No, because a focus on quality would require defining quality and then curating the content through some kind of process that would not end up being ‘social media’.
Quality will never be defined by popularity, which is the entire focus of social apps.
Ie. the default lemmy sort “active” takes replies, upvotes, and downvotes as “activity” and promotes posts that get a lot of any of them. This tends to promote controversial content.
If you sort by top, its instead only based on upvotes and the sort promotes less divisive and controversial stuff and more “quality” stuff.
No, because a focus on quality would require defining quality and then curating the content through some kind of process that would not end up being ‘social media’.
Quality will never be defined by popularity, which is the entire focus of social apps.
But there are ways to better incentivse it.
Ie. the default lemmy sort “active” takes replies, upvotes, and downvotes as “activity” and promotes posts that get a lot of any of them. This tends to promote controversial content.
If you sort by top, its instead only based on upvotes and the sort promotes less divisive and controversial stuff and more “quality” stuff.
I wouldn’t say that upvotes always mean quality, they could also just indicate mass appeal while quality but niche content is hidden that way.
I never said they did. Just that they tended to be more correlated with quality than downvotes or replies.