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.
(1) Do you remember that ennui engine article that was making the rounds a few months ago as Reddit collapsed? I had already started thinking along those lines so it being more advanced along that road, it really helped me realize that social media being that way is the point. Also, it was extremely well written I thought, or perhaps it was just so very timely, but in any case I recall that I could barely put it down bc I wanted to just soak up that article. I shared this thought both bc the content is relevant, but also bc I want to read more content that is like that, which really makes you think rather than as you say simply doom scroll. (Although typing on a mobile, I have to fight it from changing fully formed words making perfect English sense, to using entirely different words that do not match, which further matches our theme here in saying how technology is not always so friendly.)
(2) Check out this post if you would: https://kbin.social/m/BestOf/t/177639/u-at-lvxferre-at-lemmy-ml-discusses-the-dichotomy-between-effective-moderation-vs-low-content. First it is once again relevant in multiple ways to the discussion at hand, but also note the magazine it is in: an entire one dedicated to highlighting and sharing the “best” content on the Fediverse. Note in particular how there have only been 4 posts since my own that I’m linking here… that was from 2 months ago, which REALLY helps underscore the exact message about the content: the higher the quality filter, the less of it there is. We would love to see an excellent post in our doomscrolling once a day, but what if it were only available once every other month? That magazine btw does not accept primary submissions such as my former one, only secondary content i.e. it takes a second person to nominate a post.
I would love to see a similar magazine geared toward deeper thinking. If you create or find one, please let me know?
(3) If there were such a one (probably there could be and I simply not having done the due diligence to find it yet:-D), I would share this video to it: https://youtu.be/R943_eAvnWw. If you don’t want to watch the full thing, maybe skip to just the end summary, but I am saying that I found it highly relevant to again the type of content we are talking about here, compared to typical YouTube videos.
And once again, the only question is what to do about it. We cannot control others, who e.g. Won’t Look Up, all we can control is ourselves. So what will we do, who want such as this? I cannot create such a magazine btw bc I am on Kbin which iirc has zero moderation tools (or an API). I might create a Lemmy account purely to create such a magazine, but then I cannot migrate my existing account over… that was a major selling point for the Fediverse but turned out to be a lie (for now). So the state of the current tools really does impact the end result. If you have a solution though, e.g. if you will create such a space for deeper thoughts, I would love to join it.
Note it is easy to make a bookmark to a specific magazine, so that someone can check that (once a day? week?) and still have access to doomscrolling on their mobile devices, which ngl is a heck of a lot easier to perform than to type (especially on Kbin using a browser rather than an app).
Great response. Thanks for putting this together.
I had seen the first two links/points you mentioned before and they are both interesting reads.
The third I had not seen before.
On a meta note:
When I read this my thought was: “Oh, is it an hour long deep dive into a subject” and was surprised that it was only 8ish minutes long… and you included a TLDR. Which is a great example of one of the issues with social media now. The collapse of attention spans.
A big factor in this for me is the lemmy-mobile/Kbin-desktop divide. I know it is not true for all people but accessing via mobile seems to exacerbate the short comment, little engagement issue. In part, I think due to the relative ease of typing on an actual keyboard vs a mobile screen.
I gave up viewing reddit on mobile several years ago due to this and to restrict my time on the site to when I was at home. (this was also the reason to access the fediverse via Kbin) Case in point, I would never write comments of the length I have in this thread on mobile.
While reddit and the fediverse look and behave a lot like old school forums that were desktop based, I think it is safe to say the majority of users access it on a mobile screen which changes the interaction dynamic and rewards or encourages the short comment and move on behaviour.
This is also why image based posts gained in popularity as they are easier to consume on a small screen.
I have no real answer to this as I realise that to many people, social media only exists in the mobile space but the way media is consumed does have a strong effect on what is consumed and I haven’t really seen this aspect of doomscrolling talked about in discussions like this.
Re the TLDR: you can tell I have gotten used to a Reddit-style audience indeed:-). But also I enjoy “unpacking” myself here much more:-D. (e.g., can you tell that I also have switched now in this comment to a keyboard? :-P)
You are very welcome and thank you very much for the thanks!:-)I put that in emphasis b/c I want to keep coming back to it, by adding some new points relating to it:
(4) There really is a “social” side to this place too. That is not a bug but really truly is a feature. We like it even? At least when it is short and easy to pass over - it provides a short-term value, and probably a longer-term one as well, in keeping communities civil & dare I say welcoming?
Sites featuring blogs and articles also exist, if we want to seek those out. The Fediverse would serve as a great way to collect them together, making them more discoverable, but the primary purpose of the Fediverse seems to me to be a “social media” site, so focusing more on the social than on the exact content - and that I seriously doubt will ever change, so any thinking must keep that foremost in mind, the practicality side.
(5) I actually disagree about the mobile issue - or rather I think a much MORE foundational issue is that Reddit was for-profit. That caused them to enshittify their product, regardless of which means you used to consumed it. But then yes, I do see how the device used further compounded that and even here in the Fediverse is going to affect things moving forward, like the overall UI/UX needing to work for both mobile and desktop, putting constraints on what can / will be implemented compared to what would be most optimal for just the latter alone.
(6) Highly relevant to this discussion, it also seems to me that it is a problem of the class of “finding information”, such as how you would handle your email. There, putting things in folders has its set of pros and cons - needing effort up-front, especially if a message concerns multiple topics, plus as the set of folders itself grows larger the problem meta-escalates (one email account for home, another for work, each with its own set of folders, so now which account, which folder, in which other sub-folder, is the thing I want? again, especially crossing multiple boundaries like a non-work meeting, but with your work friends, but during non-work time - is that “personal” now or…? in any case it may need to go onto your “personal” calendar if you do not have access to your “work” machine at that time, but anyway the division lines are not always so clear-cut). Conversely, leaving all messages in one huge pile has its pros as well - you’d need to design a “query” to find it later anyway, but how often do you really “search” for emails to begin with, compared to simply read them and move on? - although it is much easier to “miss” messages this way. Which style we use probably says more about our emotional preferences than which is “best”:-D.
And relating back to the “social” messages such as emphasized above - those legitimately add information too? They indicate receipt of the message for one, as well as friendliness of the recipient. But is that primarily short-term information, so should those simply be “deleted” after being read, or instead stored along with the rest, especially if they are quick to glance at and pass over while looking for something else? Or should the sender not have even bothered to send them, if they were to be considered a waste of the recipient’s time?
Applying the former thought to the Fediverse, how do we “find” the content that we want to see, other than ofc creating it ourselves?
(A) we can create a new sort algorithm, adjusting the “Feed” to suit our preferences, the benefit here is that it affects everyone across the entire Fediverse, who can elect to use the new algorithm or not. But it would take coding, creating consensus, and could take months to more than a year. Google got its whole start as a company this way even, as did the predecessor to Reddit iirc, so the solutions could range from simple to very very complex.
(B) we subscribe to existing magazines, which takes mere seconds and gets us most of the way there insofar as threads at least though not comments.
Oops, it says this is too long.
Continued:
© we create a new magazine where the culture is to only offer worthwhile messages. But… whereas my long-as$ essay here may be full of “information”, is it truly “worthwhile”? THAT is in the eye of the beholder. Hence a niche sub where the collection of like-minded people upvote/boost comments that are of interest to them could be of value…
Until it gets poisoned, maybe by a bunch of kids just wanting to have fun, or people who legit disagree about the end goal, and it subsequently all falls apart - e.g. reviews on sites like Amazon or Yelp or whatever, which seem worthless these days? I really wish a reviewer would say something like “this year’s phone model is crap - buy last year’s instead”, but instead the professional reviewers all have to say that “it’s the best one yet, it has zero problems, maybe a slight one with the corners not being as round as I’d like”, and most of the negative normal-people ones I see are more like “I did not enjoy the packaging they sent it to me in, I wanted gold filigree instead, engraved with a President’s signature personally to me” (WTF DOES THAT HAVE TO DO WITH THE FUNCTIONALITY OF A PHONE EVEN!? ahem:-P), and ofc the ubiquitous “when I opened this I was standing next to my husband, who was wearing a red shirt at the time, and I distinctly recall that I craved donuts…but there were none to be had”. Translation: I am saying that the default state of the universe is to increase rather than decrease entropy, and if we want to work against that, it is going to require more than a little effort to build a good thing, and even more effort to maintain it, and defend it from “attack”.
And the only solution I can think of is that a community of like-minded people becomes self-reinforcing. New people come in, step out of line, and are put in their places by everyone else. The work is spread out among many people, making both the overall effort easier (b/c people don’t even bother bucking the system) and also the personal efforts can be spread out among many. The entire Fediverse does not need to change (which is fortunate b/c that was never in the cards to begin with!:-P), but those who want memes can have them, those who want a place for yo mama jokes can likewise have their space, and too for those who want deeper introspection? Which again, might even exist already, I simply have not done much looking beyond that BestOf community I linked to.