First, I want to say how great it is to see success in a social media platform not owned by some giant cooperation. That said, right now we are at a turning point where we can still change the platform in major ways and I think we all have a shared interested in Lemmy becoming the best it could be.
Let’s face it, Reddit had many problems even before the API changes. The toxic herd mentality, over and under moderation at the same time, small posts getting drowned out by already big ones and so much more. As you probably are already aware of, social media can quickly end in filter bubbles, extremization and bringing out the worst of the human psyche. These are not problems simply fixed by better moderation. Rather, these are problems resulting from the engagement driven design of most platforms (Post controversial statement -> many comments -> Post gets delivered to more people -> even more engagement -> …) I want Lemmy to be a place that brings people together instead of dividing us apart.
Therefore, I wanna start a conversation on what design changes Lemmy should implement in the future to make sure the platform remains humane and everyone can engage in respectful conversations.
I think a good starting point are the recourses of the Center for Humane Technology, like their course on Foundations of Humane Technology
I’m looking forward to hearing your opinions and ideas on this :)
I think Lemmy being decentralized and not having user karma by design already gets a pretty good base. With the concerns of censorship, admin drama, and protecting marginalized groups, the rest has to come from your instance admins and moderators of communities you follow. With the nature of the platform, you can create toxic places but those are easily defederated and/or blocked.
We are definitely off to a good start :D Still there are starting to show problematic signs
In some news communities people are obviously upvoting news article based on nothing more than the headline. This creates an environment where only articles with polarizing headlines succeed, and a real discussion becomes impossible
How do you prevent that? I think that might simply be inherent of unrestricted news communities, not necessarily the platform itself. You can have a more restricted news community that disallows click bait or polarizing titles or only allow posts by approved users (or go further and lock to instance like beehaw).
I don’t have the perfect plan yet, but the way you show posts to users (ranking and interface) can have a huge impact on how users interact (think of “allow all cookies” but in a way that incentives the good in people)
One quite intrusive solution would be a popup asking you if you really read (or skimmed) the article before up/downvoting if you haven’t clicked the link yet. Something like:
Do you really wanna vote based on the heading alone? Take me to the article Yes, let me vote
I’m not really sure if that’ll work, but maybe the OP can post a description/summary of the keypoints in the news as an alt-text?
That’s a good idea that I’d really like that to be a norm in news communities.
We are definitely off to a good start :D Still there are starting to show problematic signs
In some news communities people are obviously upvoting news article based on nothing more than the headline. This creates an environment where only articles with polarizing headlines succeed, and a real discussion becomes impossible
So a straightforward one to get started, and one already in the GitHub issues:
- Allow the feed to be less viral: the “value” of posts from smaller more niche communities will be weighed against the size/popularity of its community rather than all of your feed. Can even pin this weighting by the size of the community at the time of the posts creation.
Combined with allowing multi-communities defined by the user so that various communities can be grouped together, any user should find it pretty easy to avoid just seeing the big viral posts. And, AFAIK, this would be something Reddit never did??
I think that’s one great step 👍 It’s always been a frustrating experience asking for help (maybe with a PC problem) and either getting deleted by mods or getting no answer at all
undefined> various communities can be grouped together, any user should find it pretty easy to avoid just seeing the big viral posts. And, AFAIK, this would be something Reddit never did??
Reddit has this feature, it’s called multireddits.
I wasn’t clear on that it seems … the novelty I was referring to was weighting posts by their communities of origin. In combination with “multi-lemmy-communities” (which wouldn’t be novel), I’d imagine you’d get a rather powerful and interesting control over your feed.
Ah, I see how that could make a difference 👍 I’m wondering wich sorting algorithm should be used by default.
When sorting by best I come across post I’ve already seen after about 15 minutes. (But maybe that’s more of a feature than a bug; 15 minutes per day is probably just the right and healthy amount of Lemmy 😅)
Yeah, you’re right. I used them often
Yea, multi-lemmy-communities are on the devs’ radar (and have been for a while I think?). But they weren’t the main thing I was talking about as I’d hope that they will come at some point … it was combining them with some equalising weighting (as I said in my sibling response to the same post above).
That makes sense. On Reddit the small communities were always drowned out when using multireddits (worst when sorting by best of the month)
Combined with allowing multi-communities defined by the user so that various communities can be grouped together
These multi-communities should also be followable and shareable by others, kinda like how Matrix Spaces work!
I have an idea for news communities:
When a post is just a link to an article (so no other context) you should be required to click on the link before voting, to incentive users to at least skim the article. Of course posts would get less votes (wich needs to be taken into account when ranking) but voting on headlines alone is useless and bad for informed discussions.
This might sound funny or weird; - Can we consider to implement The Kaizen Philosophy into this platform? I am all taking this seriously. The overall quality of the software & hardware products that we utilize could significantly improve - continuously over time.
I have no experience in software development but believe it could work, based on what the project is.
Here are some short steps, that can be followed through for all things in life;
- Why is this step important?
- What positive value am I adding by doing so?
- Where should I do it?
- When should I do it?
- Are there any other people involved?
- Is it being done correctly?
- How often must I do it?
The PDCA - Cycle;
- Plan - 7 Question System
- Do
- Verify
- Act
Above is based on science and it’s implemented on many industries past few decades. Now it’s content or checklist that the Lemmy Communities could implement, should be based on the general consensus here. See above as an template.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. It’s fun we are at a stage in which we can define what we want this community to be like not just technologically but as people. Also note this can be done on an instance by instance basis, too.
I think the human component is even more important than the technical. The inventor of the facebook like button kind of regrets his invention. He didn’t forsee all the bad consequences (people being excluded by getting few likes and people doing everything (even dangerous things) for likes and validation)
Maybe controversial …
Enable us to follow people as on microblogging platforms like masto. A person, if they’re open, has varied opinions and interests. Plus, as there id a personal relationship, a posture of respect is natural. It isn’t hard to get a varied feed once you follow enough people. Combine that with subscribing to communities, and the cross-pollination and you should naturally get a more varied diet of posts.
If you don’t want to wait for that feature in Lemmy, you can interact with Lemmy users and communities on other AP speaking platforms. Kbin seems to do this in an all in one approach, but you can easily follow Lemmy users in Masto too. I’ve been splitting between Lemmy for communities and Masto for people so far.
That’s a great idea, but I don’t know if it fits this platform. What makes Lemmy (and Reddit) great for me is that I can follow specific communities (specific video games, movies, kinks…)
Well there’s no reason we can’t have both. Kbin is experimenting with this by providing two separate interfaces, and seems to be working well. Other platforms kinda mix things up too like Facebook, friendica and hubzilla (last two being on the fediverse though not particularly popular).
Tbh, I do find the micro blogging interface in Kbin to be very confusing. It almost feels like two sites smashed into one.
Paste the Lemmy username into your Mastodon search bar, you can follow them there.
https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@[email protected]
I think it will only start syncing all their new posts and comments once you follow them
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That sounds like some authoritarian lunacy. No thanks.
