What kinds of things from reddit would you like to see Lemmy avoid as the user base grows?
Personally I think not having karma limits is nice currently! I understand why they were used but grinding karma as a lurker on reddit was frustrating.
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The comment "This" is annoying to me. Just use the upvote button!
This.
This
Upvoted and this'd
This!
🤔
Yea that seems like something that started showing up more as time went on and more users joined. The trends and jokes did get tiring.
🙄
The comment "this" comes from sites that don't have votes. The equivalent here is voting. It really is that simple.
This. I usually try to avoid commenting just “This” and try to give more explanation why I’m saying that. Feel like that’s the proper way of doing it.
Personally I am commenting and posting much more now than ever on reddit. I want to transition to lemmy and see it grow as I refuse to use the Android reddit app.
I am not typing/imagining a comment and then not posting it here either like many people do on reddit. It seems like a good time to become less of a lurker.
Agreed, especially with how new Lemmy is, it just really feels like it needs our engagement to succeed and get more people to join.
I remember when I first got on reddit, it was still bigger than lemmy is now, but it still felt small enough that commenting actually felt worthwhile. Definitely excited to be here. Tryna engage as much as possible so people feel there's a community to join
Yeah. Honestly I'm way more active here. Granted my whole time on the fediverse is like a week or two, but Ive made more comments today than I have in like a decade on reddit. I could easily see myself not returning to reddit.
If I'm not mistaken, because lemmy by default sorts comments by newest, if you comment something more users will see it, but on reddit it'll get stuck at the bottom.
Add back the hardcoded slur filter but just for these kind of comments
This tbh
Agree. Kind of relatedly, anyone know what boost does versus an upvote?
Assuming they use Mastodon terminology it likely means the same thing as a retweet.
(For anyone confused, OP's using kbin, not Lemmy)
This is what I wanted to post in here. Any version of the like "this" "to the top with you" "have my upvote" etc etc
Like it's a conversation board, I don't care about one person's personal opinion of a comment that actively takes away from the conversation and clutters the replies when there's an entire feature around giving your opinion on a comment.
Nazis.
This is the big one
Hah. It's probably gonna be worse here.
They main instances have taken strong stances against nazi shit. The Lemmy developers are leftwing communists even, and they run lemmy.ml, so I don't think defederating from servers who'll platform nazis is unlikely.
Nah, they are going to their own rathole.
I doubt that any instance I'd be interested in being a part of would federate with nazi communities. They'd end up more isolated than on Reddit.
This is why I love the idea of Federation. You can give them their own space to shout and fling their faeces as much as they want but absolutely nobody is required to give them an audience.
You mean you don't want an algorithm hawking them into your face after your look up a recipe?
Yeah, fuck Nazis!
No, that's how they reproduce! Isolate them! Or at least use a condom.
Yes, fuck them, by the root and stem.
My thought as well.
Yeah, but actual Nazis. Not "you disagreed with me or voted for someone I don't like so I'm going to call you a Nazi."
This user doth protest too much, methinks
Reddit has a longstanding reputation for being a hive of scum and villainy (like hosting the_donald for years, or kotakuinaction, etc). I really hope that Lemmy keeps with the general left-leaning vibes of the fediverse overall, hopefully being a good space for queer people, women, people of colour, etc.
I think you do have to be careful here though. If you're too permissive you allow bigotry, but if you're too restrictive you cut off honest, good faith debate and create echo chamber silos where beliefs are never challenged.
Bigotry should never be accepted but that means non-discriminatory opinions, especially ones you disagree with, should be allowed.
Good faith is the key here. I'm all for disagreements leading to lengthy discussions and even some controversy as long as everyone is arguing in good faith.
I can't stand trolling, outright bigotry, and the normalization of literal fascist opinions as a mere "disagreement". If a "disagreement" (you know which ones I mean) will lead to people dying if enabled, I'm pretty happy keeping those ideas out.
Gender critical ideas are based on truth and reality. If those ideas are censored here that would be terrible.
Hi! I'm trans. If you're looking to change your mind about that I'm happy to chat! Otherwise I suggest you look to get out of here as soon as possible.
Hi I'd like to chat. I'm open to evidence that will change my mind
That's the beautiful thing about being a federated platform. You can create your own island and fill it with all the hatred and bad "science" you want. it's worked for the British for centuries.
No hatred here. Just leave the kids and women spaces alone.
I’ve never understood the need to militantly oppose others’ personal situations when they have no impact on your own. Even playing devil’s advocate - what is the point of the hate? You don’t believe in gender identity, then don’t personally be trans. The fact that others may be would seem to have literally zero impact on you or your life. Why should Lemmy accommodate negativity that does real harm to people in sensitive circumstances?
Who decides whats non-discriminatory.
Don't know why people are downvoting you for this because that does actually matter. What is an opinion to some is discrimination to others (and this goes for any point on the political spectrum.)
I guess the answer to that question though will be formed by the culture of the instances over time (although many instances do have explicit leanings already.) If you're finding yourself consistently flagged for discrimination or whatever in one instance you can probably find one that you are better suited to (or re-evaluate your beliefs.)
Nobody cares about non discriminatory different opinions.
/r/jailbait needed a spotlight in the national news from Anderson Cooper to get dealt with.
But (allowing for the fact that I'm still learning) by its nature I'm not sure the fediverse can stop these things in total, but the particular instances you subscribe to can. I'm unclear if INDIVIDUALS can ban instances (as far as I can tell they cannot) which I think might be a good addition. But instances can ban other instances, and eventually the fediverse will figure out which instances to put in the time-out corner for the rest of us, I think. But it will take time and might be a bit of wack-a-mole.
I think this is the big thing that Fediverse platforms are missing right now. If you want to be able to ban instances yourself, you have to run your own.
That would be nice but these platforms with "instances" look like it's a Reddit on steroids. I don't see how a community could be shut down with the way it's setup currently. I'm a complete newbie though so don't rely on my unprofessional observations.
Your instance can ban the offending instances, so they won't show up for you or your fellow users, and vice versa. It provides a good way to exile the offending community.
Do you know how the report button works?
Does it send a report to the mods of your instance?
I honestly have no idea. I'm just running my own instance so I'll just ban any users from my federation feed if I need to.
If you check the modlog page (link at the bottom of the desktop site), you can see what mods/admins have been doing recently (note that there is potentially offensive content there)
Communities can't be shut down, but they can be shut out. This is also just true in life in general.
If The_Donald were to set up shop on Lemmy.ml, they could ban the instance and the members, but they could just turn around and join another instance.
So, what do you do then? Site admins can ban the remote instance, and they can put pressure on the hosting site admins by threatening to defederate.
Let's say the new hosting site's admin gives into defederation pressure and also bans the instance and its members. We'll, then those people can set up their own server. Now, the admin won ban them.
But none of the major servers will federated with them. They'll be alone on their low population fashy instance (or not so low population - Truth Social is suppsoey the biggest Mastodon instance), effectively quarantined.
That's the best anyone can do. That's true with or without Lemmy.
@koncertejo @gronapa >Left-leaning
Not here communist faggot.
So you want censorship of opinions you disagree with? Sounds pretty fascist tbh.
When those views call for the dehuminization of others or are based on false information, yes.
Sure because those are the only ones that get censored lmao.
Consider opening up a window and letting CO
2outYes.
Mods who are running 10 major subreddits. It gives them too much power to steer opinions.
The shadow cabal that ran Reddit
It's honestly crazy that these random ass mods had the power to actually influence the views of millions
Lol as Reddit management will soon find out (we hope)
The awkward turtle...
Posting pictures too much, including pictures of tweets or pictures of news headlines.
Please link to the fucking article.
Yes! Many sumbreddits that actually had a point and were dare-I-say educational quickly became just twitter sceencap platitudes, on repeat.
I get it, easy to read and agree with and upboat, but ultimately just dumbing the place down to the lowest common denominator and burying anything with effort or insight.
Can't wait for the screenshot of a Reddit post of a Lemmy post of an Instagram post about Elon tweeting some shit.
Oh God please
god doesn't do this kind of stuff, maybe ask someone else uwu
i want this :))
Don't forget Tumblr! There's gotta be a Tumblr comment thread with a bad pun in there too.
Getting banned in one subreddit you never participated in for daring to have a comment (regardless of the content of that comment) in another subreddit.
I see the same shit in the Fediverse though. Mastodon admins blocking a server just because they refused to participate in a shared block list.
Someone’s going to make a script to ban a non-local user based on your remote posts, I guarantee it.
Isn't the federated model specifically designed as a solution to undesired moderation? If a server is ban happy, users won't go there. Problem solved?
The fact that opening a new instance still requires some technical knowledge is a difficulty facing the fediverse, since the venn diagram of people with the time and know-how to manage server administration and people who are knowledgeable on community moderation aren't always two concentric circles.
But that's not a task that is asked of a general user, even if their goal is to switch servers. If you don't like gmail, the solution for an individual is almost never to start your own email server.
Correct. What i'm saying is that since federated networks tend to be more community run initiatives, moderators are gonna be people from within the community and the final say on moderation issues is gonna come from those who understand how the fediverse works and have done the work of setting up the servers that everyone is using. Which I'm sure can and has worked for plenty of Mastodon and Lemmy instances out there, but I'm sure there's also instances where the head admin simply went haywire one day and nuked everything. It's not that the system can' work, it's just that it isn't really designed to gravitate towards experienced trust and safety experts being the ones that important decisions fall upon.
I feel like I should clarify that I have nothing against any Lemmy mods or admins. They're all being cool and helpful with onboarding reddit refugees like myself. I just think that this is an important thing to think about if we want this place to support more and more people and a growing number of communities in the future.
i'm not very sure if you mean that ppl with knowhow to set up a server are inherently already part of the system and therefore share certain opinions
if you did mean that, i wanted to clarify that setting up a lemmy instance, as far as i have seen, is something that almost any senior developer could do because it's very easy, and i as a junior developer was almost successful in my first attempt and i'm sure i could do it with a bit more time
what i'm trying to say is that it's not that hard and while it's not at the any-user-can-do-it level, it is at the any-opinion-can-do-it level
I get you. But I've seen far too many users doing exactly this (starting their own mail server) in my programming circles. It doesn't fare well tbh.
Which is important if you don't want the Fediverse to become the next Voat.
Can you please explain?
Proactively banning problematic users before they cause issues is necessary. Prevention is better than cure.
Ah, the old guilt by association groupthink.
This is a ridiculous response. I think autobanning people who common "[email protected]" is probably a good idea.
You're making a strawman argument and putting words in my mouth.
What mastodon server(s)?
Upvote/downvote counts mangling. Just show the real numbers, don't mess with them with an unknown "algorithm".
As far as I can see, the real number is already on top of the post. And then you have the split of up/downvotes near the arrows. So the "algorithm" is just basic addidion and subtraction. Someone correct me if I saw something wrong...
I think they're referring to what Reddit did with not showing them separately
I think they're actually referring to the anti vote manipulation reddit function which adds random values to vote counts (you can see it if you refresh a post that you know people aren't viewing like it's old then you can see the count change on refresh)
That's not what they mean, they're referring to "score fuzzing", a tactic Reddit used to combat vote manipulation. The number you see on a post or comment isn't the actual number, it's been fudged a little.
The forced 'inside jokes' that filled so many threads, so many times you would see a post and be able to predict the top comment and its replies. Hoping that the lack of account karma helps with that.
Ah, the ole Lemmy switcheroo.
Thanks for the gold, kind stranger.
Mod culture is always odd to me. I kind of wish there was more community modderation, and less dictators for life running things.
I know with mine that's the approach I'm taking. Let the community dictate rules rather than power tripping mods
What's your community?
I run an instance for all things pop music! From Madonna to Taylor Swift, if you like pop music you have a home with us! poptalk.scrubbles.tech
I can't think of a subject I have less interest in but I love that we're actually seeing all kinds of communities pop up here.
Looking at their profile, it's probably ![email protected]
Definitely a problem that comes with reddit and the unique subreddit names I'd say. I feel like that may not be avoided here since moving many subscribers from a large->small community is so difficult. Maybe the federation style will be successful though, I can't say I have enough experience to predict that well.
To be honest, I don't think that's entirely just a Reddit thing. Power tripping mods have been around as long as Internet forums have in general. It's a tough one to combat for sure.
As have complaints about legitimate mods from people who got banned. It is a complex issue even just to get the facts of the matter. Maybe some sort of public log of all mod messages and actions would help with that but then one would have to ensure that the people who like the deleted messages don't just use the mod log as their new place to spread the content.
gatekeeping, censorship, shadowbans from commenting in a different community, echo chambers.
Shadowbans especially. Either ban a post or not, but don't make the poster think everyone can still see it without explanation.
The Fediverse already has these, there are lots of echo chamber instances that automatically block other instances for simply federating with the "wrong" instance (equivalent to those AutoMod bans on Reddit for posting in a certain subreddit). Since instance admins pay for their instances out of pocket, they are more restrictive with their instance's allowed content than social media websites that want to cast the widest net. Eventually, there will be a massive split between communities, like how conservative and progressive Mastodon instances all block each other. Centrists can just have an account on each side of the wall.
As a new community we need to identify and stamp out bad actors immediately and thoroughly (spammers, selfservers, ads disguised as posts, brigading, illegal content, racism, you get the idea).
We can't control if they create their own instances, but we can isolate them.
If Lemmy truly catches on we probably can't totally prevent an Eternal September, but I do hope we go a long way to staving it off.
this seems to be a good place to mention avoiding groupthink and trendy opinions. more fresh diverisity and bold independent thinkers.
a flood of general americans would be worse than cultivating a niche counterculture initial userbase.
Bullshit moderation.
Reddit was so full of hateful shit. Reddit's AEO (Anti Evil Operations, basically the admins personal "mod team", probably outsourced to some country with lacking English skills) would continue to tell me that the most blatant hateful comments do not violate Reddit's ToS. Meanwhile, you get (perma) banned for the most ridiculous & mundane things at times, like saying that a fascist Italy should get kicked out of the EU & NATO. Apparently this is considered "spreading hate" and they even denied my appeal, explaining that both institutions require the members to be democratic. Meanwhile all the racism on subs like /r/europe would go unpunished. I also tried to report similar comments to mine as hate, but containing less popular countries like Turkey, and unsurprisingly they also didn't see it as hate.
Getting harassed by other users that reply on all your comments & follow you around? Nope, no violation.
Questioning the title & picture relation of a governmental account? Apparently harassment / bullying worth a 7 day ban.
Calling out dehumanization? Perma ban in a sub.
Perma ban in a sub? Perma ban in another sub for complaining about it, for "ban evasion".
Speaking out against predatory monetization methods & FOMO tactics in modern video games? Getting attacked & insulted by users and consequently perma banned for being "an asshole troll" - none of the attacks & insults were removed, let alone punished.
What isn't a violation? Racism, transphobia, homophobia, calls for violence, etc.
In regards to big hate subs it is also mostly the case that Reddit only goes and does something against them when there's some sort of media attention around it. When it directly affects their potential income. Maybe if advertisers start to complain about it.
The enforcement of the rules is so random at this point that I don't even know what one is allowed to say, or why I even should care about accounts and the platform as a whole. I understand that moderation of big platforms is not an easy task, but one surely can do better than whatever the hell Reddit is doing nowadays.
In regards to specifically Lemmy I would say they aren't up to a good start with the controversial admin team and their extremist views.
The nice thing about federation is that you can always go somewhere else if you disagree with a particular instance.
Lemmy's devs have questionable politics at best. IMO, I don't care as long as it doesn't impact how they run the site - people have a right to their own opinions, as long as those opinions don't harass or hurt others directly.
But let's say they changed one day. Maybe one day they added something to the code forcing everyone to praise the CCP or else.
Because the software is open-source - people could fork it before the change. It's out there already. People can totally make their own little variants of Lemmy with added features, if that's something they wanted to do. You can modify the code yourself and then self-host the modified version. No matter what Lemmy's devs do... they have no power on your instance. A fork means you own the code.
I've seen the sentiment tossed around that it's unethical to use Lemmy because if you donate to the project (or contribute to donations towards the project) you are financing people who have bad politics. That's your prerogative. I personally disagree - again, as long as your politics aren't actively contributing to harassment/harm you shouldn't be punished for them - but I understand the sentiment.
To that, I say - well, there's other options. That's the beauty of the Fediverse - you don't have any Musk or Spez that comes along to ruin everything. I'm on Kbin, which I like a lot. The dev is a great guy, and I really like how it combines the best of Lemmy and Mastodon.
Even if you want to stay on Lemmy, there are wonderful communities on Lemmy that disagree with the direction of the devs. Beehaw is a great place with a fantastic mod team, for example. You can donate to Beehaw's devs and know it's going to keep Beehaw running, and it's not the same as supporting Lemmy directly.
People are already doing so, right now. AFAIK Lemmy by default doesn't have the ability to disable downvoting, yet Beehaw and the instance I'm on (among others, probably) do have downvoting disabled.
Wow, thank you for this post. Doing some reading on Lemmy's devs' attitude toward human rights, and... I think I'll check out Kbin. Thanks again, I had no idea!
I got a warning for saying the words "kill yourself" in the context of a video game discussion where someone killed their own character to kill a streamer's character in the perma death mode. The method used was an ability that links 2 characters together and if one of them dies, they both die. There was some change made to prevent this in the future so i said something along the lines of "you could still kill yourself trough other means, i don't see how this solves the issue" and got a site wide warning with no way to appeal
By that metric, everyone that used LowTierGod meme should have been banned, which is half of reddit at this point.
What's the story about the Lemmy admins? Hadn't heard anything about that.
I've been on lemmy for about three years and the admins have been phenomenal. The interactions I've had and seen with them have been well-reasoned and positive.
I can't speak for whether it's true or not, but the answer I've seen is that they're tankies, or associated with that crowd in some way.
Ah ok, thanks.
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Yeah I've seen a few mentions here and there about concerning political ideologies from them, but I'm not even 100% sure who 'the lemmy admins' refers to given the decentralized nature of the platform.
Oh you were on a roll with this one but crashed right into a corner at the end there, lol.
Mods locking threads because “y'all can’t behave” jfc just ban accounts breaking the rules and let the rest discuss
The reason they do this is so they don't have to spend their entire life moderating a single thread.
For real. I'm so sick of mod drama. 99% of the time, any sub drama boiled down to a mod freaking out over X
a big one for me. Coming across a big discussion late and not being able to interact because its been locked down. Mod failures
Reposts! The same 20 jokes being reposted on r/funny to the point that they're no longer funny.
You don't want reposts? How about 15 different c/funny communities across 15 different instances each with the exact same reposts.
I assume all those different communities are eventually going to be assimilated into 1 or 2 communities. Those that lack subscribers will eventually die out organically.
i don't think that'll happen, we'll see! i think that some degree of redundancy is unavoidable as ppl
Me too. I just hope the algorithm will be smart enough to only show me those communities on my front page. Right now it is showing me everything and I have no idea if there's any real algorithm deciding what shows up.
Too late, c/memes is already filled with things reposted from reddit and most of their content isn't even memes... Or at least funny
!memes is the new r/funny?
And it took less than a day to become like that
Flair would be nice, but I think Lemmy should do it its own way with hashtags. It would be cool to search for hashtags within specific communities, subscribed communities, entire instances, and all instances.
Realized another - the awards that reddit created were out of control. I didn't mind avatars too much since customization can be fun and it was optional, but the awards are spammed and shown on most reddit clients.
I actually support awards here with the option of hiding them, i think it'd be a good, relatively ethical way to monetize lemmy.
funding is better than monetizing a platform
It could be in cool (in the future) to have a donate button instead, so to support users who are posting great content
On the other hand, donating to lemmy should be separate (the way it is now) and not a cut of those donations to users
I always thought it would be cool if awards meant something, like a donation to an NGO of the user’s choosing (from a list of 20 or so to reduce complexity). Lemmy could be one of the options but not the only option (like it was for Reddit) that the money would go to. I feel like more people would buy and give awards if that were the case.
Like integrating a PayPal/ Kofi tool kind of?
I felt the move of making reddit silver a real award was a big shift. Newer users don't even get why reddit silver was a thing.
I do like the idea of optional visibility - awards certain;y don't have to be bloat/bad.
Reddit Silver being an award just completely stole all the magic out of it. It was a cute little memey way to show support and make fun of Reddit Golf and then it got turned into a way to put more money in Reddit's pocket :c
Yeah that’s a really good point. Maybe a portion of the award funds for a given post could go to that post’s creator’s server and a portion to a pooled fund for all servers/servers reaching capacity?
Of course this and any other ideas re monitising should be carefully thought out re perverse incentives 😬
Awards were fine when there was only three of them: gold, silver, platinum. Once they added twenty billion, all meaning the awards once had were lost, especially since many of them were given to users for free when they were once paid only.
Shadow banning.. one of the most Orwellian moderation tools ever.
I never understood shadow banning. Just IP ban if you really don't want that user coming back
The original use case for Shadow banning was bots I think. To them it looks like they're comments are still being posted, but everyone else it's invisible.
Which makes sense, I imagine if I was shadow banned i would realize pretty quick. But it's not easy to have a bot realize they are shadow banned
given how that was such a dismal failure, I'm pessimistic about the future of the fediverse and its battle against bots
It's not about making the user leave, because of they know they are banned they'll try to evade. Shadow banning gives the desired effect while not tipping off the user. So they post away, to nobody.
IP banning is such an annoyance if you are unlucky enough to only be able to deal with ISPs that do not use fixed IP addresses.
"Can't post today, because another random person got my IP 'du jour' banned in the past" is a pretty terrible user experience.
And the pro troll uses Tor or a VPN and only needs to reconnect his client to receive a fresh IP address. I consider IP banning to be a very mediocre tool at best.
I think WikiPedia used to do IP bans. I rarely contribute to WikiPedia and never on controversial topics. Still I randomly receive a mail saying I've been banned for doing some shady stuff
Pro trolls are a tiny minority, though. Most of them put no effort in whatsoever.
Yep. So many ISPs use CGNAT now because of the rising costs of IPv4 addresses. And for IPv6, you can get a /32 block for free from Hetzner or other cloud providers.
Reddit banned device MAC addresses, in my experience.
E: I said MAC address but I meant device ID. Just mushy brain today.
How is that possible? On the app maybe? Generally all a website can see is your IP and whatever telemetry your browser sends back.
Hmm. Well, maybe my deductions are off. I used only RIF and a unique email address. Caught a ban. Remade account, banned within a few hours. Tried a week later, banned in a few hours. Gave up for a couple months then got a new device. Created an account, lasted for months. So I figured it was the device. Static IP. Email addresses the same just with a random number appended into it with a plus sign like [email protected]. Wasn't trying to hide.
I found the site wide rule against violence to be arbitrarily and poorly enforced. I wrote a lot about legal history and specifically crime and punishment, and I guess my prose and rhetoric sometimes confused the admins into thinking I would ever endorse violence.
Anyway, found it hard to find your reply here to comment back to you. Browning in jerboa. Could see your reply in the inbox but clicking on it didn't bring up a reply option, just took me to the full comments. Had to scroll through your posts, you seem pretty chill and reasonable and thanks for making so many comments. I think it's really about the discussions rather than the top level meme content.
Aww, you're so sweet! I'm sorry you had trouble with that.
More like device ID
I pretty sure you can't get someone's MAC through a browser (through the app maybe), so I'm calling bullshit on this one.
You're right, I said MAC but was thinking device ID.
People taking the voting system so seriously. On Reddit people got offended by being downvoted. Sometimes people downvote just because it’s sitting at a low number.
The karma system on Reddit is tied to a lot of things so it's understandable for them to care about it. If an account has low karma, they're more likely to be shadowbanned or suspended. Even when not shadowbanned, their posts and comments will need manual mod approval to be shown to other users.
I also hated the "disagree = down vote" mentality. Don't like what the other person is saying? Take 'em down.
That's the reason I signed up for Beehaw, because they removed the down vote ability. I think it makes for a more positive mindset
How are you going to prevent spams or bots if there is no karma restriction
The power that the admins have. While most subreddit bans were justified, in my opinion, it just felt really off for them to have so much power.
Here admin has even more power, except it is limited to their own instance. So it is more on the user to be prepared. You don't want to be too attached to your data on a single instance. The instance might be abandoned, down, gone; the admin might go crazy. And the solution isn't to have the admin be more reasonable. The solution is to hedge your bets on multiple instances and multiple communities.
I really dislike replies to questions that aren't really lengthy or offer any discourse. I always found people to reply just with the title of a film when someone would ask "whats your favourite movie and why?" on askreddit. Too often people would just write the name of the film and that was it, made the whole experience redundant. I feel like this got worse after years of being on the site.
Reddit gold.
Annoying clickbait titles on posts making you click to see wtf they were talking about - EG: "Can we take a second to thank this character in Game of Thrones"
God yes, this annoyed me so much in AskReddit threads. I've always been tempted to make one of those snarky AskReddit threads which would be like: "Why do you never explain why something is good/bad, and only drop the name of it?"
Yeah honestly I stopped browsing AskReddit because of that. And I don't think it was necessarily entirely the commenters' fault, I think it was that the questions have gotten worse over time.
Thirsty comments. Puns. Meta humor. Dog language like “fren.” People who use the word “stonk.”
i literally got a dm saying "i'm horny" like 30 seconds ago.... and there's a pun like 6 comments below yours, and meta humor like 5 comments above yours.
what i mean is, lmao, if that's what you think you're getting away from, i'm sorry to inform you that you have failed :)
I haven’t had that.
Every single Reddit thread is puns.
Oh god the dog language is such a good one
Some way to cut down on bot spam / bot shills. The political manipulation in Reddit really grew thick 2015ish and never went away.
The comment bots got thicker than mosquitoes in a swamp over the past couple of years. You couldn't go into a comment section without half the comments being bots reposting them from other similar threads.
Yes they did. It is/was rough.
Lol I think over my 11 years on reddit I only had 1.6k karma.. And while I love internet points as much as the next guy it's much healthier not to even see an overall count on here. Makes me hope that they don't add it so I don't have to be constantly worrying about what my overall score is.
TBH karma + post/comment history is helpful is picking out trolls though. For me it’s a way of finding out if the person is an argumentative twat or just someone who’s views are different to my own.
Completely agree. I think it’ll be very important from the perspective of identifying truly bad actors and defederating from some servers (as a last resort). Perhaps a compromise would be it being visible only over a certain threshold? Not sure.
Total user karma is useless to gauge the quality of the poster.
Upvotes and downvotes are good in the moment, in the thread, for the community to promote good posts and bury bad ones.
Exactly. I say this as someone who had nearly a million accumulated on the other site: karma points should only exist in the context of the current discussion, not as an overall tally for the user. Sure, it helps people quickly spot obvious trolls, but the downside is you end up with power-users (Gallowboob anyone?) who only repost content to watch the funny number go up. None of that here, for the love of god.
Good point, did not notice that I can't see a tally for myself. I never got any much karma built up since I didn't post or engage.
I actually used uBlock Origin to hide my karma in the top right corner from myself when it was shown by default. I found commenting less stressful that way.
A relatively small thing: the 500-comment viewing limit for normal accounts. So many times on Reddit I've been put off engaging with posts with 500+ comments knowing that nobody would see it. It's stupid because comments are just text and unless the software design is absolutely terrible then simple text comments shouldn't take up bandwidth at all.
Funny that Reddit pretends to be saving you bandwidth by not loading comments, but has no problem loading 100MB of javascript bloat.
And ads
Lots of ads
the 500 comment limit made the concept of daily threads replacing common questions a killer on subs like r/fitness. "Has this question been asked before? Well, instead of being able to pull up several threads about this topic, I have to go through the daily threads of hundreds of days and search the comments for keywords - after increasing the number of comments visible from 200 to 500, and then still not being able to search all the comments on the 1000+ comment threads." Just genuinely became unusable.
step 1. create discomfort for users
step 2. remove discomfort at the small price of $3.99 / month at a 30% discount for new users NOW at your nearest Walmart and 35% discount for senior citizens, members of the LGBTQIA+ community, supporters of the R or D party at the local youth center and old members of the Jean Baptiste Church down the corner because they're cool and they rent our DVDs sometimes.
These days on Reddit no one will read the linked posts and the comments are very circlejerky and lower quality. On the other hand Hacker News has mods (mostly just dang lol) vigilantly enforcing their guidelines to maintain somewhat quality discussions.
Another thing is a lot of reposting, bots, and excessive cross posting resulting in a lot of recycled garbage throughout. I miss the days where social media sites ripped off Reddit content, not the other way around.
People not reading the post was a meme even back in Slashdot days before Reddit or Digg were invented.
It's true, though. I am very guilty of it. I have gotten better at it but 100% of the time I'd click the comments first no matter what. If it seemed worthy of my attention I'd click the link. If it seemed too far-fetched I'd click the link.
I'm realizing now that it's mostly because I don't want to wait the 0.5 seconds for another page to load (ridiculous on my part) and possibly deal with paywalls.
Honestly, it is as much a condemnation of the websites writing the articles as it is a problem with users.
A lot of news articles in particular are all fluff, no substance. Especially the ones later in the news cycle for any given news story can often be summarized by half a sentence and otherwise nothing new if you have been following the story.
Censorship. All the major subreddits became political echo-chambers. Reddit was founded on free speech and open discourse, especially when it was really uncomfortable. I'd love to see the same for Lemmy. Over the years I've seen authoritarianism creep into the moderation policies of most major subreddits. Today, even posting on the wrong subreddit is grounds for being banned from dozens of major subreddits. Even having a polite disagreement about, for example, anything to do with "trans," is grounds for being banned.
Some people just like lurking.
I'd like less nazis. Including the dog whistling kind.
You should say "fewer Nazis." Ha! Didn't think you'd meet a grammar Nazi so soon did you?
You should actually say "No Nazis at all"
Since Nazis took over a Bluey Memes (children's cartoon) Facebook page, I realized the only way to be rid of them is to have a zero tolerance for Nazis policy. Anything community purports "free speech" should be considered an immediate dog whistle for fascist creep.
I agree with you. I hope karma is not implemented on Lemmy. The up/downvote system is fine the way it is now. I will say also coins and awards. I don't really think those are necessary. I'm aware that was something characteristic to reddit (correct me if I'm wrong) but I prefer all that to not come back.
I think awards might be a good source of revenue though?
Have the servers been getting enough donations to break even so far? How long will that last? Patreon works so well because there are walled features and perks for increased donations. Asking "please" and "pretty please" will only get you so far.
I hardly ever used awards, so I didn't think about that. You are right.
I thought coins and awards were dumb. I think durable comment logs and karma are good things, though.
From what I could gather in my short time here, Karma exists on Lemmy as well, it's just not a public stat and that's great because it completely eliminates the reason for karma whoring.
Sure you could try to add up all the upvotes and deduct your downvotes, but why bother? People trying to raise their karma (or those weirdos who were trying to farm downvotes) were always annoying at best and conversation killers at worst.
Hidden karma is the best way !
If karma becomes visible on Lemmy, I think it will start having the same problem of karma farm bots like reddit, people reposting to receive positive karma, trolls saying controversial things to receive negative karma, lots of spam, you know. . .
I'll never understand the concept of farming karma on Reddit. I know some subs had minimum karma limits before you could post/comment, but those were rare and typically a fairly low threshold. Beyond that... What's the point? Why did OP feel the need to mention "grinding karma"? Either it's something they enjoyed doing or it's something they didn't care about -- op seems to be both.
Spez's involvement in anything anywhere. Seems to turn everything he touches into a pile of turds.
Reddit had a lot of subreddits where the users seemed to hate each other and I'm hoping that can be avoided with Lemmy. I guess with the way Lemmy works, two communities that hate each other don't have to complain about sharing the same website the way they did on Reddit.
I think that aspect of not sharing is a great point. Seems like a group would be going out of the way to find other groups to dislike even.
making brigading more unacceptable here than it seems to be on reddit would be nice
That's already built-in by being able to block instances. For example, you can't see my comment right now because your instance blocked mine, presumably because you didn't want to be brigaded by communists!
Did beehaw block lemmygrad?
As a reddit convert who just started on kbin, where can I read a bit about all this communists thing? I'm left leaning enough to call myself communist between friends and family so I'd like to observe where the political tendencies of these various instances lie. If it's too much of a hassle, never mind. I'll probably figure it out soon enough.
Among the large instances, sh.itjust.works, sopuli.xyz, feddit.de, beehaw.org, lemmy.one, lemmy.ca, and midwest.social all have lemmygrad blocked. Beehaw seems to already have Hexbear blocked too - very ahead of the curve, gotta respect that.
Meanwhile, lemmy.world, lemmy.blahaj.zone, and of course lemmy.ml do not have lemmygrad blocked.
I'm not sure where you can read about the blocking. If you ask the liberals, they'll probably say something about genocides. If you ask lemmygrad, they'll probably just say cause they're libs. Anyway, there's not that many users. If someone is annoying you then just block them.
No its sillier than that, its because they didn't want to see communist in lemmy.ml
Define brigading.
Coordinated attempts to sway public discussions
That seems really broad tbh, like me and my doctor friends try to convince people they should brush their teeth twice a day would fall under that.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=brigading
Top three replies:
So wait if I post a link on here and a bunch of people go there and comment wouldn't that be brigading? So basically this entire platform can be considered as designed to brigade other websites?
If that happens with malicious intent, yes. If it's just advertising, a friendly visit or an otherwise civil exchange of opinions, no.
How can we determine malicious intent?
If a bunch of people go to have a discussion and one person says "Hey we should mess with them" is the whole group considered malicious?
On the flip side if a bunch of people go and comment maliciously but it's never explicit is it fair to just assign malicious intent to them?
It's social interactions, not science. People form opinions.
People may falsly assume they're being brigaded, and there may be confusion around the term and the limits. Which in turn can be used by brigading groups to conceal their efforts.
Anyways, I hope I could help answer some of your questions.
Massive amounts of cross-posting / re-posting of the same memes over and over again for klout farming. It's seriously awful on Reddit.
Zero tolerance for fascists, and zero tolerance for state propagandists.
The fact that Lemmy is federated means you don't need to be tolerant of anyone and if they want to keep spewing bigotry and lies. If you make it impossible for them to exist in an instance they'll have to either give up or spool up their own instance that we can isolate.
Because running an instance requires some organization, maintenance, and money, anything that becomes too isolated from the rest of the fediverse will eventually die out.
Everything on that AMA
Neoliberalism and collaboration with various State Department agents.
I'm almost 100% positive that we're safe on this one.
The word "based"
Based.
/s
Pretty much accepted it was the end of reddit when that started appearing.... /s
That and 9gag immigrants
If lemmy can avoid the use of /s and 9gag immigrants I'll be a happy little lemonian.
Never got the resistance to /s. Some people just struggle with understanding sarcasm, seems an easy way to avoid misunderstanding.
The /s tag is important to easily recognize sarcasm, especially for neurodivergent people.
Yeah, sarcasm doesn't translate well in text. At times, it's easy to identify a sarcastic comment, and sometimes it's not clear. I have myself interpreted comments on differently before seeing the /s at the end. Changes the entire perspectives sometimes.
I think because for those who do understand it the /s just ruins the joke. So I don't think there is pleasing both sides.
Part of the humor in sarcasm is feigned sincerity.
It's like explaining the joke immediately after telling it. If you have to tell everyone its sarcasm, then you've done a bad job at deploying sarcasm.
Except half the trick to deploying sarcasm is to use tone of voice, which you can't do in a text-only format. /s is like a shortcut for that. To use a face-to-face example, it's like saying something sarcastic with a straight face then cracking a smile to reveal you were joking all along.
Plus we're on the internet, people have some terrible takes that totally seem like they should be sarcastic but just aren't.
I guess I do get it though. /s does take some of the humor out of it, it just seems like more than a worthy tradeoff.
Telling jokes in a text medium isn't new and sarcasm is frequently used without hackish writers rushing to reassure everyone that they were only kidding. If you can't do a sarcasm without an '/s' then just don't do one.
Agreed. I can't tell you how many times in business I've seen a matter of fact text or email set someone off thinking the sender was some sort of monster. Try to add any humor and it can be 100% worse when it comes to interpreting.
I never had an issue with the /s used. Yes, I could read it as sarcasm 90% of the time before it appeared. But to me the written word should always add clarity. If the one commenting felt it should be used then so be it.
Poe's law mate. Without a clear indicator of the author's intent, any parodic or sarcastic expression of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of those views.
Writing and reading sarcasm on screenplays work, though. So why not on any Internet social platforms? This buffles a lot of Redditors. They really take the post/replies too serious.
i love sarcasm, it's the best hahahah there's nothing better than sarcasm, i wish all of lemmy was sarcasm, just pure sarcasm, nothing else, that'd be so awesome
Yea, always hated that one.
You're stepping on the joke, once by mentioning it, and again by ripping out the best thing about low-key sarcasm: that some people don't get the joke.
Frankly, its racist against the British.
This is a good point, and it lead me to a realization: on reddit, there are two crowds that don't get the joke. The first is the people the sarcasm makes fun of. The second is people on your side that just really love correcting people. Treating you like you're serious is a chance to correct you and gain community approval for how "right" they are. They miss the sarcasm because they're so excited to correct someone and gain community approval for it.
This isn't a problem in real life: you know who you're around, and you make sarcastic jokes when everyone around you knows your stance already. I can see why /s became a sort of necessary protection on reddit. We can hope to not have to protect ourselves from people like that here, and not need /s as a result.
I like "lemonian", a lot.
i just kinda stopped using reddit around then, mainly only became active again because stuck at home.
Always lurked, just stopped posting after so many insane arguments over sarcasm. Really should have been a cross instead of a slash.
It's a slash because it's a shortened version of , fake HTML tags that used to be used on forums.
oh im aware
RIP Sarcasm
I like the anonymity of Reddit (I had multiple accounts there too) but it would be great if we could use our own domains as a handle as a way of being “verified”. I know this is possible on the AT Protocol with BlueSky, might even be possible here, but I thought it would help with giving some authority/authenticity to users who want or need it.
There are a few Mastodon instances which do this. Journal.host for example.
@gronapa
unchecked anonymous shitposting trolls
I feel the same, I mostly lurk.
Fear of dropping the hammer down on bad actors.
And power mods too. No point moving to the Fediverse just to have all the content moderated and censored by 8 or 10 power trippy losers.
That's a good thing about Fediverse. Anyone can create their own instance and recreate the board/community/magazine there. Nobody needs to be under the thumb of some sore mod.
We just need a well maintained core and installer so anyone, anywhere can get an instance going.
That's how I understand it anyway, please correct me if I'm wrong.
One thing that I think would be interesting would be a small change to the upvote downvote system. Instead of just showing the total upvote -downvote, you could instead have a percentage, say as a pie chart. That way a user could visually see how agreeable/disagreeable a controversial topic is, instead of just + and - karma.
Similar to how the post vote percentage worked on reddit. I think I've been seeing the total + / - on comments here in my time browsing.
The original idea of so called "reddiquette" where people don't down vote because they disagree, they vote based on whether it contributes to the discussion or not. But obviously that's not easy to enforce in any way
True, but it was very welcoming at the beginning of reddit. And really it all boils down to moderation. If the hooligans don't like a heavily moderated community, they can start their own.
Lol there's already at least one person on my instance who rocked up and created about 50 communities to grab the names. People gonna people.
That raises a question - is there a mechanism for a community creator to hand over mod rights to others?
I was considering doing something like you describe, not because I want to be in charge (I definitely don't) but to try and start to recreate some of the Reddit subs I really enjoyed which didn't already exist here.
I've made one for MST3K (https://lemmy.world/c/mst3k), but I don't particularly want to be a mod, I just wanted it to exist in order to give Reddfugees more incentive to stick around. Was considering doing the same for other things - Twin Peaks, David Lynch, Scottish Football, Dance music, etc, but I don't want it to seem like a power grab.
EDIT - I discovered an answer to this: a mod can make anyone who has commented on a community into a mod of that community using the three dot menu on one of their comments:
Not sure whether that would let the second mod kick the first mod off though, or whether the community creator retains access regardless.
Honestly no idea, I'm not a mod of anything so you're better placed to know if there's a way to do that.
I do think there's a discussion to be had around whether it's actually valuable to have all these empty communities sitting around though. Yeah, people might recognise the name and maybe even sub, but if there's literally nothing in them then what's the point?
Those are the ones I have a problem with. To be clear, the ones set up by people who attempt to seed content and get conversations going (like yours, I see!) are absolutely what this place needs. But the empty ones are growing in number and clogging things up in searches, making Lemmy as a whole look emptier.
I guess over time those empty ones will either get going or die off. Hopefully most are "build it and they will come" type deals.
Fair point re mod tools/options, I'll try and work it out!
EDIT - found it:
I'm using Jerboa, and I don't think those mod options are available yet, but in a browser I was able to do it if I wanted.
Nice. Waiting for the first "meant to ban someone but misclicked and made them mod" complaints to start rolling in from them being so close together lol
Lol! Definitely something I can imagine doing with my sausage fingers!
That seems tricky. Something I actually liked about reddit was how well categorized certain types of content was and to a large degree that is enabled by allowing mods to e.g. make a lot of different /r/talesfrom... subreddits or a lot of the Imaginary or SFW porn (/r/earthporn,...) or a lot of different cat subreddits.
@gronapa
I wish there was multidimensional voting, and a way to filter out downvotes from people you don't align with. Minority opinions matter, but then getting downvoted to oblivion because the majority doesn't agree is damaging. It tends to lead to lowest common denominator content or proven reposts.
No, I have to disagree. That would lead to echo chambers worse than even the worst of subs on Reddit.
I've read it as a way to counteract echo chambers.
Assuming votes influence what opinions people voice, minority opinions have a hard time. Which can lead to them being underrepresented, and the vicious circle towards echo chamber has started.
If the minority opinion poster can make themselves more comfortable, how would that (also) lead to echo chambers?
Is hiding dissenting views truly a way to make yourself more comfortable? Sure, maybe more comfortable in your beliefs, but no one should be entirely comfortable in their opinions. It gives a false sense of valediction, like the entire world believes in you, when in reality an argument could completely fall apart if challenged outside of that space.
Upvotes and downvotes don't really matter in the end. You can always find groups of people who agree or disagree with you. However, hiding opposing views doesn't make you or an opinion more valid. While it could counteract echo chambers, I personally don't see how it wouldn't make the problem worse.
In a very blunt sense: Yes. We all do that. Most people surround themselves with friends who like who you are, not with enemies who hate who you are.
It seems we both value pluralism, and see echo chambers as a bad thing. I haven't understood yet how you meant hiding votes (not opinions) would lead to echo chambers. Could you explain that?
Or were you talking about hiding views, when I read the proposal as hiding votes?
Yeah I proposed that on one of the GitHub feature requests for Lemmy, per-instance configurable multi dimensional voting. The default implementation to be "relevant/irrelevant" and "agree/disagree"
This
Followed by “is the way”
liberals, lemmy was made by communists for communists
The extreme Sinophobic tropes and clichés that were clearly inserted into the redditbrain by American propagandists.
Do you support Chinese concentration camps?
I support a critical view of western media, which has shown itself time and again to grossly exaggerate claims about the actions of the Chinese state's actions.
Is there enough there for me to be concerned about what is happening in Xinjiang? Sure, but I have been burned enough to not accept the most extreme version of events without a degree of skepticism.
Knowing a few things about the history of China over the last 200 years and relations with the west over that time period would bring a degree of nuance to the conversation I'd really appreciate.
There are no Chinese concentration camps. There are however American ones. Do you support them?
There are probably things on China that I'm gonna strongly disagree with you on, yet some things that we'll probably find common ground on. Hope we'll have a healthy exchange of ideas when the topic comes up
No doubt. I'd bet though that the things we disagree on are things you believe that aren't true.
i thought it was just me :/ sometimes the sinophobia against chinese people (not the government) is insane
i can assure you, having spoken to quite a few chinese people (of millennial and gen z age), they do not approve of the government. there's also many chinese people who exist outside china, yet there's still sinophobia towards them.
many. most do not even have exposure to the world outside of china due to law restrictions. as much as they dislike the authoritarian government, they stay in china because it is their country, their culture, and home. so idk tf you’re talking about.