I’m a long time Lemmy lurker and occasional Redditor. Since the Reddit influx, I’ve watched the frequency of shitty Reddit-type behavior, e.g., combative comments, trolling, and unnecessary rudeness, just sky rocket.
I’m happy to have more content on Lemmy, but I wish the bad actors and assholes would have stayed on Reddit.
Yes, I realize the irony of posting this on a new community that’s basically a Reddit transplant.
I think that it’ll get better over time, for structural reasons: since Reddit is a big instance with lots of users and only a few admins, the admins give no fucks on how you behave there. (And if you’re banned by a mod, you create another username and problem solved.) Here however individual users are more precious for their instances’ admins, so admins have more reasons to keep their instances clean of people likely to piss off other people. And, even if they don’t, I predict that instances with notoriously rude individuals will get defederated. The net result is that those users will have low visibility for other users.
What concerns me the most is not combative, trolling, and unnecessary rude users. It’s the stupid - users who are able to reason but actively avoid it. It’s the context illiterates, the assumers, the false dichotomisers, the “I dun unrurrstand” [with either an implicit “I demand to be spoonfed as per my divine right”, or an “I disagree but I’d rather pretend that I’m a stupid than outright say it”] and the likes. People tend to pat those users on their heads and talk about esoteric stuff like “intentions”, but I don’t think that they should be socially accepted here, as they drive the dialogue level down and make the place less fun for other users.
It might be different if there was noplace else for them to go. But why does EVERY place on the internet - Reddit, Twitter, Facebook/Threads - all have to cater to it? Can’t there be just ONE place where we hold ourselves to a higher standard? Maybe this means we’ll see fewer posts / comments / “activity” - but is that a bad thing, necessarily?
Still, as I learned how to drive, I realized something: if you leave a space somewhere, someone will fill it. If we want to build something different, it will require expended effort to make that happen.
Because other people don’t care about your standard.
If you want to make an instance where it’s’ enforced, do so - that’s the whole point of the Fediverse. Just don’t be surprised when you have no users.
Depending on which are those standards, you might get a lot of users. We had examples of that even in Reddit, where a few subs (like r/AskHistorians) had fairly specific rules that boil down to “don’t be a moron” and they were still fairly popular, even in a site that could as well have as slogan "lasciate ogni ragione, voi ch’entrate"¹. That’s because not even the stupid benefit from the others’ stupidity, so they still gravitate towards environments with higher standards².
So what !OpenStars@kbin.social said might be actually viable; the Fediverse (or at least, some chunks of it) could hold itself to a higher standard. The question is how; perhaps through instances? User culture? Or even UX changes that make context harder to ignore and stupid shit sink to the bottom (against the Fluff Principle³)?
(At those times I really want a c/TheoryOfTheFediverse…)
A simple and obvious solution is just to adopt the rules of communities on reddit that manage to maintain a average quality of content (askhistorians? r/science?), and building features that help with that (multireddits , so you will have different feeds for “fun” and “important”, or user tags) , reddit enhancement suite features could also be helpful.
The problem I see is that those communities usually had very specific goals; e.g. r/askhistorians wasn’t intended for discussions, it was more like “ask something in specific, get a specific answer”, so it’s hard to apply the same rules for communities with other goals.
And frankly, r/science was a bit of a dumpster fire.
I might be wrong, but I feel like we need to instigate a different mindset here, so perhaps user culture would be the way to go? That means scolding users for acting as dumbarses, instead of playing along their entitlement (a la Reddit).
Fully agree on the features.
First, actually reading before speaking? And going to the trouble of citing your references?! This is absolutely an example of what I was talking about in terms of holding ourselves to higher standards. I get it - it is outright fun to share memes and short quick snippets, and there is room and value for doing that too, in line with the context that is offered (some posts call for more serious discussions, memes call for just fun, but oftentimes an article/thread can have responses of both types), and I do that myself too even, but there should also be room for deeper thoughts as well? Which by their nature tend to be downvoted or at least ignored, b/c people are not always in the mood for a wall of text, even if thoughtfully and lovingly crafted.
One example could be to add to the upvote system (or on kbin there is a “boost” that is the true upvote, actual upvotes are not counted even though they are displayed - yes it is complicated!:-D) a new thing like “favorited” or “loved”. Yes, people would game that too, but maybe if you could only use one of those a day, or ten per month or some such, then people would have an incentive to hold those in reserve (people could still game it with alts, so like anything else, it may need some attention, but perhaps that is not enough of a criticism to simply not move forward and start doing it?). Netflix similarly now has “up=like”, “down=did not like”, but also “double up=LOVE”. Implementing that across the Fediverse could allow distinctions between content that you merely agreed with, vs. content that needs special distinction as being LOVED. Even Reddit allowed awards, to meet that same need. Btw, I nominated your comment in the m/BestOf magazine for a vaguely similar effect, except that magazine has extremely little traffic (I am not even subscribed to it myself, although in my defense I do keep trying but it always goes to a new page displaying the single word “Error” whenever I try), and also it is far too much effort to do for every post that is worthy of such distinction.
I almost hesitated to respond with these thoughts, b/c who am I to suggest something that I am not willing to implement into actual code? That said, my responding to your existing comment seems a different matter, since you do seem interested in this topic, rather than an entire post requesting/demanding that something be done.
I wrote out a somewhat long-winded I suppose explanation of my personal experiences that led me to believe what I do, but I exceeded the character limit so I will have to post it separately, at which point you can peruse it at your leisure or just skip it if you’d rather.
More importantly though, if you are interested, here is an - I think - extremely insightful article about the short-term blurting types of comments, which again I do myself, we all do, acting to drown out serious discussions: https://kbin.social/m/BestOf/t/113715/The-Ennui-Engine-or-how-chasing-short-term-gratification-drains-our. I am not sure that I hold out any hope for change, but at least I enjoy trying to educate myself on such things for the sake of my own sanity:-).
We mostly agree on memes and other “just for fun” material: it’s fine if it’s there (I like it too). The only problem is when it drowns the deeper content into a sea of fluff, as it often happens in social media.
What if its value decrease with usage?
For example. Let’s say that the feature is called “fav”. And that “favs” are taking into account, for sorting purposes. Each poster gets 100 “fav points” a day.
If the person “favs” a single piece of content, that content is boosted by 100/1 = 100 fav points. If the person favs two, each gets boosted by 100/2 = 50 points. And if the person indiscriminately favs 1000 pieces of content through the day, each is boosted by only 100/1000 = 0.1 fav points, so practically nothing.
This wouldn’t impose a hard limit on how much you can use the feature per day, contrariwise to your idea, but it still makes you use the feature consciously - because you know that favving one more piece of content will make all the others that you’ve favved through the day count less and less. I feel like this could address the fluff principle in a way that simple votes (or boosts, double upvotes etc.) don’t: not using the feature would backfire (the points go to waste), but using it indiscriminately would also backfire.
I’ve read the Ennui Engine article. I feel like the author touched a good point, perhaps this is all a result of us taking the internet as “it is not serious / real life, then it doesn’t really matter”. This mentality somewhat worked in the 00s? Not any more though. The proposed solution feels unfeasible though, as it expects people to do the right thing, that’s like herding all cats into the same direction; we might need smarter solutions than that. (Even then, thanks for sharing this text, I think that it bullseyes the problem on the descriptive level.)
Thanks for the nomination in the mag!