Since a lot of folks sort by “all” on Lemmy, popular posts get overwhelmed by people who don’t daily drive operating systems like iOS or MacOS.
I like outside perspectives and all, but when the majority of the “community” discussion is coming from people who aren’t even using these products, it is pretty hard to have informed conversations.
Moreover, I feel like this type of engagement creates a lot of threads that get pretty combative and catty. They’re often started by people who are trying to argue and convince iOS / MacOS users that they’ve picked the wrong side of the fence.
Anyone else feel me on this? I imagine this is a problem for other communities on Lemmy as well.
This is an endemic problem on Lemmy and is part of why I’m mostly done with it (I’m just lurking around right now to keep an eye on my instance I’m decommissioning).
There’s no point in trying to build a community with a very hostile environment for anything that doesn’t align with the very odd hostile-against-everything-not-OSS zeitgeist.
Take a look at [email protected]. The folks downvoting don’t even own EVs and just spam bad takes on News and Politics communities.
Ironically Reddit is a healthier place.
Wait until they come to correct you by saying that’s not true, they’re actually hostile-against-everything-not-FOSS, how the F is very important, and why certain licensing standards are better than others. And any time anyone tries to call out deficiencies in their favorite FOSS, they’d be greeted with swarms of “you don’t understand FOSS” comments and have no room for any constructive discussion. Then, to top it off, they’d always default to the “why don’t you just go find your own instance instead” comment. It’s almost as if they don’t want a community for discussions, they want echo chambers, and they’ll be hostile and unwelcoming to everyone who’s not aligned with their believes.
Edit: oh, look, we have the go fund your own instance comment in this thread already! Called it.
Yeah, i used to think this wasn’t the case when i just joined here, but the longer i use the more frustrating it get. People downvote and brigade on seemingly harmless thing, from post that they don’t understand, to language they don’t speak, to technology they don’t use, to idea(that doesn’t involve extremism) they don’t agree. There’s been people telling me why they stop posting and developing the community in my instance, and all boils down to the random downvoting and brigading.
If the admin of the top 10 instance didn’t turn off downvoting, then you can be sure that this platform will slowly die off before Reddit even got its own just desert. It’s impossible to build a community and recommend friend for a place this hostile. This place used to be super wholesome when i join.
I think it would be probably a good idea to globally hide negative votes from the all feed until they reach a certain threshold. There are communities for topics that aren’t popular on the fediverse that definitely get drive by buried in the all feed.
The downvote definitely has its place as a way to penalize offtopic and spam discussion, but it also requires some thick skin because people use it as a disagree button for better or worse. The scores don’t really matter.
To add on,
Go look at some of the downvoters (link me any thread, I’ll pull the list of votes since I’m an instance admin). Some of the folks doing some of the downvoting spend an enormous amount of time on Lemmy.
It’s probably why Lemmy’s activity has been dying off except for the hyper-active power-users.
I know it’s an unpopular opinion, but I feel strongly that downvoting itself is a problem.
Social media is powered by little bits of endorphins that come from clicking the response buttons, and a certain type of person seems to get a thrill out of the downvote in particular. That personality type does not seem to be conducive to building a strong community, but we give them quite a bit of engagement anyways to keep them coming back.
I don’t think anything of value would be lost by dropping that action all together.
I slightly disagree because it can be a good way to track people who only traffic in bad faith. If there were some other way to flag them, I’d be all for it but it’s almost completely bad options for ways to flag that sort of anti social behavior.
I would argue that the signal to noise ratio here makes this metric effectively worthless. Being unpopular doesn’t necessarily indicate bad faith, and downvotes come for many reasons that are not similar enough to group.
Downvotes also bring a unique kind of bad actor: the troll. I have many times seen accounts that go out of their way to farm for downvotes, and that kind of content brings everyone down with it.
deleted by creator
Ngl I laughed at this, everyone knows votes are public, but actually calling someone out? Pathetic. But since you’re not pulling any punches, I’ll tell you why your comment is useless fodder.
This shows you have little experience in internet fora, small or poorly moderated communities are not a lemmy problem but on every corner of the internet. It also shows you are actively missing the point of lemmy, make your own corner, make it interesting and people will come. You don’t agree with the admins of a community? Others will too so actually put in the effort yourself. But you don’t want that, you want a large platform of your likeminded people. Then use that platform ffs. And meanwhile, slow and steady your niche will have better representation on lemmy as well.
Curate your feed, you own an instance, use it and defederate from instances you don’t like. Don’t like any? Then get off lemmy instead of being so petty because you thought lemmy was an exact drop in replacement for reddit. So please, leave the door open on your way out, so people who have actual value to contribute can come in.
Edit: Ofcourse they delete their comment lmao
You like Discord?! Kill him!
This place is insufferable
What do you mean my lurking? You posted 5 times today and apart from a 2 week break you took (vacation?) you at least post daily and amassed 600+ comments in 10 Month.
Sure, I did make a couple comments between today and yesterday, including this one, so I’m not sure where the “gotcha” is here.
I signed in yesterday to check how a deletion script of mine would work and decided to scroll around. Yesterday I saw a social security thread that was some news I didn’t come across yet, and today I saw this thread in my list of active threads as I tabbed back and it piqued my interest.
If you’re curious about my future activity: