnglish
      5·
      8 months ago

      • Better ways for Communities to surface themselves. Starting with such a small community, it’s hard to get more people unless they come in from browsing the equivalent of /All. I’ve also been active in promoting this Community to people who seem to want to discuss things on other threads and were frustrated by the same things I was, but we’re still pretty small.

      • More controls (and decoration) available to the Community itself. It’d help us out a lot if we could disable downvotes, for instance. As it stands, we can’t discuss any remotely controversial topic without no-comment downvotes from random people burying threads. That means that if the first few people don’t like the topic or my initial outlay of it, they kill any hope of anyone seeing the thread. On a platform with scads of various activists, this means that this happens often.

      • Better moderation tools. For instance, we can’t properly remove deleted content, and it’s all mostly visible still on mobile clients. Hell, we’ve seen deleted rule-breaking comments continue to accrue upvotes somehow.

      • Ways to pre-emptively surface sub rules to mobile users who never see the sidebar (especially if they are breaking them). Lemmy seems to think that people browse communities, but they do no such thing. The Community is popped into a feed, and people see a topic, but most never even look at the Community itself.

      • Stopping bad users. Things like… there need to be ways to stop a user from going into user history of others and downvoting every single thing they’ve ever written because they didn’t like a take they had. We also need ways to appeal bans and stop brigading.

      • We’ve had threads reported for using terminology a user didn’t like. The threads then vanished. We, the mods, were never notified that a large and actively debated thread was now gone and could do nothing about it.

      • Blaze@dormi.zoneEnglish
        2·
        8 months ago

        It’d help us out a lot if we could disable downvotes, for instance.

        Did you consider moving to an instance with downvotes disabled? https://reddthat.com/ is a great instance without downvotes, it might suit well for your community.

        • Ace T'Ken@lemmy.caOPMEnglish
          1·
          8 months ago

          That’s… not a terrible idea. Do you know what that entails? Is there an easy way to move things, or is it just a matter of starting the new one up fresh?

  • Andrew@piefed.social
    5·
    8 months ago

    Lemmy seems to cloned Reddit without much thought into what was wrong with Reddit (besides the ads, and the corporate ownership). So it’s not much surprise that Lemmy has many of the same faults (I blame the design decisions, rather than the users).

    As for ‘actual discussion’, it can be difficult to switch gears if you associate the app you’re using with simple dopamine hits, to go from 'scroll, scroll, chuckle, scroll … ’ to start properly engaging. Also, I think people genuinely find it hard to know what to say: if you ever see a link that leads to another platform that allows comments, you can see for yourself how often people take a comment from there, and copy/paste it back to into Lemmy.

    Re: this community. There’s no great advantage to deleting it, at worst just let it fester with the thousands of other dead communities, so it’s still there to revive if you get back into the mood. In the meantime, it’s probably worth investigating the alternative platforms (both Fediverse-based on non-Fediverse-based). The challenge will finding one that’s both more serious and satisfyingly active (e.g. tildes is more geared to discussion, and has expanded on the simple upvote/downvote system, but it’s a bit quiet)

    • Ace T'Ken@lemmy.caOPMEnglish
      6·
      8 months ago

      Well, you’re right. I probably won’t delete the Community, but I won’t engage either if my mind can’t be changed. Some discussions on here have been awesome, and it’d be a shame to wipe them out.

      I wish there were a way to have to force users to have to opt into the shitty dopamine hit mode you mentioned instead of it being the default. It’s one of the main problems with modern social media and one of the reasons I feel that Forums were dramatically better.

  • AchtungDrempels@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    8 months ago

    I just learned about this community from the piefed issue tracker. Glad that i found it! Looking forward to hopefully take part when i have something to say. I feel like this community here is especially hard to find, just because it is so broad and not a niche interest that is easy to search for with an obvious keyword. I was also wondering if communities being home to instances with a localized TLD may have it harder to grow because people just assume it’s a f.e. canada centric discussion. I may remember this wrong, but i think last summer the !bicycles@lemmy.ca community was the largest and most active cycling community (it was very small though), but somehow !bicycling@lemmy.world has now more than three times the subscribers (looking at lemmy.world numbers), even though i’d say that !bicycles@lemmy.ca is still the most active english language cycling sub (strangely the german speaking !fahrrad@feddit.de community seems to be the most active of all of the cycling communities that i know of).

    I thought quite a few times that i need to leave lemmy, i felt like all the negativity i was exposed to had a bad effect on my mental health. I was also thinking that i didn’t want to be associated with all these super angry people. I blocked a lot of meme, politics and news communities but it still seeps through. Still i have some hope that this can take off more, i generally like lemmy.

    I had high hopes for the “scaled” sort, to find some interesting communities, but i ended up not using it at all. Maybe i should give it another try. On lemmy.world they have this “community spotlight”, where they promote a smaller community on top of the homepage. I think that is a pretty cool idea, although i feel it would be nice if they changed it more often, or cycle through a group of communities for a month randomly, then on to another group.

    All in all i think this community here has great potential! I will have a look if i can propose this community for the lemmy.world community spotlight if you don’t mind.

    *edit: i have now suggested it for the lw community spotlight, i hope that’s ok.

    • Ace T'Ken@lemmy.caOPMEnglish
      1·
      8 months ago

      Thanks for the response! I would very much appreciate any way to further grow the Community, so I’d love to get added to the spotlight.

  • 🇨🇦🇩🇪🇨🇳张殿李🇨🇳🇩🇪🇨🇦@ttrpg.network
    MEnglish
    3·
    8 months ago

    I have to admit that as, I think, the author of that 1 response, I found the utter lack of engagement to the points I made rather dispiriting. It definitely coloured my decision not to reply to the next one (well, that and me not being boots on the ground in USAville, so not having a meaningful opinion to warrant a full-on response vis a vis division).

    I tend to agree with you on what Lemmy contains. Especially #5. As a result I’m probably going to drop Lemmy entirely from my list of sites to visit.

    • Ace T'Ken@lemmy.caOPMEnglish
      2·
      8 months ago

      Yeah, I should have replied, but last week was one of the busiest weeks I’ve had. My apologies. The response was great and definitely deserved more people engaging with it.

      I’m not American either, but the division seems to be a worldwide phenomenon. It’s definitely in Canada where I am and seems to be feeding off the American version.

      • 🇨🇦🇩🇪🇨🇳张殿李🇨🇳🇩🇪🇨🇦@ttrpg.network
        MEnglish
        1·
        8 months ago

        Every social change in the USA is mirrored by a later Canadian one. The worse the change, the faster the mirroring.

        For example women’s suffrage started off in bits and pieces in the USA in Colorado in 1893, culminating in full, universal suffrage in the USA (without property restrictions, etc.) in 1920. It took until the 1950s to get approximately that level of women’s suffrage in Canada, and that in a really bizarrely fragmented process. A completely unified approach didn’t happen until 1999 (!).

        On the other hand the current split between Nazis (I refuse to call them “conservatives” because they’re not “conserving” anything!) and normal people is something that really came to a head in the USA in 2008 and started happening in Canada c.2012.

        Bad social ideas get imported from the USA a good ten times or more faster than good ones.

        You can see similar dynamics appearing in things like the respective nations’ “Yellow Peril” laws. (And keep in mind that the last vestiges of the USA’s “Yellow Peril” laws were finally removed in the 1970s… while I was alive! Took Canada a bit longer to match that, as usual, though Canada was practically alongside the USA in starting them.))

  • Blaze@dormi.zoneEnglish
    2·
    8 months ago

    Hello,

    Sorry to hear you are closing this community. I didn’t contribute as much as I would like to (busy myself animating other communities, and real life stuff too). Do you want to try advertising this community once more to larger communities like !casualconversation@lemmy.world ? Maybe that could help getting better people on board.

    Also, you might want to have a look at https://tildes.net/ . This website is heavily focused on discussion, so maybe the issue you have is that people that could be interested in your community are already there

  • DerisionConsulting@lemmy.caEnglish
    2·
    8 months ago

    This community didn’t really feel like a place to discuss, it seemed more like a place for the mods to have a soap box for others to listen to them.

    Also, some of the “topic starters” were incredibly leading, and also completely out of no where. On the division in the USA “Can it be remedied, or is civil war the only option?”. Civil war? Do sane people think that would solve the political division in your country?

    • Ace T'Ken@lemmy.caOPMEnglish
      1·
      7 months ago

      it seemed more like a place for the mods to have a soap box

      I mean… that’s what starting a thread is as a CMV, article, or Steelman (among others). As a mod, it’s kind of our job to create threads when the Community isn’t large enough yet. Do you feel someone would start a community called Actual Discussion and not have anything they’d like to discuss?

      some of the “topic starters” were incredibly leading

      They were common talking points I saw in other threads ripped almost directly from top replies, not my opinion. And you were never required to speak on the starters, they were simply things to get people thinking and responding.

      All in all, I’d say you’re being rather uncharitable in your descriptions.

      • DerisionConsulting@lemmy.caEnglish
        1·
        7 months ago

        They were common talking points I saw in other threads ripped almost directly from top replies, not my opinion.

        In your main post, you complain about the quality of posts you find online and how people aren’t voting on quality, so then why use highly upvoting as a metric?

        Do you feel someone would start a community called Actual Discussion and not have anything they’d like to discuss?

        That’s not what I said.
        I said that things didn’t feel like discussions.

        • Ace T'Ken@lemmy.caOPMEnglish
          1·
          7 months ago

          The points weren’t chosen for quality, they were chosen because they are commonly parroted. This was in order to encourage people to discuss things that are commonly spoken, but may not be ideologically sound. In other words, they were chosen specifically to be debateworthy. If a poster chose, as long as they were on topic, they could also completely ignore them or create a new thread. Often in order to discuss something, you must give an opinion first and not merely sit and critique what other people say.

          The topics where I wrote out a bunch of stuff that was ripe for picking apart were the topics that were discussed the most heavily. If you don’t feel like that’s a discussion, then I’m not sure what you would feel like one was.

    • Ace T'Ken@lemmy.caOPMEnglish
      3·
      8 months ago

      I have about 200 of them saved that are my favorites and have been going through them when I find something that is related in my mind. I generally put them on the weekly threads to try and bump up engagement a little bit as it’s something more than just text, and it’s something that I love as well.

      I think you’re the first one to comment on it. It is appreciated!

      • gimpchrist @lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        8 months ago

        That’s really awesome I used to cut every single one out of The Coast and just collect them back in the day… I’ve lost them all, so it’s really friggin nice to see them again… what a small world!