429
Why does Lemmy feel so fresh compared to Reddit?
(lemmy.world)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
429 points (100.0% liked)
Asklemmy
43961 readers
1158 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
It's called the honeymoon effect. The sooner we recognize this, the sooner we can acknowledge that lemmy is vulnerable to all the same failings as reddit, and the sooner we can take steps to safeguard against those failings.
If we instead say "no no, lemmy is different, look at how much better things inherently are over here", then we're doomed to go down the same path.
I agree - what would you say those pitfalls are? Of course the decentralizing nature takes care of some problems - but the main thing that made me feel awful browsing reddit was the constant argumentative nature of every discussion. When I first discovered web forums 20 years ago it was the magical aspect of it that had me engaged. It was actually cool to be able to chat with other people online about anything - and that itself put everyone in a good mood; after all, why waste your time being really negative if you're doing something cool and interesting? Now, it's very common place. Added with people being more comfortable that they can remain anonymous, huge sites like Reddit are prone to a lot of....crap. That's what I can think of so far.
I both love and hate the upvote/downvote mechanic. I like seeing quality posts bubble to the top, I also like seeing the general consensus of lurkers, but I don't like circlejerk posts or that downvoted comments get dogpiled on, which often both result in a toxic, self-righteous flame war. And the solution is obviously not deleting the downvoted comments, because then you're just censoring unpopular opinions.
I think something worth trying would be not visually distinguishing between posts with no votes and posts with more negative than positive votes. I think an instance could enforce this on their own communities with only positive results.
The only counter argument is that dishonest arguments can't be "buried" by downvotes (hidden behind a "[show]" button). Another strategy would be to allow burying, but somehow throttle the responses to them; maybe limit the comment depth, or limit the number of responses per user, or allow users to flag flame war threads as "unproductive" which at some point would block further responses.
To be clear, I don't think the lemmy "spec" should adopt any of these measures, I think these regulations should be decided by instance/community mods, and up to the users to regulate and provide feedback on.