Most online communities have a low barrier of entry and effectively no user onboarding, and end up becoming chaotic messes where content is difficult to navigate. Obviously this is fine for more chatty communities, but is unfortunate in more serious and discussion-focused forums and for content archives. Even on Lemmy, there are communities where formatting rules are completely ignored[1]. This results from a combination of site design, moderation, and user respect for the community (three things notoriously bad on reddit-like sites, and well, most popular sites)
A couple of exceptions to the trend are forums which enforce a barrier of entry and quality control (unfortunately I can't recall any right now, but I would love to hear of some!) and some booru IBs. A booru site is an archive where users upload media without titles and tag it for easy searching. If a booru manages to enforce a decent quality of tagging (and there are mechanical ways to assist with this, such as tag aliases) then the site becomes a well-organized online content community.
Most boorus I've found allow NSFW content, so here are some work-safe examples:
- FindAfox (photos and videos of foxes)
- FIRST Robotics Competition Archive (unofficial)
- Safebooru (mostly anime drawings)
Note: feel welcome to list slow or 'dead' sites!
For the sake of discussion, can you give some examples of good design in the community? How does that contrast against other Lemmy instances?
Aggressive moderation of bigots removal of down votes and an incredible dedicated and diverse moderation team for starters.
It is for example the safest place for trans comrades on the entire internet from my experience.
I find downvotes important in maintaining signal to noise long term. If people downvote me, I take that as a signal that there's either something I don't know, or that I need to improve how I communicate the idea. I want a community where I can have a real conversation with people that both agree and disagree with me, not an echo chamber that only allows conforming views, nor a shit flinging free for all.
Nah downvotes are reactionary. If you disagree with someone you have to explain why.
And we love our emojis and have the best worst memes, don't we folks?
A couple of exceptions to the trend are forums which enforce a barrier of entry and quality control
Resetera
I agree with the boorus. Some of the best tagging systems and implementations in existence
