Asklemmy

people having a stick up their ass about the letter of the rules as opposed to the spirit of a community was one of the worst things about reddit. if you want mods who act like cops, stay with reddit

could we do something about this?

Downvote posts that don't generate good discussion.

Report posts that are flagrant rule breakers. (I report posts here that aren't actually questions, or bad faith statements that are only barely questions)

But more importantly...

UPVOTE the good posts!

And even more importantly...

POST the kind of content you want to see! Be the change you want to see. If you're just a commenter, you can't complain that there's no posts! Haha

Thank God for that.

Lemmy needs the ability for mods to move posts between communities. There's plenty of posts that would make for great discussions but that are not where they should be. Moving them would make more sense than shutting them down altogether.

Eh, yeah but we don't have the numbers to remove content left and right. Better to have mediocre content right now than 1 really good post every 2 weeks

The way I see it is the rules exist to improve the experience of the community. They set guidelines to help us achieve that. The rules aren't the final source of truth though, the quality of the community is.

So, if you see something that breaks the rules and is pulling the community down in doing so, use the report function, and highlight it.

If it's breaking a rule, but not harming the community, then just let it fly.

I have no interest in enforcing rules for the sake of rules. I see them more as guidelines for fostering a better community, and that's the lens through which I moderate.

Yes, someone does care.

You do.

Next question.

If I'm honest I have no idea what would be a open ended question. I asked yesterday how people learned a new language because I'm struggling with it and wanted to see how other people do it. But that doesn't seem like a open ended question and would not be allowed?

I feel the same way. Most of the conversations here are pointless and don't prompt any interesting discussion. They are just an opportunity for the OP to air their dumb questions and opinions. Particularly any question that begins "Does Anyone Else" should just be banned from this muni. If people want such dumb questions in their feeds, they should join a separate muni for that.

The issue with a lot of subs on Lemmy is too little content, not too much. There isn't enough traffic to warrant high moderation and said moderation may scare off those who want to participate.

Good question; it’s not my place to answer. @[email protected], @[email protected], @[email protected]?

I like it how it is. I dislike active moderation and arbitrary rules. The community makes the rules, good mods enforce what the community pushes through, and not just one or two vocal people. If the community engages, and it hurts no one, why interfere. At best you discourage participation.

I don't mind questions being somewhat focused or topical. But the ones I don't like are "Here is my long-winded opinion on x, what do you think?" or "Here's a random article or other thing I found on the internet, thoughts?"

If it's a post asking opinions on a recent event, that's one thing. But I think the soapboxing should be limited. There's more that a post should need to actually qualify as a discussion-fueling question than just the fact they ended a sentence with a question mark somewhere in their post.

Thoughts?

All questions are multiple choice to an extent. There's no such thing as truly infinite answers to a question.

Personally I think it's fine-ish given the actual number of topics being created - it seems to be easily low enough to not cause questions adhereing to the rules to be pushed down the list and buried with easier or more sensational questions. I think the danger of being a stickler to the rules is that you just drive people away or make them too intimidated to ask. Yeah it is annoying but I think it is fine to just downvote and move on as you say. Splitting the community I think would potentially do even more damage.

Now if there were significantly more topics being created per day then my answer would be different and I would absolutely encourage more active moderation and adherence to the rules.

I don't care.

I help moderate a community that tries to mirror how things were done on Reddit, and over time we decided "this isn't Reddit, we don't have nearly as many users as Reddit, so there's no need to run this place like Reddit".

Eventually this community and others will reach a tipping point where there's a need to cull posts and have stricter content guidelines, but for now I think it's ok to be a bit lax.