What factors do you think contributed to the "Reddit Hivemind"? How do you believe it can be avoided?
What factors do you think contributed to the "Reddit Hivemind"? How do you believe it can be avoided?
I've been seeing more often (and others have posted the same) that some of the elements of "Reddit etiquette" seem to be taking over here. Luckily I can still find discussion comments but it seems the jokes and general "downvote because I disagree" are slowly taking over.
So the question becomes is it the size or the functionality of the site? The people or popularity? What's your thoughts?
edit: should I change it to Lemmy-hivemind? Exhibit A: the amount of downvotes without a single explanation (guessing it's anything to do with Reddit being talked about).
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Gamifying the voting incentivises people to make low quality posts and comments. That’s why Reddit is now basically just rage bait fake stories with comment chains that all look exactly the same. And now it’s all just ai generated anyway.
I sometimes visit and read the AITAH type stories and I’m dumbfounded that people can believe or enjoy reading them. All the subtleties and nuances of the early days are gone and it’s a race to who can karma farm the hardest.
The other thing that made Reddit great in early days were the small communities being visible on the front page. It made the content varied and there were different types of posting hitting front page. I think Lemmy is struggling with this because politics is just so loud that we don’t have enough volume of other content being made.
Using scaled sorting really helps with getting smaller communities on the front page. I still see the political and news communities but I also see communities for cities and niche hobbies.
Indeed. When’s the last time we saw a well-thought-out, controversial opinion on Reddit?The system breeds behaviors that are in conflict with a high-quality, diverse discussion.
It is for the same reason that I’m very particular about my downvotes. They are reserved for low-quality content, not that which I personally disagree with. I’d like if we could all learn to be less judgmental and more constructive so that we may all learn something meaningful. I think this is incompatible with the way that Reddit operates.
As someone who recently switch to Lemmy, I did notice that there is a general difference in the tone of conversation. This is the first time I've seen it put to words
Tildes polices for tone instead of wrongness, and it's been working out over there. People are generally happy with the discourse.
A lot of it is in the site design, too. There aren't downvotes, because they're not needed. There's a lot of proactive moderation coming from the community by using comment labels. Labels help push comments up or down, and some require you to type a reason why, which encourages thoughtfulness instead of knee-jerk hivemind and pile on. The 'extremely bad' label has a cooldown time limit on it, so people are less likely to abuse it.
I wonder if separating relevant/irrelevant & like/dislike into two votes would have any success. Quite likely it would not, but might be worth trying.
Would probably rename [ like / dislike ] to [ agree / disagree ] to avoid overlapping with [ relevant / irrelevant ]. To make it more robust, make voting for relevancy compulsory if voting for [ agree / disagree ].
But the reported stats is all moot if there's bot manipulation anyway. Also, people would most likely say it's relevant even if it's actually not, just because they agree with it
my downvotes. They are reserved for low-quality content, not that which I personally disagree with.
There was more of that in the early days of Reddit. At some point everyone abandoned that principle, and from them on every thread became more of a battle than a conversation.
I remember when Reddit's best "reading" threads just suddenly shifted. AITA, JustNoMIL, TalesFromTechSupport, TalesFromRetail, all of a sudden they went from realistic stories of real people venting to... just obvious rage bait. It was so disappointing. It was one of the best things to read on the bus, here's someone going through something, can offer support, laugh about it, whatever.
It went from stories like "I had someone demand a manager when I wouldn't offer them 40% off" to "someone pulled a gun on me at work, and my manager told me I should have punched them". Just such horrible bullshit. That's when I knew the site was going downhill.
I think Lemmy is struggling with this because politics is just so loud that we don’t have enough volume of other content being made.
I regularly suggest people to block those communities, or consider an alt to follow those
I really agree with the excessive news e politics comunitties. I have a hard time setting a good feed 'cause of that