tl;dr: let’s stop the generic and almost-irrelevant-doom-and-gloom karma-harvesting one-liners that can be copy-pasted between any two articles written in the last century
Background
Anyone who has used Reddit for any decent period of time is probably aware of the drill – when you create an account, unsubscribe from the defaults and find the smaller communities. It will end up in a better experience.
Why were people told to dodge the defaults? They were the largest subreddits. But because they were large, the quality was often regarded as “meh” due to post and comment quality.
How bad was it? You’d find news posted about something, then you’d click into the comments, find they’re something to read, then move on.
A week passes and an article on a similar subject comes up. You click into the comments and a sense of “Is this deja-vu?” is felt. Is this comment thread for the article this week, or the article from last week?
Turns out, the discussion was too generic. It wasn’t uniquely thought provoking to the article posted. The comments didn’t offer much and could be copy-pasted between many news posts spanning any given year.
Reddit became boring after picking up on this pattern, especially as this became the norm on so many communities. The comments served as candy for feeding a doom-scrolling habit. At times I’d joke to myself that I could predict what the upvoted comments would be.
Why do I bring this up?
I’ve noticed that commentary in the most popular communities have been flooded with unsubstantial commentary as of late – the type of commentary that could be copy-pasted between almost any two articles in a given month. It feels like cheap karma acquisition, even though Lemmy doesn’t really incentivize karma.
The Lemmy community has a lot of energy and a lot of people who want to see it succeed. I do too.
So what should we do?
I am advocating that we collectively try to put in more thought in our discussions. I think Hackernews (sans the occasional edgy political take) and Tildes might be worth learning from. Let’s make it a goal to contribute content that others may learn from and do away with the copy-paste doom-and-gloom comments.
Just unsubscri-
Yes, the popular refrain to a lot of concerns about Lemmy is “just unsubscribe from those and join another community”. I disagree that is the right solution. This isn’t limited to just one or two communities of a given type and what habits are created in one community easily spread to others due to the very large overlap in users.
I’ll promise to (try to) be nice :)
I think it all varies for how to contribute.
Perhaps if someone posts something about a product you use – let’s say an article about how some feature is broken but you’ve known about it for some time, just chiming in with “I’ve noticed this issue ever since an update last year” would provide interesting information. If I’m someone who hasn’t used the product, now I know it has been a historical issue.
For something that’s a bit more effort, say someone posts a news or politics article. If you know any additional context about the issue, that might be worth contributing. Let’s say an article comes out about a representative pushing for a certain policy at a national level. If you know this politician has pushed for this policy at a local level, contributing a link so that others can read more about their efforts would be beneficial.
Good suggestions. On the one hand you’re right, but on the other hand I don’t want to totally discourage people from posting a silly/low effort comment if that’s all they have to say.
Although it’s true that Lemmy comments are not always substantive, there is an associated problem whereby a lot of posts barely get any comments or discussion at all. So I think we also need to recognize that even a low effort joke can help stimulate further discussion and maybe result in a more substantive comment in the form of a reply.