this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2024
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Asklemmy
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I think a large portion of lemmy is too focused on making lemmy popular. Fake engagement and posts that nobody cares about donβt create engagement. Instead, more focus on just enjoying lemmy would ironically lead to better posts and discussion. Likewise, people post the same articles to the same communities seeking engagement. It leads to dupilication which waters down the discussion, ironically, also leading to less engagement. I think federalised communities, as has been discussed would be a good solution. However, it strikes me that they donβt want to miss out on karma, for some reason. So, short term gain, for long term hassle of multiple posts. If some of the most prolific posters posted to the most relevant community and cross posted elsewhere, then maybe communities would coalesce more.
An example of this that really bothers me: I joined several gaming munis because I like to talk about games. But there are people out there who feel that a gaming muni should be about the games industry, and so those munis are just a constant stream of gaming news articles, patch notes, and trailers. Mostly with completely barren comment sections. What I wanted was the social experience of chatting with people about games. I don't care about (as a random example) the latest Helldivers 2 patch notes.
I think less of an emphasis on having a steady stream of content and more on only posting something that you believe is worthy of discussion would be so much better. If people want to see literally every rockpapershotgun article, they can subscribe to their RSS feed.
Yeah. I find that a lot of comment sections are rather empty and some people who are there are really bad at discussions.
I try to comment on things so there is engagement and conversation. Without engagement, this is just a collection of bookmarks.
But it's kinda up to us to create that. Somehow. Sometimes even just a quip or shitpost comment can sort of open the floodgates.
The way I see it, people shouldn't post things unless they have some discussion they want to have about that thing. They shouldn't post just because it's news. I'd be fine with Lemmy having far less frequent new posts if those posts were all created by people who were legitimately trying to share something rather than just generate content.
There's [email protected]
I joined with the Reddit exodus and there were so many communities that were a straight copy of a subreddit. No discussion, just posts - yuck.
Please yes this. It's good to see gaming related news but largely I just want to nerd out about the games themselves. Of course I should be told to just post my own damn content, but I have admittedly never been good about creating OC.
I don't know what would get me to comment more than patch notes for an incredibly popular game thousands of people are playing. So either bad example or I have no idea what you want in a gaming sub.
Does a book club meet up to just talk about what their favourite authors tweet about, or what new book is coming out soon in a series they like? No. They talk about what artistic choices they like and don't like in the books they read, what emotions those books evoke, what other books they remind them of, etc.
I think part of this comes from wanting a broader base of content, which I agree with. The rest seems to come from wanting the downfall of Reddit, who is in my rearview mirror so I don't care.
We are currently like old Reddit, a techy, mostly progressive, crowd. That means a lot of uni-topic content.
When there are 10,000 users, and 5 of them are into sewing, the sewing community is dead. When there are 100,000 users, and thus 50 interested in sewing, content starts to form. You can see where this goes from here.
Coalescing into massive communities is a mixed bag. Putting all your eggs in one basket makes them more vulnerable to rogue moderators, sudden loss of a server, the need to defederate if the host server gets compromised, provides a more attractive target for bots, and other bad actor things.
Yes it would improve ease of use and make Lemmy more newbie friendly, and it can be frustrating to have conversation splintered. Lots of times I'll comment on an empty story at the top of my new feed only to find a lively discussion a little lower. That's all frustrating, I agree. It's also, I think, the nature of federating.
If multiple different news communities are thriving despite posting pretty much the same content, there are reasons for that. People can pick just one to subscribe to, and they don't all pick the same one. That tells me there is something about each one that makes them attractive to different people.
I think it can really hurt smaller communities, though.
Ultimately a kind of uber cross posting that hides away the technical bits. I'd definitely love that. Or at least if I as a user could specify multiple communities for a post, and from a ux ui perspective it remains a single post.
Then again one could argue that subscribers should simply follow multiple communities and that solves the problem, too and it already works. So just avoid cross posting altogether.