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.
Do you want engagement or not?
I want more quality engagement. If that means there are fewer comments, so be it.
Ignore the people who don’t give the quality you want. Some of us work ridiculous hours and are trying to decompress from everything going on around us. Some of us don’t have the energy for the kind of quality you want. You’re basically suggesting that they don’t contribute at all, and that leads to isolation. They may want to engage with people. They may not have people around them to engage with. Excluding them over “low effort” comments that you can ignore is kind of meh.
I’m just suggesting that the low effort commentary was a popular painpoint of Reddit and I’d hate to see Lemmy make the same mistake and die off.
Perhaps you’re involved in the wrong communities? Generally smaller more niche communities have higher engagement and effort posts.
As I said, this isn’t just “the wrong communities”, this is endemic to any sizable community here on a topic worth subscribing to.
If the basically-tiny technology, news, and politics communities are the wrong communities at this stage of adoption, Lemmy has no chance in hell of being anything better than a substandard Reddit.
Worth is kind of not a one size fits all thing. It’s subjective. But I dunno. That depends on how big or small it gets. I don’t think bigger is necessarily worse. I don’t think Reddit is all bad either.