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This weekly thread will focus on Helping Us Fix Weekly Topics. This Community seems to have a problem. I generally do my best to create open-ended topics that don’t lead the reader to respond in any specific way, all while providing what I think are interesting starters. I’ve purposely picked other moderators that do not think the same as I do on many topics, but have the skill to explain why they feel the way they do. Results of all of this seem to be extremely limited.
If I try and introduce some opinion in a topic for people to pick at (even if I don’t believe it), they tend to get very aggressive and seem to insult moreso than discuss. They focus on moral arguments instead of logical ones and abandon discussions when challenged which sort of defeats the purpose (and goes against the rules) of the entire Community to begin with.
Some Starters (and don’t feel you have to speak on all or any of them if you don’t care to):
- Can we do anything with moderation or rules to help encourage you to respond more?
- Are there any format changes you’d like to see that may help?
- Do you ever feel that Lemmy is a more aggressive form of social media and therefore limit your discussion?
- Does the activist nature of Lemmy help or hurt further adoption?
- What topics would you like to see covered?
- Is Lemmy even a good platform for discussion to begin with?
- Would you like to be a mod and help out?
Is Lemmy even a good platform for discussion to begin with?
No.
Anything with simplistic popularity polls attached to literally everything people provide is pretty much automatically going to suck. Even if everybody is voting in good faith you’re just going to get an echo chamber. Once you factor in that a very large number of people don’t vote in good faith (like people who get angry at something you say and go to your profile to systematically downvote everything you’ve done, or organized dogpile voting, or …) you begin to see the real problem lurking behind the obvious one.
Lemmy was an attempt to replace the festering pile of groupthink that was Reddit with something “On The Fediverse” (rather like “On The Blockchain” only less morally repugnant) and instead of thinking about where and how Reddit succeeded and where and how it failed and trying to do better, it just tried to clone Reddit while allowing its flaws to magnify by the distributed nature of it.
I actually saw a system once for dealing with that that I thought had serious potential. If you wanted to downvote someone, it cost you time. Every time you downvoted the system would pause you, rendering you unable to use it for a period of time. On your first downvote it was measured in milliseconds, but with every downvote you cast in a given time period (by default it was the day, I think?) the pause increased exponentially. So by your 20th downvote you were being frozen for a minute and by the time you hit your hundredth you were freezered for a week. (It was, actually, technically speaking, impossible to reach your hundredth as a result.)
The idea behind this was that the community could downvote you to perdition if you were a jackass (since it would be a miniscule freeze time for them), but if you tried to counter that by downvoting everybody who downvoted you, you’d rapidly be frozen out of the community.
Of course the problem with that was that it was based on the naive supposition that people wouldn’t coordinate downvoting circles; that you wouldn’t be able to arrange brigading and dogpiling. But I still think something interesting could be salvaged from the idea by people smarter than I am. After all the statistics are all there and it should be possible to identify voting circles, sock puppet accounts, and the like from statistical behaviour, no?
Huh. That’s actually a really good idea.
Or… and hear me out here… Maybe it could cost 10 cents to downvote someone. Not enough to be egregious, but the funds could be used to help keep the server afloat and would make you think twice about downvoting comments you only mildly disagree with.
Yeah, monetary costs work too. The idea is that it has to cost.
Though with monetary the costs would still have to go up exponentially so that you don’t have some deep-pocketed Apartheid Manchild literally nickel and diming a server to death.
No, but for a different reason.
Conversations have extremely short life spans. After a day, conversations dwindle down to individual threads with back and forths between two people (at best), since they are the only ones revisiting the post (due to notifications).
Even if people were committed (and/or reminded) about revisiting posts, the threading makes it difficult to find what’s new.
I think the short life spans and the difficulty in finding what’s new are part and parcel of trying to clone Reddit’s flaws instead of figuring out why it was broken in the first place.
The problem with Reddit wasn’t that it was “centralized”. It was that it was mob rules.