I Hope Rexxitors Tone Down the Low-Hanging Comment Chains on Lemmy.
I loved Reddit for what it is, but nothing made me back out of a post faster than seeing the top 3 parent threads as a regurgitation of the same inside jokes, pun-chains, and so on.
Just need the people complaining about people complaining post followed by a rule baning complaining about people. Then we can get the golden meta post of complaining about the rule stopping you from complaining about people.
I'll give it until the end of June. By that point, anyone who was going to leave reddit will have left, and new users will come more organically. At that point, the rexxitors will do what redditors do best, which is gatekeep.
I think it's natural to want the majority of posts to meet one's preferences but what one finds interesting/entertaining/etc. varies for each person.
I love diversity and choice and so I'm happy that each community can have their own individual rules/cultures and we can pick which communities we want to join. E.g., I wouldn't expect the same behaviour/rules/culture in a shit posting community compared to an arch linux community, but I'm glad both types of communities and content will exist.
We can collectively choose what kinds of unique cakes to bake and we can choose which cakes to eat too. :D
this was something I loved about slashdot moderation. When voting, people had to specify the reason for the vote. +1 funny, +1 insightful, +1 informative, -1 troll, -1 misleading, etc.
That way you can, for example, set in your user preferences to ignore positive votes for comedy, and put extra value on informative votes.
Then, to keep people from spamming up/down votes and to encourage them to think about their choices, they only gave out a limited number of moderation points to readers. So you'd have to choose which comments to spend your 5 points on.
Then finally, they had 'meta moderation' where you'd be shown a comment, and asked "would a vote of insightful be appropriate for this comment" to catch people who down-voted out of disagreement or personal vandetta. Any users who regularly mis-voted would stop receiving the ability to vote.
I don't think this is directly applicable to a federated system, but I do think it's one of the best-thought-out voting systems ever created for a discussion board.
edit: a couple other points i liked about it:
Comments were capped at (iirc) +5 and -1. Further votes wouldn't change the comment's score.
User karma wasn't shown. The user page would just say Karma: good. Or Excellent, or poor, or some other vague term.
It really is fascinating though, having a front row seat to what really is a massive tectonic shift in the history of the internet. Real curious to see how this all plays out. I've been online since the early 90's so I've seen tons come and go: AOL, yahoo, slashdot, livejournal, myspace, digg, etc, and this one feels different for some reason, but maybe its just me.
I think it feels different because it's not website B rolling in as a replacement for website A. It's an entire new system for social media, so the way you understand and use it has to shift a bit. I find it exciting, a lot more than if we just shifted to a generic centralised reddit alternative.
I get what you're saying, but communities that spend time together will form their inside jokes, their way of doing things, etc. If you don't like it you don't have to participate. I say this with the upmost respect, but you need to get over yourself. Nobody is forcing you into a community.
yeah, it's almost a bit intimidating to post here now the fun has settled. you have to think of a whole thought about a somewhat serious topic and sometimes that's just...ugh
The relationship advice threads were the weirdest. Someone would post a question like "my wife is sleeping over at her male coworkers place a lot and stopped coming home, should I be worried" and all the answers would be saying they're just jealous and too controlling.
You and I must have been in opposite threads there. Because it was weird, but in the opposite way you're describing.
Once saw one where I guy's wife let her sister something close to 1% of their savings because both the sister and her partner had been laid off in one month. The guy went ballistic and move everything out of their joint accounts into ones under his name only, and gave her a strict allowance. People on reddit were telling him that's nowhere enough, he should apparently divorce her right away, and maybe sue her.
They were also convinced that because of this one short term loan the SIL and BIL were now going to think he's a sucker, and they'd move in.
It was weird. Those places often get weird though because people in healthy relationships, or single but happy about it, just don't show up. So you just gave a cycle of people unhappy with their personal relationships goading other equally unhappy people.
So you're saying we should encourage people to not comment and participate because you personally don't enjoy something?
I know I'm being a bit over the top with the wording there but lets really think about it for a moment. Participation is engagement. And if we want Lemmy and by extension Lemmy.World to grow its what we need.
I upvoted you. Its a valid discussion to have. I just personally don't think its something we should be worried about in general.
Let Lemmy grow. Growth and low effort pun threads is not what killed reddit. Corporate interference and shit stirring controversy spewing algorithms in the name of "user engagement" is what drove reddit down the drain.
This right here. Puns aren't what was bad, it was the endless doomscrolling habit and continuous outrage going on that was. All the Rexxitors are going to see a serious uptick in their mental health. The puns were a coping mechanism, I think here that defensive reaction will be minimized.
I jest. Ultimately without some sort of mechanic that disincentivizes noisy, low-effort joke comments there's not going to be some sort of magical cultural shift. I'm just arriving, but from what I'm seeing Lemmy doesn't have any sort of design that will skew comments towards actual discussion and away from jokes/noise in any meaningful way.
The way it is right now, we don't have total "karma", which I imagine helps to at least suppress the purely karma-farming spam. That said, there's no real reason to think it won't be added here eventually.
I am still learning Lemmy, but I agree with you from what I am seeing. There is no “karma farming” here right? So the motivation is mostly people who want to engage?
There's no total karma for a user yet, yes. So the perverse incentive to make number go up at all costs isn't quite as wild as it is in Reddit.
As I wander around Lemmy more I'm also noticing that there's a lot of opportunity for instances to have their own subcultures, which goes against the "It doesn't matter which Lemmy instance you use" advice I've seen in a couple places. It definitely seems prudent to choose an instance that has an admin team and/or a theme you like, because instance-local content is going to be the easiest to find. The instance I chose is decently small and chill, but I've seen some other instances with a big focus on memes. To each their own!
Yeah, I was thinking of having some sort of feature that pre-builds thread topics in a post (humor, discussion, cross-searching) where users can put there comments in depending on what it is they're going for.
I'm also eyeballing Tildes as a Reddit alternative, and their dev has an interesting approach to increasing signal-to-noise ratio. They don't have downvotes, but they have labels that affect how comments are sorted, with the joke and noise labels moving comments down in the sort by a pretty significant amount.
Agreed. I think for now it's up to each community owner to set the expectations for their community and for the mods to enforce it. And so like Twitter...the quality of your feed will be dictated by whom you follow or in Lemmy's case which communities you join.
That's your opinion and you're welcome to it, but nothing will kill adoption rates harder than doing the whole early Mastodon thing of "you should change how you behave here"
Lemmy sorts comments differently from reddit. Lemmy's documentation page about their algorithm describes reddit's algorithm as one that,
rewards comments that are repetitive and spammy.
It's an issue the developers claim to have a solution for.
I have no problem with jokes and comment chains. People should have their fun. But, I deleted my reddit account in frustration years ago. Reddit ranks the jokes higher than relevant discussion.
I'm cautiously optimistic. Lemmy is likely to be less prone to this particular problem.
Wow, that's a clever little algorithm. It feels like it could work better.
Reddit's big problem (among many) was you had to get in early on a thread to contribute. Otherwise you could be so far at the bottom you might as well have sent your reply to the bit bucket.
lemmy's algo seems in theory to work better, but we'll only know when the userbase here gets large enough.
On reddit, once a thread got past 300+ comments, the only way to get any views on your comment was to post it as a nested comment in a top-level comment.
I feel like there is a potential but minor problem with Lemmy's algorithm. It favors new comments but what if the post itself is asking a question with a definitive answer? The best answers might get buried by side discussion as time goes on.
I could still find the information I needed when it was a serious query, and I could still find sound and sensitive viewpoints on many topics. But, opening a horrible post just to see a horribly distasteful comment as the first response just kept reminding me not to take life so seriously.
Same. I like it, but it belongs in more shitposty communities IMO. I like a small percentage of my feed to be shitposts, and when I dig into it it's just people repeating twists on the same stupid jokes.
Sometimes it's actually clever, a lot of the time it's just people wanting reassurance they belong.
It's annoying when it overflows and floods everywhere with the exact same joke (like Google en passant). In r/anarchychess they were constantly workshopping new jokes, because it definitely got old
@bizzwell some subreddits did have some dedicated flairs which required everyone to be serious (at the cost of being banned) - but this required the OP to deliberately think about posting the stuff under the right flair.
Maybe this could be also easily enforced here by asking people to append [Serious Discussion] at the beginning of each relevant post, on the title or content?
I spent an unhealthy amount of time on reddit over nearly the last decade, and somehow this is the first time seeing that phrase. I actually had to just google “google en passant” to figure out what you’re talking about. I’m still not sure I understand the meme, and I’m certain Ive never seen it, or at least never paid attention to it if I did. Yet it must be common because at least two people bring it up in this thread. Crazy how that works.
Just a simple call-reaponse meme. AnarchyChess ended spreading everywhere. Probably because chess took off with middle and high schoolers during 2020 lockdown.
the other thing to consider with low effort, duplication of memes is the server overhead. one thing to burn corporate coffers with the same people of walmart and cat tropes but this kind of stuff burns server and storage resources.
for a corporate entity looking to make billions off our data that's the cost of doing business -- but for lemmy server admins it's a truly personal cost.
imo we should be respectful of our "homes" and try not to trash them with low value content.
Hopefully you can find some social media platform that doesn't have any other people on it so that you can live in peace from the dumb shit that other people post.
At first I thought this is an overly pretentious post, but while writing a response I thought about some of the most upvoted yet heinously circlejerky comment threads I've had to wade through to get to a rational or different comment. Good point OP'Lem!
There's a noticeable generation gap between people who use 1!1!1! and the ones who would say sO MuCh tHiS! I'm not sure when it happened but I'm gonna guess you are about 35?
Lemmy reminds me of old school BBS where actual discussion happened. I know it's been a shift for me where I actually have to think about a response and hold a discussion instead of just following the patterns. Not that I don't appreciate rote comments, it's nice to expect a joke and have that delivered on. Not every thread though.
I've been hoping most of those users are only here temporarily following the bandwagon/circle-jerking, and that they go back to reddit for the comments of nothing but lame puns and off-topic jokes.
I was really hoping to escape that migrating here. The comments of nearly every reddit thread just devolves into r/funny or r/adviceanimals. Distinct subreddits mean less and less, and off-topic content is upvoted in every sub just because it illicits a cheap laugh.
Reddit is less and less a place for substantive discussion and more just a dumping grounds of repetitive lame jokes. I really hope the children stay on reddit...
For real though , idk if I see it happening. If the culture of "this" comments comes with, all we have against it is an opposing culture of trying to keep comments high-quality. It just depends on what kind of redditors take the effort to migrate
I'm not sure it's even possible to contain some of the tropes. I still occasionally see people posting "first" on YouTube and similar, and that's a Slashdot troll meme from more than 20 years ago.
To complicate things, you may also get different behaviour in different communities by the same user.
I think it's really at the community level that culture can be formed as at the all post level, we all just have our different preferences and that's fine. Also, our preferences may changed based on what we want/need in a day, e.g., one day we may want jokes while another day we may want tech support.
And so at the community level, community owner Bob may want no low-effort posts so he can put that into the rules, the mods can enforce that (be removing low-effort posts), the community can enforce it by only upvoting high-effort posts, and then a culture is formed which will draw other people who are into that.
And likewise the same for other culture/expectations.
I am really worried it will be an uphill battle. I see two things happening 1) We all exodus here and ruin this place. 2) Nobody cares and just leaves Reddit doing what it wants. Sadly neither are great outcomes, and yes I know I am cynical.
This is one of the jokes I hate the most on reddit. Someone doing a thing another person said they didn't like. It's so played out and one of the reasons I was trying to branch off from reddit.
If the Lemmies end up like 2023 reddit, then maybe what you're looking for is tildes.net which seems to be more like r/AskHistorians meets pre-September Usenet.
True; but the open sites I agree with, currently lack the moderation-style and content of places like r/AskHistorians and Tildes.
Usenet, Slashdot, Reddit, Tildes, a future Lemmy?
I used to wish there was a browser plugin that would just hide the top comment on posts somehow. Invariably, when a postvreally blows up, the top comment is some kind of joke or a pun that doesn't add anything to the discussion at hand.
with a community as big as reddit, the only way to make yourself heard is to be among the top few comments on each thread.
It gets tiring writing 10 lengthy, well thought-out replies for 10 different threads, only for 9 of them to fall off the radar and get no responses. So you get people spamming low-effort puns in order to get noticed.
I will also add, that people's time is also a finite resource. And so we can all help by being respectful of the rules for each community (save moderators time) and additionally in communities where you are asking for help -- avoid being a Help Vampire.
I agree with you, the relationship subs were/are a hell of 'heh a quick way to lose that 210 pounds, dump him sweaty!'. Like why can't we just give advice without everyone trying to be a wiseass.
That's just Zoomer humor. It has nothing to do with Reddit. Memes on tiktok/insta are the same thing. The same joke over and over (that's not even "funny" in the traditional sense) repeated so much that it's funny.
That has been literally all internet humor since the dawn if the internet.
All your base are belong to us, nyancat, GGG, advice animals, roflcopter, it's a trap, badger mushroom, everything.
Internet humor literally relies on enough regurgitation to be a huge inside joke.
I mean, before that it was pretty much "I hate my wife" humor and dirty jokes for half of a century,, so even if the dead horse is being made into applesauce, it still might be a step up.
I know it's not the conversation we're having, but nothing makes me hate anti-LGBTQIA+ folk quite like the "I hate my wife" shtick.
"GAYS ARE RUINING MARRAIGE" My brother in Christ, just yesterday I heard you joke about finding your wife a pair of concrete shoes. You did perfectly well destroying the concept of marriage all on your own.
No it isn't. They were wearing diapers when Redditors were making "This guy X" jokes or broken arms jokes, or pun chains ad nauseam. Stop making this another example of "It's those darn kids" when every generation is guilty of being corny as fuck.
I don't think it's just zoomers. One of the most annoying things that older generations do is quote movies and old commercials for no reason. Don't forget "whassuuuuuuuuuup"
I've had countless millennials quote star wars, mean girls, napoleon dynamite, the godfather, and you don't even want to know how many shitty joker impressions i've heard.
I think it's just a human thing to do and if you weren't there, it's kinda cringe and not funny.
That being said, I always found the reddit comments annoying asf lmao