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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?
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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.
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.
(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 …)
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.
Is Lemmy even a good platform for discussion to begin with?
I also am going to have to say no to this question. Reddit style forum threads don’t do a good job of promoting legitimate discussion in general. The simple like/dislike voting system encourages users to vote emotionally and your community-specific rules for voting aren’t going to do very much to change user behavior in that regard. As you’ve already found out, that is going to make having a discussion about any topic that’s controversial or requires an amount of nuance or flexibility of thought to approach nearly impossible. However, these are the topics that tend to have the most value as a discussion and not being able to adequately have them is a disservice to the community.
Maybe this gripe is also specific to me, but I would guess it’s not. I exclusively use Lemmy on a mobile device. This makes crafting a lengthy, well formatted, and coherant response quite a bit more difficult than if I were to use a non-mobile device. Constantly fighting autocorrect, needing to break a train of thought to scroll up and down to see what point I’m responding to, and managing links and sources by swapping apps don’t make for an enjoyable experience.
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?
The population of the platform is relatively small, with 50,000 monthly active users compared to Reddit’s 250,000,000 million (I’m pulling these number roughly and from memory based on a recent thread) it’s a fraction of a percentage the size of a platform that also would struggle with this style of a community. This at its core is going to limit the number of possible discussion participants who are passionate and knowledgeable enough to reply to only a very few and that’s if they even manage to see the thread because anyone who doesn’t actively check or subscribe to the community is only going to see the post in the algorithms within about three hours after its posted. This is a low volume community in terms of votes and engagement so it will get buried by memes very quickly. Maybe consider posting the weekly during a higher volume time for users like on the weekends to help a little.
The population around here is both diverse and homogenous at the same time. There is a large enough amount of cultural diversity, but the type of user who is actively on a platform like this tends to be of a similar personality. I would argue that tech and privacy focused users actually don’t make great candidates for academic discussions. I know this is a strong generalization, but these people tend to be, and excuse the idioms, the “I’m the king of my castle” or “My way or the highway” type of people. Because of this, in conjunction with the voting system, almost every thread ultimately feels more like a loud argument in a bar rather than a conversation. Everyone just wants to say their piece to be heard and then move on.
The occasions that I type half of an entire thoughtful response about a topic that I’m knowledgable about only to delete it halfway through are numerous. In fact, I did that for this specific post yesterday 15 minutes after you posted this topic. Commenting on a new topic is always a huge gamble because it feels like a shocking amount of users on the platform are only here because they’re having a bad day and want to be a jerk to someone and argue for the sake of arguing.
Edit: I guess this turned into a bit more of a rant than I had intended rather than constructive feedback. I guess some of my own platform frustrations are mirrored with yours.
Thank you for the reply. The majority of my thoughts were very much in line with what you said and it’s sort of what I feared.
I’m not sure how to continue with things as they are as it feels like trying to start a dialogue with a wall at times. I hadn’t considered mobile platforms as part of the issue, but you are most likely correct.
Not to say it’s not possible to successfully run the type of community you’re seeking, but fostering it is going to feel like an uphill battle for a very long time.
Beehaw has tried to promote a similar moderation heavy and discussion based platform and also ran into issues with Lemmy as a whole. Last I knew they were creating their own platform rather than staying, but that was because of ideological differences with the developers and lack of moderation tools.
Great questions! I hope I can jump in without being too short.
I wonder if something like debatemap.app or kialo-edu.com would offer a better UX (“user experience”) than Lemmy. I’ve also heard that substack.com has done a good job of attracting high-quality discussion (but I worry, what’s stopping them from traveling down the enshittification path like all the rest?)
OTOH, I think online discussion itself has some weaknesses that can’t be easily overcome–perhaps in-person, local discussion is (usually/almost always?) better. For example, one study indicates that engaging in political discourse with people online leads to an “uncivil comment rate” of 10%, while a “mixed political / non-political” discourse has a lower uncivil comment rate [1].
Personally, I find it to be generally true that I need to trust someone in one or more non-controversial areas of life before I take their controversial (to me) opinions seriously. Simple time and familiarity also helps.
[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/political-science/articles/10.3389/fpos.2021.741605/full
