I loved Reddit for what it is, but nothing made me back out of a post faster than seeing the top 3 parent threads as a regurgitation of the same inside jokes, pun-chains, and so on.
Glad to see one of the first posts I see on here is whining about how other people post. Starting to feel like home already.
Just need the people complaining about people complaining post followed by a rule baning complaining about people. Then we can get the golden meta post of complaining about the rule stopping you from complaining about people.
When do we get to complain that some people here didn’t like something before, but some people now like that thing? Surely soon.
I’ll give it until the end of June. By that point, anyone who was going to leave reddit will have left, and new users will come more organically. At that point, the rexxitors will do what redditors do best, which is gatekeep.
Don’t worry! We’ll develop our own new inside jokes to repeat and nauseum!
EDIT: I realized, 4 hours later, than auto-correct had changed “ad” to “and”. I’m leaving it as it makes this comment even more obnoxious.
Definitely! We have our own social network, with baccarat and masseuses!
All lemmings, take one step off the cliff!
first new inside joke: and nauseam 💀
And my ax!
Couldn’t help it, sorry
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yeah but it’s charming when we do it
This!!!1111one
God that felt awful to type
Oh no. I was hoping to not have to see another ‘bacons at midnight’ type of post within my lifetime.
Agreed, it’s gonna get so annoying hearing these jokes and nauseam though.
…With blackjack and hookers!
@Barbarian and nauseum
I think it’s natural to want the majority of posts to meet one’s preferences but what one finds interesting/entertaining/etc. varies for each person.
I love diversity and choice and so I’m happy that each community can have their own individual rules/cultures and we can pick which communities we want to join. E.g., I wouldn’t expect the same behaviour/rules/culture in a shit posting community compared to an arch linux community, but I’m glad both types of communities and content will exist.
We can collectively choose what kinds of unique cakes to bake and we can choose which cakes to eat too. :D
Sounds like a good AI feature for a Lemmy client app. “✅ I don’t want to see comments that only contain a pun.”
this was something I loved about slashdot moderation. When voting, people had to specify the reason for the vote. +1 funny, +1 insightful, +1 informative, -1 troll, -1 misleading, etc.
That way you can, for example, set in your user preferences to ignore positive votes for comedy, and put extra value on informative votes.
Then, to keep people from spamming up/down votes and to encourage them to think about their choices, they only gave out a limited number of moderation points to readers. So you’d have to choose which comments to spend your 5 points on.
Then finally, they had ‘meta moderation’ where you’d be shown a comment, and asked “would a vote of insightful be appropriate for this comment” to catch people who down-voted out of disagreement or personal vandetta. Any users who regularly mis-voted would stop receiving the ability to vote.
I don’t think this is directly applicable to a federated system, but I do think it’s one of the best-thought-out voting systems ever created for a discussion board.
edit: a couple other points i liked about it:
Comments were capped at (iirc) +5 and -1. Further votes wouldn’t change the comment’s score.
User karma wasn’t shown. The user page would just say Karma: good. Or Excellent, or poor, or some other vague term.
Wow, that is pretty fascinating.
That’s so dreamy that I created a feature request post linking to your comment. (I also did an @ you but not sure I did that right.)
This seems like a great system.
I really hate all the reddit awards. I didn’t even know they exist until I opened the steve huffman ama in new reddit, and it had about a million awards that were all a different (moving/sparkling) emoji. Facebook has those too, all the little icons for like, haha, sad, heart etc. I find that stuff really distracting to look at and it’s one of many reasons i refuse to use facebook, or reddit’s official website & app.
Something like you’re describing sounds like it would work really well though, especially if there were just maybe different colours or something for the upvote/downvote type, instead of space-wasting icons and images.Yeah, their layout is dated, but the scoring system doesn’t take much room (once you accept the idea that a reply can have a subject line):
Username checks out.
I wouldn’t expect the same behaviour/rules/culture in a shit posting community compared to an arch linux community
What’s the difference?
I use Arch btw
Iusearchlinux.fyi
Yes that’s actually the instance I’m apart of
Me too!
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Nice. I actually don’t use Arch Linux but rather Garuda (a derivative of Arch) so I still find the forum helpful. :)
Those were just two random examples. It would depend on whatever rules/guidelines each community owner makes.
Basically each community can have their own rules.
- Some communities may allow swearing and some may not
- Some may allow 18+ content and some may not
- etc.
Lemmy will likely have its own “the narwhal bacons at midnight” phase.
It’ll interesting to see what it is…and then almost immediately tiresome.
I think that stuff like that developed when the userbase was pretty young. Don’t think something like that will happen again.
At least I hope not…
It’s a free society here, if Lemmy really takes off its most likely going to happen and you’re free to partake in the joke or not.
Lemmy is here to serve all, I imagine some hard boundaries around illegal content will be put in place though.
De-federation can happen for that sort of scenario
Well I’m certainly not above low effort shitposting.
That legal/illegal thing is going to be tricky to figure out. What’s illegal exactly in a global federated social network? Whose law applies?
The instance’s hosting country’s law applies to the instance and the communities it hosts.
Displaying illegal content from the fediverse is fine?
Its a bit complicated. EFF has a good post from a US perspective https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/12/user-generated-content-and-fediverse-legal-primer . My understanding for US instances (and IANAL), is that if you have a TOS banning illegal content, register for a DMCA agent, and remove illegal content in a reasonably fast timeframe when you have knowledge of it, and ban repeat offenders, you should be okay.
I remember cackling at the narwhal nonsense ~15 years ago. Definitely makes me feel old thinking back to those days.
do you remember when they tried to make Millhouse a meme
I do say everything’s coming up Milhouse sometimes.
Wasn’t Millhouse was a meme before reddit was a thing? Pretty sure I saw Millhouse memes on 4chan back in the day.
Definitely from the 4chan way-back.
Damn, we’re already gatekeeping in here? Nice.
…nice
Nice
69
nice
It really is fascinating though, having a front row seat to what really is a massive tectonic shift in the history of the internet. Real curious to see how this all plays out. I’ve been online since the early 90’s so I’ve seen tons come and go: AOL, yahoo, slashdot, livejournal, myspace, digg, etc, and this one feels different for some reason, but maybe its just me.
I think it feels different because it’s not website B rolling in as a replacement for website A. It’s an entire new system for social media, so the way you understand and use it has to shift a bit. I find it exciting, a lot more than if we just shifted to a generic centralised reddit alternative.
This is what web 3.0 is about.
Not crypto, but decentralization.
Web 1: fragmentation Web 2: centralizatiom Web 3: decentralization Web 4: quantum entanglement Web 5: …
That’s crazy, we shouldn’t even allow anyone here unless they had at least 1,000 karma on Reddit.
It really is fascinating though, having a front row seat to what really is a massive tectonic shift in the history of the internet. Real curious to see how this all plays out. I’ve been online since the early 90’s so I’ve seen tons come and go: AOL, yahoo, slashdot, livejournal, myspace, digg, etc, and this one feels different for some reason, but maybe its just me.
Are you sure you liked Reddit?
This has been my internal dialog for a while now.
I hated reddit and everybody who used it
I get what you’re saying, but communities that spend time together will form their inside jokes, their way of doing things, etc. If you don’t like it you don’t have to participate. I say this with the upmost respect, but you need to get over yourself. Nobody is forcing you into a community.
totes agree on that ish
the dumb shit is what makes it feel like a community or friends getting together. if its not that its a college message board for assignments
yeah, it’s almost a bit intimidating to post here now the fun has settled. you have to think of a whole thought about a somewhat serious topic and sometimes that’s just…ugh
ya that hype will die down too
im totally a filthy casual and get the dislike but if lemmy survives and thrives, it will be with the help of shitposters
not everything has to be serious
Thank god. I enjoyed using reddit because I used to shitpost irl and have had to tone it down with work so I need an outlet somewhere…
The relationship advice threads were the weirdest. Someone would post a question like “my wife is sleeping over at her male coworkers place a lot and stopped coming home, should I be worried” and all the answers would be saying they’re just jealous and too controlling.
You and I must have been in opposite threads there. Because it was weird, but in the opposite way you’re describing.
Once saw one where I guy’s wife let her sister something close to 1% of their savings because both the sister and her partner had been laid off in one month. The guy went ballistic and move everything out of their joint accounts into ones under his name only, and gave her a strict allowance. People on reddit were telling him that’s nowhere enough, he should apparently divorce her right away, and maybe sue her.
They were also convinced that because of this one short term loan the SIL and BIL were now going to think he’s a sucker, and they’d move in.
It was weird. Those places often get weird though because people in healthy relationships, or single but happy about it, just don’t show up. So you just gave a cycle of people unhappy with their personal relationships goading other equally unhappy people.
So you’re saying we should encourage people to not comment and participate because you personally don’t enjoy something?
I know I’m being a bit over the top with the wording there but lets really think about it for a moment. Participation is engagement. And if we want Lemmy and by extension Lemmy.World to grow its what we need.
I upvoted you. Its a valid discussion to have. I just personally don’t think its something we should be worried about in general.
Let Lemmy grow. Growth and low effort pun threads is not what killed reddit. Corporate interference and shit stirring controversy spewing algorithms in the name of “user engagement” is what drove reddit down the drain.
This right here. Puns aren’t what was bad, it was the endless doomscrolling habit and continuous outrage going on that was. All the Rexxitors are going to see a serious uptick in their mental health. The puns were a coping mechanism, I think here that defensive reaction will be minimized.
No the endlessly repetitive puns were bad. They weren’t the only things, but they were absolutely bad.
Exactly. Like, I get that people want to have fun and all and I’m all for it even if it’s not my thing, but any relevant discussion was constantly drowned out by the pun chains and copypasted shit to the point that it was fairly obviously often just bots, but as long as a few people have their fun fuck the discussion right? Right… but I/you/we gotta be less cynical, as was said above the lemmy algo is apparently better with this stuff. So I’m at least going to try to be a little hopeful.
Yea the main reason I hated it was because I had to fuckin dig through a thread if I wanted to find a serious comment about whatever was posted. It wasn’t so much that low effort puns and shit were common, it was that they drowned almost everything else out in a lot of subs. Like even /r/science was turning into a memefest at the end.
I guess we’ll see how things develope here
exactly
you have my updootI jest. Ultimately without some sort of mechanic that disincentivizes noisy, low-effort joke comments there’s not going to be some sort of magical cultural shift. I’m just arriving, but from what I’m seeing Lemmy doesn’t have any sort of design that will skew comments towards actual discussion and away from jokes/noise in any meaningful way.
The way it is right now, we don’t have total “karma”, which I imagine helps to at least suppress the purely karma-farming spam. That said, there’s no real reason to think it won’t be added here eventually.
I hope it doesn’t, better without karma, it shouldn’t be competitive really
Never really got the point of Karma to begin with. All it really does is measure how well you match the tone of any particular echo chamber.
If I recall, a minimum karma was used by some mod bots as a gatekeep of sorts on more official subreddits. But even then I don’t think it was more than to deter very new accounts.
Deterring very new accounts is still a useful thing to do.
A lot of posts on my country’s COVID sub were removed by the bot with an account too new message, and it was only set to about one week. It doesn’t really slow down new users but it cuts off a lot of spam bots.
Although lately on reddit I’ve been seeing a lot of repost bots, and it seems their strategy as of late is to make a whole bunch of accounts at once, then sit on them for a few months before they start using them for doing their spamming/reposting. So the minimum account age was easily being circumvented.
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that’s really smart – but at the same time i’m horribly curious
I am still learning Lemmy, but I agree with you from what I am seeing. There is no “karma farming” here right? So the motivation is mostly people who want to engage?
There’s no total karma for a user yet, yes. So the perverse incentive to make number go up at all costs isn’t quite as wild as it is in Reddit.
As I wander around Lemmy more I’m also noticing that there’s a lot of opportunity for instances to have their own subcultures, which goes against the “It doesn’t matter which Lemmy instance you use” advice I’ve seen in a couple places. It definitely seems prudent to choose an instance that has an admin team and/or a theme you like, because instance-local content is going to be the easiest to find. The instance I chose is decently small and chill, but I’ve seen some other instances with a big focus on memes. To each their own!
I agree with you to an extent, but I have noticed on my instance it is heavily populated with outside instances so hopefully as this grows that subculture part will not be as much of a concern and more a fun “extra bonus” if you will of your favored instance and we can still unite under our favorite “common communities."
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But you could filter out comments containing only “this” or variations with exclamations points and such
Yeah, I was thinking of having some sort of feature that pre-builds thread topics in a post (humor, discussion, cross-searching) where users can put there comments in depending on what it is they’re going for.
I’m also eyeballing Tildes as a Reddit alternative, and their dev has an interesting approach to increasing signal-to-noise ratio. They don’t have downvotes, but they have labels that affect how comments are sorted, with the
jokeandnoiselabels moving comments down in the sort by a pretty significant amount.Tildes developer has openly said they don’t intend for it be a replacement for reddit, and that kinda is what makes me come here instead.
If they aren’t open to the idea, it will never happen.
Not saying they should open the floodgates either, it’s mainly that the use cases and end goal for Tildes vs Lemmy are completely different
That sounds like it could work pretty well, you could even just add it on to other comment sort styles. You don’t need to necessarily remove downvotes if you really want them in specific instances.
Doesn’t Slashdot kind of work like that?
This comment has been modded +1 (Informative).
Agreed. I think for now it’s up to each community owner to set the expectations for their community and for the mods to enforce it. And so like Twitter…the quality of your feed will be dictated by whom you follow or in Lemmy’s case which communities you join.
I’m sorry… but the pun threads are legendary. I actually hope they at the very least, continue.
It always puts a smile on my face.
…and my axe!
am i doing this right?
And the name of that axe was …
Albert AxEinstein
Take my upvote! And my !silver
This is the way
This guy axes.
That’s what she said! B)
ah, the ol’ lemmy-fiddy!
I also choose this guy’s dead lemmy-fiddy
Hold my broken hands, I’m going in!
GUH
I loved the joke threads. People continuing a reference or pun or joke was just a harmless, fun time.
And don’t forget about the song threads!
That’s your opinion and you’re welcome to it, but nothing will kill adoption rates harder than doing the whole early Mastodon thing of “you should change how you behave here”
I believe the response you’re looking for is “Well that’s, like, your opinion… man”
spoiler
sorry, couldn’t resist
Should’ve thought of that one myself, nice
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Unfortunately it’s just something I think we’re going to have to deal with no matter where you go. Even forums with higher quality users still have lame jokes and puns thrown around.
As a Rexxitor, I second this entirely.
I also choose this guy’s inside joke!
I would, but I broke both my arms.
sigh unzips
Actual unzipper
Call the sexorcist!
For me, that was part of the charm.
I could still find the information I needed when it was a serious query, and I could still find sound and sensitive viewpoints on many topics. But, opening a horrible post just to see a horribly distasteful comment as the first response just kept reminding me not to take life so seriously.
I’m fine with a horribly distasteful comment, but for the love of God make it a unique horribly distasteful comment.
I also pick this guys dead wife
Same. I like it, but it belongs in more shitposty communities IMO. I like a small percentage of my feed to be shitposts, and when I dig into it it’s just people repeating twists on the same stupid jokes.
Sometimes it’s actually clever, a lot of the time it’s just people wanting reassurance they belong.
It’s annoying when it overflows and floods everywhere with the exact same joke (like Google en passant). In r/anarchychess they were constantly workshopping new jokes, because it definitely got old
Yeah, and you can just fold the first comment in the chain and the whole chain disappears as well, so it’s not like it’s that much in the way either.
@bizzwell some subreddits did have some dedicated flairs which required everyone to be serious (at the cost of being banned) - but this required the OP to deliberately think about posting the stuff under the right flair.
Maybe this could be also easily enforced here by asking people to append
[]at the beginning of each relevant post, on the title or content?
Lemmy sorts comments differently from reddit. Lemmy’s documentation page about their algorithm describes reddit’s algorithm as one that,
rewards comments that are repetitive and spammy.
It’s an issue the developers claim to have a solution for.
I have no problem with jokes and comment chains. People should have their fun. But, I deleted my reddit account in frustration years ago. Reddit ranks the jokes higher than relevant discussion.
I’m cautiously optimistic. Lemmy is likely to be less prone to this particular problem.
Wow, that’s a clever little algorithm. It feels like it could work better.
Reddit’s big problem (among many) was you had to get in early on a thread to contribute. Otherwise you could be so far at the bottom you might as well have sent your reply to the bit bucket.
lemmy’s algo seems in theory to work better, but we’ll only know when the userbase here gets large enough.
On reddit, once a thread got past 300+ comments, the only way to get any views on your comment was to post it as a nested comment in a top-level comment.
lol, I realized the same thing and gamed that broken system more than once.
most power users realised that, i think. and that’s what led to the pun chains.
I feel like there is a potential but minor problem with Lemmy’s algorithm. It favors new comments but what if the post itself is asking a question with a definitive answer? The best answers might get buried by side discussion as time goes on.
I think as time goes on, I’d assume the recency boost would subside and the upvotes for the definitive answers should float back to the top.
Also, length is probably favoured as well, since so many top content isn’t just 3 words.
