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Collectively, Lemmy has a substantive comment issue - Lemmy.world
lemmy.worldtl;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.
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