652

Addressing the Exponential Growth of Communities (lemmynsfw.com)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by OptimusPrime@lemmynsfw.com to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world

214 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Over the past few days, I've witnessed a remarkable surge in the number of communities on browse.feddit.de. What started with 2k communities quickly grew to 4k, and now it has reached an astonishing 8k. While this exponential growth signifies a thriving platform, it also brings forth challenges such as increased fragmentation and the emergence of echo chambers. To tackle these issues, I propose the implementation of a Cross-Instance Automatic Multireddit feature within Lemmy. This feature aims to consolidate posts from communities with similar topics across all federated instances into a centralized location. By doing so, we can mitigate community fragmentation, counter the formation of echo chambers, and ultimately foster stronger community engagement. I welcome any insights or recommendations regarding the optimal implementation of this feature to ensure its effectiveness and success.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] Weerdo@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

I've always thought about creating some metric to weight users who create comments with the most engagement as higher. That leads to the most controversial or dividing comments rising though.

Some impartial judgement via mod points and or community awards to weigh valuable users would be nice.

The issue is any of these would be gamed, it might be possible today to use an AI model like ChatGPT but that's got its own biases.

So for the moment I can't think of a better system than upvote downvote.

[-] socialjusticewizard@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago

Yeah, weighting 'engagement' higher is basically the youtube algorithm problem: you'd be attracting trolls most of all. You could probably devise something smarter, like weighting it to include all of most upvotes, fewest downvotes, and most comments; adding comments to it helps identify people who post positive but engaging things, but again that can lead to an echo chamber. Plus, it then under-weights new users compared to established ones, which can be unfortunate.