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No, it’s not a joke. I’m frustrated and I’m probably not choosing my words carefully.

This community has had steadily falling engagement - our last 3 weekly threads have had a grand total of 1 (excellent and well-articulated) response, and the number of topics not generated by myself (or the other mod) since the inception of the community has also been 1.

Very few people want to actually talk. From what I’ve seen, the masses want the same things that they wanted on Reddit:

  1. Memes
  2. Articles they don’t read (but will bitch about endlessly) that reinforce their opinion
  3. Angry responses to someone (who may be trolling) that reinforce the current politics of the reader (that they couldn’t have given a fuck about a few years ago until it became heavily politicized)
  4. Shitty easy jokes
  5. Personal politics circlejerking

I hate that I can see a hundredth point-free meme post and view 200 replies on it. I hate that it’s just the same talking points being strawmanned over and over again in every thread. I hate that any point outside common groupthink is downvoted to oblivion and buried instead of discussed.

The reason I’d like to back away from Lemmy seems to be the same reason I started this community: we need more people who can articulate points, and less downvoting, but it doesn’t seem to be getting better.

Maybe one day, but today is not that day. Lemmy needs to mature in more ways than one.

  • Rimu@piefed.social
    81·
    9 months ago

    Can you think of any software features that might address the issues you raise?

    I’m building a lemmy alternative and greatly prefer ‘actual discussion’, too.

    • Ace T'Ken@lemmy.caOPMEnglish
      5·
      9 months ago

      • Better ways for Communities to surface themselves. Starting with such a small community, it’s hard to get more people unless they come in from browsing the equivalent of /All. I’ve also been active in promoting this Community to people who seem to want to discuss things on other threads and were frustrated by the same things I was, but we’re still pretty small.

      • More controls (and decoration) available to the Community itself. It’d help us out a lot if we could disable downvotes, for instance. As it stands, we can’t discuss any remotely controversial topic without no-comment downvotes from random people burying threads. That means that if the first few people don’t like the topic or my initial outlay of it, they kill any hope of anyone seeing the thread. On a platform with scads of various activists, this means that this happens often.

      • Better moderation tools. For instance, we can’t properly remove deleted content, and it’s all mostly visible still on mobile clients. Hell, we’ve seen deleted rule-breaking comments continue to accrue upvotes somehow.

      • Ways to pre-emptively surface sub rules to mobile users who never see the sidebar (especially if they are breaking them). Lemmy seems to think that people browse communities, but they do no such thing. The Community is popped into a feed, and people see a topic, but most never even look at the Community itself.

      • Stopping bad users. Things like… there need to be ways to stop a user from going into user history of others and downvoting every single thing they’ve ever written because they didn’t like a take they had. We also need ways to appeal bans and stop brigading.

      • We’ve had threads reported for using terminology a user didn’t like. The threads then vanished. We, the mods, were never notified that a large and actively debated thread was now gone and could do nothing about it.