tl;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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At times I’d joke to myself that I could predict what the upvoted comments would be.
That was no joke. It was a regular occurrence.
Reddit’s biggest strength was also it biggest draw back, its size.
If you came across a thread that was more than 30 minutes old, there was little point in making a longish, thoughtful and nuanced response as it would be burred at on page 4 and lucky to be seen by anyone. Let alone read by someone who would take it on board and reply to any points you made in a meaningful way.
The main way to gain any visibility was to reply to one of the top 3 or 4 comments, which often lead to a large number of actually replies that were correcting a minor error of fact in the comment, rather than addressing the point of the comment.
The response to this by some people was to hang out in r/new and post comments in the fresh posts in the hope of getting some visibility that way. The down side was there was still little point in spending 5-10 minutes (or more) writing a long form post as two things would usually happen.
1: The post would gain no traction, get lost in the flood of new posts and never be seen on the main tabs, so your reply would be unread.
2: The post would gain traction but in the 10 minutes you were writing a decent reply, the flood of the same jokes and one liners have already drowned out any real discussion.
Whether you cared about Karma or not, the sheer volume of comments and votes drove those that did to endlessly spam the same responses over and over again.It is a great example that at some level humans on mass are no better than the pigeons B F Skinner placed in his boxes endlessly hammering away at the button in the hope that this time a treat will pop out.
Now, I assume, many of us here have had a similar experience. While we may not have liked it, conditioning like that is really hard to break. Personally, I am willing to admit that my first thought was to hit add comment after only writing the first line of my response.
The only thing that is harder than forming a habit is breaking one that is maladaptive and not serving you well.
Seriously. Every top comment is some dumb doom and gloom, one-sentence hot take. Or at least super cynical.
Like just yesterday some post mentioned a YouTube Music strike, and the top comment was “People use YouTube Music?” What a waste of comment space. Yes, people use it, obviously.
And that is almost every thread. Just some idiot making some idiot comment. Who the hell up votes shit like that? It’s still the top comment and has even more upvotes now.
I really hate seeing hacker news all over lemmy. Stop telling me to go there. Stop telling me they’re better than me. If you like another site so much, use it. You will like me less.
OP if you want better comments, try asking better questions.
You can certainly respond in a less hostile manner.
I’m not telling anyone to go to Hackernews. I’m citing an example of another community where there is a higher bar for substantive content, much like how I cited Reddit as an example of what we shouldn’t strive for.
Death to any comment that’s anything only communicating “I enjoyed this”.
“lol” “This made me laugh so much that I xyz!!” “This is perfect!” All useless. Upvote and move on.
If I couple copy paste a comment to any random parent comment and it still makes some sense, it’s a bad comment.
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