Asklemmy

The "Reddit hivemind" is the human hivemind.

Reddit doesn't represent the entirety of humanity. It represents a specifically self-selecting group of people that tend to come from a combination of converging material conditions that allow them access to the site, and site retention for each user depends on whether that user is likely to opt into that particular group's increasingly-ossified norms that are provided superficial but effective incentives to continue doing so by the site's owners.

Social groups can and do change over time, and some are better or worse off in varying ways, and they are not all "Reddit hiveminds" unless you are lazily equivocating all human social structures as "hiveminds." What else is there? Some fantasy of rugged Randian individualism?

To say otherwise is useless fatalism, or at the least, false equivocation.

probably an unpopular view but tbh i think voting has ruined modern forums

firstly its much much easier to game, and for big platforms to fake

but more to the point, voting makes excellent sense when the topic is something with a clearly provable right/wrong answer. eg. technical questions are ideal for voting, where the wrong information does belong at the bottom because its simply wrong and in most cases most people can easily verify if it works or doesn't work.

instead we get voting for everything now, so it merely becomes a poll of opinions not facts, but unfortunately our monkey brains sees the numbers and somewhat equates emotions with facts.

oldschool forums ALREADY HAD a poll feature, so when we wanted a poll we could get one. now everything is a poll, and when everything is a poll nothing is especially meaningful.

We also have a problem on lemmy that there is a subset of users who think that votes are how you curate your feed. They downvote anything that they don't want to see instead of blocking communities that they aren't interested in.

I think Lemmy is struggling with this because politics is just so loud that we don’t have enough volume of other content being made.

I regularly suggest people to block those communities, or consider an alt to follow those

I really agree with the excessive news e politics comunitties. I have a hard time setting a good feed 'cause of that

I remember when Reddit's best "reading" threads just suddenly shifted. AITA, JustNoMIL, TalesFromTechSupport, TalesFromRetail, all of a sudden they went from realistic stories of real people venting to... just obvious rage bait. It was so disappointing. It was one of the best things to read on the bus, here's someone going through something, can offer support, laugh about it, whatever.

It went from stories like "I had someone demand a manager when I wouldn't offer them 40% off" to "someone pulled a gun on me at work, and my manager told me I should have punched them". Just such horrible bullshit. That's when I knew the site was going downhill.

Indeed. When’s the last time we saw a well-thought-out, controversial opinion on Reddit?The system breeds behaviors that are in conflict with a high-quality, diverse discussion.

It is for the same reason that I’m very particular about my downvotes. They are reserved for low-quality content, not that which I personally disagree with. I’d like if we could all learn to be less judgmental and more constructive so that we may all learn something meaningful. I think this is incompatible with the way that Reddit operates.

Using scaled sorting really helps with getting smaller communities on the front page. I still see the political and news communities but I also see communities for cities and niche hobbies.

There's a number of instances that don't have downvotes. Notably, it forces each person who takes issue with something you've said to respond to you if nobody else has said it. Whether that's better is up to you.

I was thinking the same thing. Reddit is a cesspool because communities shut out anyone who dissents with a group's opinions, allowing the group to continue thinking "everyone" believes the same thing they do. Sure it's a good thing for mods to be able to quickly block obvious troublemakers, but there needs to be an unbiased review process in place when someone is kicked out simply for disagreeing or asking legitimate questions. Echo chambers are bad.

Telling someone they're disgusting for being POC or LGBT+ is a good example of an action that deserves an immediate ban. Asking someone what policies a political figure implemented that benefited you should NOT be a reason for a ban, especially if you're only banning them because you can't answer the question.

I'm not quite sure how the process works on Lemmy, but I feel like moderation should include incremental periods. Like the first time you get blocked for a day, then a week, then a month, and finally a permanent ban. And a person should be able to request a review of their ban, which would be judged by a panel of mods from random groups and instances to limit people of like minds all piling on for the same butt-hurt feelings. There should be ways to make things more fair than just reddit's policy of an invisible admin making decisions based on their mood that day.

Too much growth too fast for sure! Much harder for Lemmy to create its own culture and maintain it. Much harder to discourage toxicity. Notice how healthy communities are often smaller.

Sucks for niche communities but they'll get slowly spun up over time, and in the meantime they can be found in other places including Reddit. I don't personally need everything to be a one-stop shop.

It's the eternal September.

I think we need to consider the norms Lemmites enforce. From what I've experienced: it's often nitpicks ("I think one thing you said is wrong"), or mild insults when an opinion is outside our slightly-left-of-centre POV. Disagreement is rarely friendly, gentle, or constructive.

From what I've seen, we're great at getting the big stuff right - people react quickly against child porn or overt racism/insults. But we reply with the same anger if someone has an opinion different from ours.

I have a better time in small Reddit communities because people have more shared interests. Here our prime commonality is that we like FOSS and dislike Reddit.