Collectively, Lemmy has a substantive comment issue
Collectively, Lemmy has a substantive comment issue
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.
I think people should just comment whatever they want. Give me your off the top of your head thoughts. We dont need every comment to be an expert analysis.
Lemmy isn't big enough to gatekeep content and when it becomes big enough most people won't care about the gate keeping
I think lemmy only has two types of posts, these with less than 10 comments and ones hexbear folks posted in.
Holy shit, not me.
Haha right? Same. Thankfully threads like this are pointless because the nice thing about decentralization is that anyone can do it their own way and it doesn't matter what others think.
I agree most people shouldn't post expert analysis and would be unreasonable to expect as such. I wanted to avoid aiming this thread at specific people but there are a limited number of accounts with a very, very high comment count that is entirely derived from what I'd consider lower effort contributions.
Without examples its hard to know what your post is about
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this
I walked into this one -- this response is inevitable and only makes this man weep after his rant to the world.
don't ever let them see your tears, it's how they multiply
this
yarp
How do I stop being just a lurker and start contributing something meaningful? I'm jaded from Reddit and fear I'll have people jumping down my throat like happens so often on there. Edit: two words
Asking questions is a great way to start if you don't know the subject at hand but you find it interesting.
This. I asked "Why are people mining coal again lately?" on AskLemmy.
It was something I easily could've spent time googling, but it was interesting to see peoples different explanations and the discussions that it led to.
And if someone Google's the same question later, who knows, that thread might show up in the results
I'll promise to (try to) be nice :)
I think it all varies for how to contribute.
Perhaps if someone posts something about a product you use -- let's say an article about how some feature is broken but you've known about it for some time, just chiming in with "I've noticed this issue ever since an update last year" would provide interesting information. If I'm someone who hasn't used the product, now I know it has been a historical issue.
For something that's a bit more effort, say someone posts a news or politics article. If you know any additional context about the issue, that might be worth contributing. Let's say an article comes out about a representative pushing for a certain policy at a national level. If you know this politician has pushed for this policy at a local level, contributing a link so that others can read more about their efforts would be beneficial.
Good suggestions. On the one hand you're right, but on the other hand I don't want to totally discourage people from posting a silly/low effort comment if that's all they have to say.
Although it's true that Lemmy comments are not always substantive, there is an associated problem whereby a lot of posts barely get any comments or discussion at all. So I think we also need to recognize that even a low effort joke can help stimulate further discussion and maybe result in a more substantive comment in the form of a reply.
I've been trying specifically to comment on posts in areas where I want more content with something related to the post. There hasn't necessarily been more NBA discussions, but I usually get a response from the poster, which is how you start the snowballs rolling I think
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Except it can be constant, following you everywhere you go, and affecting you even when you block the person, e.g. they weaponize the "report" function in subs, and some mods simply can't keep up so end up removing your comments almost automatically.
And that is still fairly low level for Reddit, not even beginning to get deeper e.g. doxing. Sadly, bullying works, and all the more so in a place without effective moderation.:-(
Not that I've seen any of that here - it really does seem related to the "culture" of a place, like Discord or Slack or Reddit or... here, where others may call out a bully, or just ignore them entirely but instead provide positive feedback to replace it and reinforce community standards of decency.
As you just did, kudos for being awesome yourself!:-D
jaded from Reddit and fear I’ll have people jumping down my throat
that's not easy to get over, but trust yourself
fear I’ll have people jumping down my throat like happens so often on there
This is definitely a thing on Lemmy also.
K
The duplicate bot posts and lack of organic content are my problem. Low effort comments can be ignored or used as a conversation starter, but if there's nothing posted, then there's nothing to say.
At times I’d joke to myself that I could predict what the upvoted comments would be.
That was no joke. It was a regular occurrence.
Reddit's biggest strength was also it biggest draw back, its size.
If you came across a thread that was more than 30 minutes old, there was little point in making a longish, thoughtful and nuanced response as it would be burred at on page 4 and lucky to be seen by anyone. Let alone read by someone who would take it on board and reply to any points you made in a meaningful way.
The main way to gain any visibility was to reply to one of the top 3 or 4 comments, which often lead to a large number of actually replies that were correcting a minor error of fact in the comment, rather than addressing the point of the comment.
The response to this by some people was to hang out in r/new and post comments in the fresh posts in the hope of getting some visibility that way. The down side was there was still little point in spending 5-10 minutes (or more) writing a long form post as two things would usually happen.
1: The post would gain no traction, get lost in the flood of new posts and never be seen on the main tabs, so your reply would be unread.
2: The post would gain traction but in the 10 minutes you were writing a decent reply, the flood of the same jokes and one liners have already drowned out any real discussion.
Whether you cared about Karma or not, the sheer volume of comments and votes drove those that did to endlessly spam the same responses over and over again.It is a great example that at some level humans on mass are no better than the pigeons B F Skinner placed in his boxes endlessly hammering away at the button in the hope that this time a treat will pop out.
Now, I assume, many of us here have had a similar experience. While we may not have liked it, conditioning like that is really hard to break. Personally, I am willing to admit that my first thought was to hit add comment after only writing the first line of my response.
The only thing that is harder than forming a habit is breaking one that is maladaptive and not serving you well.
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Seriously. Every top comment is some dumb doom and gloom, one-sentence hot take. Or at least super cynical.
Like just yesterday some post mentioned a YouTube Music strike, and the top comment was "People use YouTube Music?" What a waste of comment space. Yes, people use it, obviously.
And that is almost every thread. Just some idiot making some idiot comment. Who the hell up votes shit like that? It's still the top comment and has even more upvotes now.
(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:
If you don't want to watch the full thing, maybe skip to just the end summary
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.
I really hate seeing hacker news all over lemmy. Stop telling me to go there. Stop telling me they're better than me. If you like another site so much, use it. You will like me less.
OP if you want better comments, try asking better questions.
You can certainly respond in a less hostile manner.
I'm not telling anyone to go to Hackernews. I'm citing an example of another community where there is a higher bar for substantive content, much like how I cited Reddit as an example of what we shouldn't strive for.
Sorry, I could have put more thought into my comment.
I’m not telling anyone to go to Hackernews. I’m citing an example of another community where there is a higher bar for substantive content, much like how I cited Reddit as an example of what we shouldn’t strive for.
Then start a community like "high quality news discussions" or "true news" and moderate it how you would like.
This is, for sure, an issue carried over from Reddit, but it's also a byproduct of another issue we carried over from Reddit: Most posts have a substantive issue.
Obviously not every community has this issue, but so many of them seemingly serve as nothing but news aggregators and do absolutely nothing to promote engagement or discussion. It is no surprise that the quality of comments has dropped when there are entire communities that are just copy-pasted news sludge with no other sense of community or engagement.
When the content on your website feels disposable then people will treat it as such. Lemmy as a whole has this exact same issue as Reddit does, which is not surprising because Lemmy is basically a clone of Reddit. I made a post on Beehaw a while ago about how the instance lacked any sense of community and I've seen similar sentiments expressed in other instances here and there. People, such as myself, who expected something better from Lemmy and getting frustrated when we can't find it. There was a supreme opportunity presented to us when the Reddit migration began, to make new communities and spaces for discussion of a higher quality than Reddit could ever provide but Lemmy completely squandered that. Lemmy sucks - and that's because it clones so much of Reddit... which also sucks.
I think moderators should feel free to shape their communities however they are fit, DaystromInstitute deletes low effort comments, Risa rewards them. both are great.
Holy hell
How much of this is due to the subjects of the posts? If news articles are pretty similar week to week, I'd expect the discussion around them to be similar too. That shifts the onus on users to stop posting and upvoting same-ey content all the time, or moderators to take more of it down.
I agree with the OP, but I do somewhat agree with you, too. A lot of the news articles we get now feel like "micro-updates" to the same story: Elon Musk does bad thing that is bad for Twitter, Russia says shitty thing and attacks Ukraine some more, the American right-wing tries to do something else to take away abortion rights, etc. They can sometimes be interesting developments, and I don't want to minimise the importance of any of them because they are important (well, not most of the Musk spam, but the others, certainly), but most of the commentary on topics like those has been played out over the last 12+ months and there's not necessarily much new content to analyse or discuss.
However, OP is right that comment sections here are often disappointing. I find myself commenting here a lot less often than I did on Reddit simply because there are fewer interesting comments to reply to, and because my own comments get fewer interesting replies. Part of that is just the nature of having a smaller userbase, but it doesn't stop it being a little demotivating when it feels like you're commenting into the void, or when no-one really wants to engage in an in-depth discussion.
That description of online news is good, applies not just to news on Lemmy. I check out some news portals irregularly, and I frequently wonder if I'm out of the loop because I might be missing some context for the given article that I finally clicked on. A lot of news content should ideally be turned into a weekly digest, that filters out what's relevant, gives context and wider considerations, etc. (e.g. instead of immediately informing us that the Ukrainian army has just captured a street in a village, just let me know when they've captured the whole village several weeks later, and explain if that village is strategically relevant). But that's contrary to how both news portals and sites like reddit and Lemmy work, with the demand for a constant stream of small excitements.
The for-profit news media needs to constantly push their product, thus they say what they believe will give them the maximum reward for least effort. And they are often right.
Filters for that - to only push worthwhile content through - would themselves have a cost, and someone needs to bear it even if using donated efforts of common people (otherwise those also being for-profit just continues the same cycle, e.g. Google News serves up what it wants to give you, not what you would like to receive).
e.g. someone could create a magazine to post only the most noteworthy content. One example of that is https://kbin.social/m/BestOf, but look at how many, or rather how few, bother to post to it?
So whoever created the "News" magazine is doing what they feel is appropriate, and if someone/we want something else, like a "Only Relevant News" magazine, we would need to make it happen.
I think a core point was, many comments don't even try to be part of a discussion. But get upvotes anyways and drown out others which would substantially contribute.
Agreed about same-eye content. On the other hand, different outlets report from different angles, which has some value. If we could have only one report per week on a given topic, who decides which version will win the privilege?
Which comes first, the comment or the content?
I'm happy to comment, but (1) it takes a lot of effort to make a good comment, and I'm not sure I regularly have meaningful things to contribute, and (2) many posts are retread memes, reposts, or iterations on slow-moving US political nonsense, and as such not worthy of commenting, and (3) new newsworthy posts are rare.
This is when I browse everything. It's even worse in my subscribed communities.
You’re demonstrating exactly my point of behavior that I am advocating against.
The Elon-stan spam is annoying for sure but on Lemmy it’s the complete other direction. A substantial amount of commentary is still talking about him, just venting. We don’t need some shitbag billionaire’s name plastered everywhere.
It is very, very, very safe to assume most people on here agree (myself included) that he’s a horrible person who feeds off malicious controversy and often publicizes viewpoints that are dangerous to the marginalized.
I believe your comment offers little substance because its general gist is repeated so often and isn’t at all related to this post.
Remember: limit your comments, lemmy is running out of comment space!
If you’re thinking about commenting, make a new post instead. There’s plenty of room for posts!
What
Lemmy has limited space for unique comments on posts, so make sure it’s a good one before you click “reply”!
If you feel the need to post but don’t wanna blow up the spot, just copy another users comment verbatim and post that. Copies of comments don’t take up space.
All that doesn’t apply to posts, make all the posts you want just don’t comment on em!
Lemmy in general is running out of comment space? That's kinda a problem, there will always be more comments than there are posts
It’s a serious problem, but users like you can help!
When you delete your posts the space is freed up because the backend just serves up the same “deleted by user” content.
So when you think one’s been up long enough, go ahead and delete that post!
Along with posting less, deleting your posts can save lemmy!
I'm doing my part!
Death to any comment that's anything only communicating "I enjoyed this".
"lol" "This made me laugh so much that I xyz!!" "This is perfect!" All useless. Upvote and move on.
If I couple copy paste a comment to any random parent comment and it still makes some sense, it's a bad comment.
This
Many people find content they enjoy to become more enjoyable when they can empathize with other people who also enjoy it. I don't but somebody is up voting those comments so I assume. Not like it hurts me so meh
If I couple copy paste a comment to any random parent comment and it still makes some sense, it's a bad comment.
Funny you mention this, as right before Reddit killed 3rd party apps, it was being inundated with bots doing literally just that and it was always super fucking obvious.
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.
So HN is quite heavily moderated (just turn on showdead if you want to see the graveyard), and Tildes tries to keep the community cohesive with their invite-only policy (limiting growth).
Lemmy, on the other hand, allows open sign-ups and does not have a strong (HN-like) moderation culture. If anything, it has more of a Reddit-like moderation style, with a bunch of separate communities ruled by their own mods.
Therefore, it remains to be seen whether appeals to the userbase will prove effective as Lemmy grows. Note that as Reddits userbase grew, the quality of the discourse went down, Eternal September-style.
There are, though, still a couple of big differences between Reddit and Lemmy. The latter probably won't try to attract users by running big campaigns in mainstream media, like Reddit did in later years. On the other hand, there's the risk that Meta's Threads or other (future) big tech platforms might end up federating with Lemmy.
tildes.net has something like a "superupvote" where you can mark a comment as exemplary and only do that once every 8 hours , and indeed i would say the average quality of content on tildes.net is higher then on lemmy (no offence intended).
Maybe lemmy should also implement a "super upvote", something you can give once a hour/day/week/month/year/decade or even "all time best" (which you could find by looking at a user profile), or just something where you pay some money , something like a "seriousness fee" (with the money going to the devs or instance admins or some charity).
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.
just unsubscri-
doesn't solve problem
it's an interesting comment, because this space (the whole fediverse i guess) still seems to be in its infancy and its users are still trying to figure out what it's good for.. the differences you call out are all relevant.. specifically the comment structure is healthier here than reddit, and less susceptible to brigading and trolling.. it's going to be interesting to see how it matures..
i think it's a more flexible and useful tool than most of the other things like it around, so i'm pretty confident the internet will find something interesting to do with it.. and probably sooner rather than later with all the fluidity in online populations..
How is it less "susceptible" to brigading and trolling, or did you just mean that it tends to happen less here?
If anything I think it's more susceptible overall(edit: thanks to ithas for reminding me that voting records are public - that actually help tremendously), but then again the need is substantially less too.it's hard to quantify, but i've witnessed and defended against direct attacks of the typical kind that are pretty successful on reddit.. the structure here is just less useful to them.. discussion can carry on around their attempts to dominate a thread, and get the whole thing sort of flushed down a toilet of inane consensus.. the traffic is nowhere near as high, so it's hard to say how it will evolve..
also it seems easier here to shout down trolls, also due to the structural difference.. trollish behavior can be countered here pretty effectively with real discussion, where the voting mechanism on reddit makes it difficult..
i should note i use kbin, so my experience is different from a lot of other people
One thing I've been told in the past is that with public voting records you at least get an idea of if brigading is happening, where it's coming from etc. Though maybe that's just a giant list of randomly generated usernames but if it's coming from a single instance there are at least actions to take from that.
Capitalism has fallen billions must eat Bounty Bars