How to make the Threadiverse a nice place and effectively make it grow
How to make the Threadiverse a nice place and effectively make it grow
tl;dr: Be excellent to each other, do something constructive here?
I'm not sure anymore where the Threadiverse is headed. (The Threadiverse being this threaded part of the Fediverse, i.e. Lemmy, MBin, PieFed, ...)
In my time here, I've met a lot of nice people and had meaningful conversations and learned lots of things. At the same time, it's always been a mixed bag. We've always had quite some argumentative people here, trolls, ... I've seen people hate on and yell at each other, and do all kinds of destructive things. My issue with that is: Negative behavior is disproportionately affecting the atmosphere. And I'd argue we have nowhere enough nice behavior to even that out.
I don't see Lemmy grow for quite some time now. Seems it's now leveling off at a bit less that 50k monthly active users. And I don't see how that'd change. I'm missing some clear vision/idea of where we want to be headed. And I miss an atmosphere that makes people want to join or stay here, of all of the places on the internet. The saying is: "If you don't go forwards you go backwards". I'm not sure if this applies... At least we're not shrinking anymore.
And I'm always unsure if the tone and atmosphere here changes subtly and gradually. I've always disagreed with a few dynamics here. But lately it feels like we're on the decline, at least to me. I occasionally keep an eye on the votes on my comments. And seems I'm getting fewer of them. Sometimes I reply to a post and not a single person interacts. Even OP seems to have abandoned their post moments after writing it. And also for nuanced and longer replies, I regularly don't get more than one or two upvotes. I think that used to be a bit better at some point. And I see the same thing happening with other peoples' comments. So it's not just me writing low-quality comments. What does work is stating simple truths. I regularly get some incoming votes with those. But my vision of this place isn't spreading simple truths, but have proper and meaningful discussions, learn things and new perspectives or just mingle with people or talk. But judging by the votes I observe, that isn't appreciated by the community here.
Another pet peeve of mine is the link aggregator aspect of Lemmy. I'd say at least 80% of Lemmy is about dumping some political (or tech) news articles. Lots of them don't generate any engagement. Lots of them are really low-effort. OP just dumps something somewhere, no body text added, no info about what's interesting about it. And people don't even read those articles. They just read the title and react (emotionally) to that. In the end probably neither OP nor the audience read the article and it's just littering the place. Burying and diminishing other, meaningful content. (With that said: There are also nice (news) discussions going on at the same time. And Lemmy is meant to be a link aggregator. It's just that my perception is: it's skewed towards low quality, low engagement and random noise.)
A few people here also don't really like political debate. And there's no escape from it here on Lemmy since so much revolves around that. And nowadays politics is about strong opinions, emotions and emotional reactions. And often limited to that. The dynamics of Lemmy reinforce the negative aspect of that, because the time when you're most incentivized to reply or react is, when it triggers some strong emotion in you, for example you strongly disagree with a comment and that makes you want to counter it and write your own opinion underneath. If you agree, you don't feel a strong emotion and you don't reply. And the majority of users seems to also forget to upvote in that case, as I lined out earlier. And we also don't write nuanced answers, dissect complex things and examine it from all angles. That's just effort and it's not as rewarding for the brain to do that as it is pointing out that someone is wrong. So it just fosters an atmosphere of being argumentative.
Prospect
I think we have several ways of steering the community:
- Technology: Features in the software, design choices that foster good behavior.
- Moderation: Give toxic people the boot, or delete content that drags down the place. Following: What remains is nice people and not adverse content.
- The community
I'd say 1 and 2 go without saying. (Not that everything is perfect with those...) But it really boils down to 3: The community. This is a fairly participatory place. We are the ones shaping the tone and atmosphere. And it's our place. It's kind of our obligation to care for it if we want to see it go somewhere. Isn't it?
So what's your vision of this place? Do you have some idea on where you'd like it to go? Practical ideas on how to achieve it?
Do you even agree with my perception of the dynamics here, and the implications and conclusions I came up with?
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When I first joined Lemmy, I made a really big effort to make my interactions more positive than they were on Reddit. But the problem is that this required effort, and I am afraid over time my resolve might have eroded as the fediverse became just another online space instead of something new and distinct. This is a good reminder, but I wonder if this solution of just trying to be better is really sustainable for me or others? I’ll keep trying but we may need a more concrete change to get where we want to go.
I am curious if it’s time to evolve user engagement beyond up and downvotes. While they were relatively innovative at the time they were introduced, it’s been some years and we’re still here using the same system.
The biggest problem with voting as content curation is that people vote to communicate very different ideas and reactions in different circumstances. So people are sending the same signal to a well-researched, respectful but dissident perspective and to content that is rude, violent, hateful, incorrect etc.
This could be solved by allowing more diverse reactions. People will always want an agree or disagree button, so give them that. But we could also vote on how factual a post is, how polite a post is, how uplifting a post is, etc. We could then build algorithms that prioritize quality content instead of just the current popularity contest. Ideally I’d like multiple transparent algorithms that the user can choose from (or leave a default chosen by their instance) so that users can choose what kind of content is most valuable to them.
One concern is whether this would be too complicated for people to understand or engage with properly. I’d be curious to hear what others think: would this just devolve into upvotes and downvotes again or could this be a better system?
Votes are needed to sort the posts and decide which ones are shown at the top of your frontpage. If we add different reaction types, it's not at all clear how each of them should affect the score. We might come up with some arbitrary numbers, but then the system will get a lot less intuitive and more complex.
Yes, the complexity is certainly one of the downsides to what I’m proposing, which is one reason why I was curious if people thought the complexity would be manageable. Sounds like you think not?
Just to clarify, my thought is to leave this up to users/admins to choose their own algorithm, which would transparently describe how things are weighted. For me, I would like to weigh factual information most highly, then kindness, with raw popularity at the bottom. But others might feel differently, especially if there were even more types of reactions than the three main categories I described.
For new users or those who don’t understand the system, it would be fine to have a default sort, maybe configurable by your instance. It could be as simple as just adding up the positive and negative votes, which would make it identical to the current system, or we could just guess at some different weights. Let me people try them out—not everyone will engage but I hope enough would to help iron out the wrinkles and see what works best.
I could certainly see a feature like this implemented as a plugin. But it would need someone to volunteer for the programming work.
Not a bad idea. I lack the skills myself but if anyone is interested in such a thing, let me know. I’d be happy to support in any way I can.
One concern is whether this would be too complicated for people to understand or engage with properly.
Grandmas nowadays already spam emoji conversations happily. I wouldn't be any worried that this system looks "complicated". Did we forget that we were once children who loved to tinker with things, be they the concrete such as the bathroom lock or the abstract such as mom's rules on if we can keep a pet?
Interesting that you say that, because I was imagining that each type of vote could be represented by a different emoji. I think people would get it if we picked the right ones. But care would be needed to avoid those that could have multiple meanings.
Maybe something like this:
Agree - 👍
Disagree - 👎
Friendly/kind (not sure the best word) - 🫂
Hostile/rude - 🤬
Factual or insightful -💡
Incorrect - ❌
You could add others but those seem like the most common and useful signals I would want to send while voting.
Another idea would be to just open it up and let people use any emoji to react. Some platforms already do this but it can get more confusing in terms of how to interpret and incorporate all of that information into ranking algorithms.
Another idea would be to just open it up and let people use any emoji to react.
Please no! XD We already have enough emoji as it is, not to mention they are comboable in non-portable ways or they change meaning according to the provider / renderer (GUN becoming WATER GUN is a good example).
But I do think there are valid "reaction sets" that could be interpreted with emoji, and pretty much all of them happen to match the examples you have provided:
Positive reaction / Upvote ; Negative reaction / Downvote.
Reaction of commiseration / offer of emotional support / "Hug" or w/e.
Reaction of joining in activity / offer of technical or factual support / "Let's do this".
Fun; Unfun
Reaction of surprise / "TIL" / "wow".
Factually correct ; Factually incorrect.
Reaction of "same", "this tbh", "mood" or other such neologisms
Ofc I prefer the reactions are biased towards promoting good interaction; I really don't see much use for reactions like "hostile / rude", "faggot", "kys" or stuff like that. Downvote and, depending on the case, Factually Incorrect and Unfun deal with most of that.
The reason I included the negative reactions is to help distinguish between unpopular but constructive content, which I believe is very valuable in disrupting the echo-chamber effect, and content that is actually just bad, rude, insulting etc. and not contributing to anything.
Often, when there are guidelines on how to vote in platforms or communities they instruct people not to downvote for mere disagreement but people do it anyway. So by separating the disagree downvote from the “this is just objectively bad” vote, I think this can help curate a more positive environment. The goal is that if a comment or post is getting more than a few of those reactions, it should be hidden or maybe even flagged for moderation. But posts that are merely unpopular can stay as long as they are factual and polite.
I don't think there's a big problem by using upvotes, downvotes and comments as systems that can show the popularity or controversy of a post.
Imo the bigger problem is in the comments using the same voting system. For starters, everyone the system in a different way. Most notably example is downvoting to disagree.
Secondly, because we are evolutionary wired to try and fit in, you either consciously or subconsciously try to create a comment that will give you the best chances at seeing the numbers go up and receive validation from your peers.
Personally I think the system is fine to keep running under the hood to keep the sorting algorithms available and maybe for moderation purposes, but it would be great if we wouldn't be able to see them at all as to not be influenced by the connections we make between votes and post content.
[...] as the fediverse became just another online space instead of something new and distinct
You're hitting the nail on the head with saying that. I mean the Fediverse is what it is. But I envision it to be something distinct, with added value and not just an average online space. If i didn't care, I could just use Facebook/Reddit/Discord. But I do and I'd like this to be the nice alternative to that. Maybe way smaller and with its own problems, but at least more friendly and enjoyable....
With the emoji reactions: I agree with what nutomic pointed out. It'd also be difficult for the users to understand and use properly. And it's a bit vague how that translates to a simple score for the ranking. I don't think there is any technological issue, though. And we have platforms that use emoji reactions successfully. Notably Github and Discord. It works well for linear conversations.