Edit: Well, thanks for the gold kind stranger!
Asklemmy
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
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If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
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Growth for growths sake.
Not just at a platform level but at a community level too. Around 6 or 7 years ago I started to really notice people talking about growing their subreddits, making changes and tools designed to increase the subscriber count.
For what? There's nothing to gain.
The main subreddit I modded finally became impossible to moderate for quality when, despite our lack of "growth strategy", the influx of new users became too much for the communitys culture to persist and it slowly turned into a lowest-common-denominator topic-flavoured meme ghetto. And from the outside I saw many of my favourite subreddits fall to the same scenario.
So I would say, we should avoid or rethink the idea of growing lemmy for its own sake. Eternal September will come eventually, lets not rush it
Don't assume anyone replying to you disagrees. They can be on your side even if there are minor differences between what you said and what they said. If they repeated the exact same thought, there wouldn't be a point to replying at all.
A few examples include s*x questions on askreddit, βthisβ comments, nolife powermods, jokes being more frequent than actual answers
All of these seem like inevitable consequences of human nature on this sort of platform.
I didn't mind the jokes. What I minded was people upvoting the more than the useful responses so you had to scroll to find them. Don't upvote low effort jokes, people.
This is 100% old-man energy, but I dipped back over to reddit after a week or so and man did I forget how many completely random acronyms get thrown around there... FW, TIL, ELI5, FWIW, IANAL...
Don't even get me started on ETA, which should mean "estimated time of arrival", but has instead been used to mean "edit to add", even though just putting EDIT means the same thing??
I see that kind of stuff a lot less here, and I'm assuming it's a mix of older audience and smaller user base, but so far it's been so much nicer actually understanding what everyone is saying here.
Needlessly aggressive internet arguments and flame wars for no reason
I've already run into multiple people on Lemmy who do what I call the Reddit Special:
- See an opinion you don't like
- Intentionally misinterpret the point to mean something else and attack that
- Support your opinion by arguing backwards from your conclusion
- Ignore all counterarguments when possible, return to step 2 when not
- Try to "win" with pithy mic-drop bon mots at the end of your comment
- Mask upset feelings by trotting out overly slangy 2am Chili style dismissals
For example a conversation I have actually had more than once on Reddit:
Person 1 - "I hate the designated hitter in baseball, it was more fun before, without it"
Person 2 - "Why are you in love with the old days so much? Do you want segregation back too?"
Person 1 - "Are you crazy? I just like it when pitchers bat"
Person 2 - "Lol. Clearly you have issues with being called out on your bigotry"
Person 1 - "You're not listening, I said I like baseball better when pitchers bat"
Persot 2 - "lmaoooo I don't listen to racists"
Always found reddit to be garbage, lots of pointless chained comments of adults trying to be quirky and funny.
Asking questions that are asked all the time in a sub or are already answered in the wiki. Not doing even basic searching for information before asking.
The only benefit to asking questions multiple times is that newer, possibly better solutions are recommended. I searched Reddit often for my questions and some posts worded questions better than others and some posts had wayyy better answers than others. People donβt go search previously asked questions so they can answer them. So I agree with you because it gets annoying after a time, but there is a benefit to having repeated questions asked. Itβs difficult finding a balance for it.
TIFU -insert sex story that oddly sounds like a scene out of a fantasy here-
A few examples include s*x questions on askreddit
Says sex questions on askreddit were a problem
Doesn't even write the word sex
Yeah, I don't think the sex questions were the problem, mate.
Restrict the API to each server? (just joking!) Perhaps we can try being more polite and kind towards each other. I feel that this is the case so far. I fear the moment that "mainstream" users find out about Lemmy!
Pretty obvious but just plain being rude to one another. I felt like I was stepping on eggshells every time I posted on reddit, like whatever I said was going to be given the least charitable interpretation possible. Let's be kind and polite to each other here
Questions that are answered in the sidebar or wiki should be deleted like in the old forum days. The entire content of some Subreddits was literally the same question being asked over and over again without new input.
Cross community censorship: For example on Reddit you wrote a comment in subreddit A (maybe even a negative one for that topic!) and then subreddits B, C and D permanently ban your account. If someone starts with that crap again they should be shunned.
Oh and verified users only communities, that sucked too.
It's not so much a dark pattern, but an emergent property of the upvote system: usually the first commenters tended to have an advantage and late good comments actually would never get enough exposure to float to the top.
Karma farmers would just sit at "new", spam comments and get visibility for joke and outrage comments.
The solution may be to randomly order comments below a certain threshold and/or within an upvote range.
Mods having their own personal, perverted interpretation of the rules (or interpretation of your post)
No easy, transparent way to review their decisions.
"Ladies of the lemmyverse, what's the sexiest sex you have ever sexed?"
Not having appropriate tools to detect and mod auto-generated or repetitive content submitted by companies trying to influence public opinion.
Reddit started to feel extremely consumerist after the mid-2010s, which I always kind of assumed had to do with the general demographic of users largely being people having disposable income for the first time in their lives. Itβs hard to describe exactly, but there was a general feeling of fandom around specific corporations that just felt weird to me. Iβd like to see more distrust of corporations in general here.
Reddit also felt very Centrist to me, with discussion being this golden ideal. I have no time for discussions with people on the right pretending to argue in good faith and people eating that up.
Also, as someone who doesnβt know much about China or have much love for it, the Sinophobia in unrelated threads was weird, too.
So far most of these have stayed away from Lemmy, but I see some creeping up here and there. The communities here seem generally good at keeping them down, though.
It's important to be aware that any negative community tends to snowball to a ridiculous level. If you make an "I hate spinach" community, it pretty quickly becomes ridiculous and likely more serious than you intended.
Some negative communities can be important, but you have to actively combat this snowball tendency. And it's usually better to just avoid it altogether.