There are a significant amount of questions here that do not follow the criteria in the sidebar, especially “1. Open-ended question” and “5. An actual topic of discussion”. It seems some folks want others to do research for them, or to troubleshoot some random issue.

This bugs me. Of course, I can ignore and/or downvote those posts, and I do. However, I’m wondering if anyone else feels the same way. I’m don’t want to stifle content and discussion on such a burgeoning platform, but could we do something about this?

Perhaps we could “tag” posts in some way (I know tags aren’t officially supported yet) or maybe we could redirect folks to a sister community for non-discussion questions. Or something else?

Just throwin’ it out there. If I’m alone in this, I’ll take my lumps and quietly sit back down.

EDIT: Already seeing good points in the replies! makes sense- probably a bit too early to be sticklers about topics.

EDIT 2: Really appreciate the responses and discussion! I appreciate the discourse and also not being downvoted to oblivion 😄

FINAL EDIT: Thanks to all who commented. It’s nice to know I’m not alone, but I do accept what most (including mods) have said- cracking down on the types of questions is not a priority when the community is still growing.

  • walden@sub.wetshaving.social
    471·
    5 months ago

    I don’t care.

    I help moderate a community that tries to mirror how things were done on Reddit, and over time we decided “this isn’t Reddit, we don’t have nearly as many users as Reddit, so there’s no need to run this place like Reddit”.

    Eventually this community and others will reach a tipping point where there’s a need to cull posts and have stricter content guidelines, but for now I think it’s ok to be a bit lax.

    • catastrophicblues@lemmy.ca
      14·
      5 months ago

      Yeah there’s only so many actually open-ended questions you can ask without being repetitive, while also on relatively limited users.

      • intensely_human
        1·
        5 months ago

        Yeah there’s only so many actually open-ended questions you can ask without being repetitive

        lmao. I’m curious what you think this number is. How many open ended questions are there? Just ballpark.

    • pelletbucket
      2·
      5 months ago

      i think it’s required to be lax. the laid-back nature of Lemmy is essential to its soul

    • intensely_human
      1·
      5 months ago

      Asking open ended questions that generate discussion is a good policy regardless of hating reddit

      • walden@sub.wetshaving.social
        1·
        5 months ago

        I don’t hate Reddit. I was just saying that reddit has so many more users that enforcing rules that restrict content is more necessary.

        Lemmy doesn’t have enough content to warrant the enforcement of rules that were taken from reddit.