I’ve been seeing more often (and others have posted the same) that some of the elements of “Reddit etiquette” seem to be taking over here. Luckily I can still find discussion comments but it seems the jokes and general “downvote because I disagree” are slowly taking over.
So the question becomes is it the size or the functionality of the site? The people or popularity? What’s your thoughts?
edit: should I change it to Lemmy-hivemind? Exhibit A: the amount of downvotes without a single explanation (guessing it’s anything to do with Reddit being talked about).
Gamifying the voting incentivises people to make low quality posts and comments. That’s why Reddit is now basically just rage bait fake stories with comment chains that all look exactly the same. And now it’s all just ai generated anyway.
I sometimes visit and read the AITAH type stories and I’m dumbfounded that people can believe or enjoy reading them. All the subtleties and nuances of the early days are gone and it’s a race to who can karma farm the hardest.
The other thing that made Reddit great in early days were the small communities being visible on the front page. It made the content varied and there were different types of posting hitting front page. I think Lemmy is struggling with this because politics is just so loud that we don’t have enough volume of other content being made.
Using scaled sorting really helps with getting smaller communities on the front page. I still see the political and news communities but I also see communities for cities and niche hobbies.
I remember when Reddit’s best “reading” threads just suddenly shifted. AITA, JustNoMIL, TalesFromTechSupport, TalesFromRetail, all of a sudden they went from realistic stories of real people venting to… just obvious rage bait. It was so disappointing. It was one of the best things to read on the bus, here’s someone going through something, can offer support, laugh about it, whatever.
It went from stories like “I had someone demand a manager when I wouldn’t offer them 40% off” to “someone pulled a gun on me at work, and my manager told me I should have punched them”. Just such horrible bullshit. That’s when I knew the site was going downhill.
Indeed. When’s the last time we saw a well-thought-out, controversial opinion on Reddit?The system breeds behaviors that are in conflict with a high-quality, diverse discussion.
It is for the same reason that I’m very particular about my downvotes. They are reserved for low-quality content, not that which I personally disagree with. I’d like if we could all learn to be less judgmental and more constructive so that we may all learn something meaningful. I think this is incompatible with the way that Reddit operates.
As someone who recently switch to Lemmy, I did notice that there is a general difference in the tone of conversation. This is the first time I’ve seen it put to words
I wonder if separating relevant/irrelevant & like/dislike into two votes would have any success. Quite likely it would not, but might be worth trying.
Would probably rename [ like / dislike ] to [ agree / disagree ] to avoid overlapping with [ relevant / irrelevant ]. To make it more robust, make voting for relevancy compulsory if voting for [ agree / disagree ].
But the reported stats is all moot if there’s bot manipulation anyway. Also, people would most likely say it’s relevant even if it’s actually not, just because they agree with it
Stop over-policing people. Just because you disagree with something someone says, doesnt mean you have a right or duty to shut them down
We talk about it as a hive mind, but I think it is actually a problem of large numbers of users and an algorithm that needs tweaking, plus some shady mods.
You post but you’re too late, or you have a legit opinion that needs a few sub comments, but it’s too late.
Or you get trolled, you respond in a similar vein, and the mod bans you but not them, because the mod likes their opinion more. And I don’t blame mods for being soft in general, because it is a shit job. But sometimes it’s frustrating.
Or you get trolled, you respond in a similar vein, and the mod bans you but not them, because the mod likes their opinion more.
Or you added a G-rated insult after a detailed explanation of how they’re objectively wrong. Because god forbid anyone be the tiniest bit uncivil with someone going ‘oh, so you think [infuriating horseshit]?’
Remember: trolling is explicitly forbidden, but any hint of suggesting someone might be trolling is worse somehow.
I have a hypothesis that all the good people with a moral compass left Reddit in disgust over the API changes, and effectively being forced into using the official Reddit app. What remains of Reddit are the sociopathic assholes.
all the good people with a moral compass left Reddit in disgust over the API changes
All the good posts left thats for sure. Now its just a bunch of kids asking stupid questions like “should i buy a X” or “is X worth it?”… idk maybe make a decision yourself
It was moderation and up/down votes influencing comment order.
On reddit you are punished very harshly for downvotes. Your comment gets put at the bottom, hidden and you get rate limited so you can only comment once every 10mins. Mods also nuke threads that go against their ideals and perm ban people in those threads.
Reddit culture shifted a lot during 2015 and the site mods felt they needed to control the discourse.
I don’t know how we would fix that problem but I feel like instances and a modlog goes a long way
The universal problem is that there’s no shared definition of what a downvote represents. Is it “this is spam and should be removed”? “I don’t like this”? “This doesn’t belong here”? “I want to see less of this”? “I disagree”?
That’s not even a Reddit problem - it’s innate to any social media voting apparatus. Extend it to Facebook, even. Does the laugh reaction mean I’m laughing with you or at you?
Most comments and posts I’ve downvoted have been because I accidentally swiped too far right and my upvote changed to the downvote action and I didn’t even notice. So those downvotes don’t even mean anything!
I think the right answer is to stop worrying about votes. Even if they all mean the same thing they’re still meaningless. It’s better to change your post and comment sorting setting than to try to social engineer a way out of it.
+1 and -1 is not representative of the full of ways you can feel about a content. This is what happens when convenience for the system outweights human expression.
One thing I always liked about slashdot is the ability to tag votes with things like “funny” or “informative”.
+i
Thinking scores are “added” is part of the problem. 5000 people voting 1/10 is not equal to 500 upvotes.
-1/12
Giving someone 1+2+3+4+5+… votes seems excessive
Normal humans would understand that by amplitude, I probably meant a x/10 score. And then the algorithm would put that in context of every other score your account has given out to properly weight relative to your baseline. Then perform sentiment analysis on that specific post relative to all the other posts you’ve passed judgement on as context and isolate your relative score with respect to that specific sentiment.
Dude, it was just a maths joke and I wasn’t even replying to you
-1/12 is the result of putting the sum of all the natural numbers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc) through the Riemann zeta function.
Get off your snarky high horse and treat people with kindness.
“Normal humans” good gracious.
OK sorry but it sounds like your saying “votes with values other than +1 and -1 ? Ridiculous ! What next ? downvotes of amplitude -1/12 ? Cats and dogs living together ?”
Which I assume the reason the designers of these platform only give us binary +1 and -1 expression and that’s IF they don’t take away the negative option entirely.
In my defence I plead reddit brain
Reddiquette says
Vote. If you think something contributes to conversation, upvote it. If you think it does not contribute to the subreddit it is posted in or is off-topic in a particular community, downvote it.
If people followed that there would be no problem.
Unfortunately, the downvote button is mostly used as an “I disagree” / “I don’t like your opinion” button.
Vice versa, I think Reddit upvoted a lot of the same old boring memes/jokes with the idea that maybe they would benefit if they get there first then next time.
Any post related to WWII, Top comment: “I did nazi that coming” 10,000 upvotes.
It’s not that bad on Lemmy but I have noticed an up tick in non helpful very unoriginal jokes in threads with serious topics.
Most comments and posts I’ve downvoted have been because I accidentally swiped too far right and my upvote changed to the downvote action and I didn’t even notice.
I actually changed it so that if I swipe too far it saves the post/comment and to downvote I have to swipe too far the other side to downvote. I think that makes more sense
It makes me wonder—would the dynamic change if there was only an upvote? So you could choose not to upvote, but the default action would be a neutral one, and if you liked/wanted to support/etc you could signal that.
I see tons of posts on here now that are downvoted to oblivion, because they are a legitimate article that says something a group doesn’t like. There won’t even be comments on the post. So like a Reuter article that discusses Palestinian casualties and no comments and like -20. This doesn’t seem like a super useful mechanism. Or at least, it’s just functioning today as a content preference “I don’t want to see this typed content” as opposed to “this is bad info, out of line with the community, etc.”
And despite ranking my list by either hot, or top day/six hours, I still see the downvoted posts regularly so the mechanic doesn’t even really do anything in terms of visibility. Or possibly there’s just too little content on a given community for it to get filtered out.
Not sure if you realize, but a lemmy instance can turn off downvotes for the entire instance. So we’ll see if instances with downvotes disabled will do better.
No I didn’t know that, would be interesting to see more of them try it, just for curiositys sake.
Blajah doesn’t have downvotes, so I can’t downvote anyone and also can’t see if anyone downvotes me. It has helped me break free of the Reddit hivemind and truly be myself.
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I’ve already seen hivemind votes on some Lemmy comment threads. It’s just inevitable. Hopefully most Lemmy communities can be better about the banning thing though.
Between the Boston bomber and the APIpocalypse it seemed to me like the hive mind got a lot better, even on Reddit. You could find a lot of different perspectives, and it was rare for one that’s definitely wrong to stay on the top. Unless you just define “hive mind” as insufficiently conservative or whatever.
I thought they got a LOT worse after APIpocalypse. I couldn’t go anywhere on Reddit without seeing people factioned up. It was like the only approved comments were the same circlejerk as before but with the added tendency to make Reddit look good. Kind of like only saying what you heard on Reddit and nothing else. Shit got lonely quick.
I’ll take your word for it, lol. Lemmy’s been so good I haven’t really gone back.
Oh well thank god the wrong perspectives don’t stay at the top.
Users upvoting/downvoting leads to a hivemind, even if the moderation is not complicit (which it often is).
I like hiding votes until you’ve voted. Allowing users, communities, or instances to change how posts/comments are sorted might help too.
If users were able to migrate their accounts that could help against centralization
What is that you care to preserve? Can’t you just register a new account and kill the old one? (genuinely curious)
Many users have stated they would like to keep their comment history and subscriptions. Move their account to a different instance. Having to start from scratch is a big hassle.
The fediverse concept is great but users are locked into the instance they create their accounts on. With so many instances it is better to just start somewhere and figure out what’s what later.
So far I am happy with my instance. But if I ever change my mind it would help if migration was simple.
Great point, are the lemmy devs (idk if it works that way?) aware of this?
I have a conspiracy theory take on it; I think Reddit is run by fascist admins trying to push a fascist ideology and that’s why it’s so toxic. I think techbros that run corporate social media platforms are all fash.
I think the difference is when you have a small group everyone sort of considers themselves co-custodians of a space—lifting each other up and helping people integrate. But get enough people and it starts getting exhausting constantly trying to enforce norms against an ever growing community of people who don’t understand or respect them. It’s like social enshittification.
Too much growth too fast for sure! Much harder for Lemmy to create its own culture and maintain it. Much harder to discourage toxicity. Notice how healthy communities are often smaller.
Sucks for niche communities but they’ll get slowly spun up over time, and in the meantime they can be found in other places including Reddit. I don’t personally need everything to be a one-stop shop.
I think we need to consider the norms Lemmites enforce. From what I’ve experienced: it’s often nitpicks (“I think one thing you said is wrong”), or mild insults when an opinion is outside our slightly-left-of-centre POV. Disagreement is rarely friendly, gentle, or constructive.
From what I’ve seen, we’re great at getting the big stuff right - people react quickly against child porn or overt racism/insults. But we reply with the same anger if someone has an opinion different from ours.
I have a better time in small Reddit communities because people have more shared interests. Here our prime commonality is that we like FOSS and dislike Reddit.
But we reply with the same anger if someone has an opinion different from ours.
Hey fuck you! That’s total bullshit and you know it!!
Not a single comma. Tch tch tch.
I’m old enough to remember the start of eternal September. It hasn’t stopped yet.
I don’t recall when I first started using the internet. Late 80’s or very early 90’s. No WWW back then. It was all IRC and gopher and newsgroups and other things I don’t remember. I lived near MSU, so I could dial in for free because it was a local call.
And then once you got in, it was hard to find anything to actually do. It kinda felt like exploring Mars. But eventually I found things. Very exclusive club and very good times that I miss. No advertisements. No one trying to make a sale.
It kinda felt like exploring Mars. But eventually I found things
Even the world wide web felt like that until shockingly recently. I remember circa 2005 just typing in random words .com and seeing what you’d find, or discovering a cool new website by word of mouth at school.
I remember vising pig.com and discovering a delightful page consisting of nothing more than a giant picture of a pig and the text “this domain is for sale” that lasted years. These days it’s probably one of those shitty for sale landing pages.
Moderation is a big part. Heavily libbed up mods such as the Lemmy.World ones are only allowing one perspective to be posted. Which is why the place is slowly turning into Reddit
This is done in three ways:
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Restricting what content is allowed to be posted using made up metrics like MBFC or calling anything they don’t like an opinion piece.
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Allowing users to insult those with differing opinions EG call them Russian bots or Trump supporters and only banning users when they insult those trolls back.
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.World/WorldNews style just banning anyone who doesn’t have a Biden style Zionist worldview.
The centralization around .World is one of the biggest issues facing Lemmy right now.
Yeah, good point. I think it’s best to have multiple instances with similar subs so you can always move over easily. People should also make their accounts on different instances and be a bit more active there.
i was wondering if i was the only one that felt this way; since i keep getting banned and named called on lemmy.world and shitjustworks every time i try to let newbie leftists posters know that lemmy.world doesn’t not represent the lemmyverse and that they’ll get a much better experience if they try almost any other instance.
You’re absolutely not the only one. My first Lemmy instance was .world, but I eventually left when I noticed that they were kinda manipulating their userbase to consent to an eventual defederation from .ml, on the grounds that it’s a “tankie” instance. The .world admins are really quick to ban any communist instance or community, and if all of them are banned, they just outright make shit up.
That was the red flag that made me jump ship, but honestly I don’t regret it at all. I didn’t truly realize the scope of .world manipulation until I started seeing Lemmy from a different instance.
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Lol… Mods enforce the hivemind.
Any critical analysis or questioning of the mods narrative leads to comment removal and bans.
They hive mind is just as strong on lemmy as it is on Reddit. which has led me to wind-down my engagement on lemmy and will very soon drop it all together. going back to RSS I guess or might try nostr next.
