It is objectively a lot more male than Reddit or other social media. Reddit has many issues, but lack of women is not one of them.
It is objectively a lot more male than Reddit or other social media. Reddit has many issues, but lack of women is not one of them.
That Lemmys’s not too different from Reddit.
Clickbait/ragebait gets upvoted to the top if it makes people feel good; hardly anyone even checks the source. Getting called out in the comments hardly affects it.
Niche content gets absolutely smothered by this, too, and the niche posters eventually give up.
These are structural problems Lemmy/Piefed software can improve, but that doesn’t seem to be the development priority :/.
I’d argue this is a larger issue of the Fediverse, too. Devs are unintentionally copying structural issues, prioritizing other things when unhealthy attention patterns could kill the whole system. Like it has for previous social media alternatives. Lemmy feels more and more like Voat to me, which has got me really worried.
What are your ideas?
I’ve been meaning to make git issues, but in a nutshell, one is “community taxononony”
Instead of being pigeon-holed into a single community, every community would be part of an inherited hierarchy, like a class system in programming. /c/thelastairbender might be part of /c/animation, or /c/television; perhaps both?
Organization would be mutual. Moderators of each have to approve to join and remain in the hierarchy, though the “initial structure” of the community could be set up by admins I suppose. The sub community inherits “global” rules from their parent communities, but can have their own rules as well.
And what’s the point of all this, you ask? Well, way I see it, Lemmy has a “niche” discoverability/attention issue, where big engaging communities like politics crowd out smaller niches. But being a sub community would show all its posts in the communities up the hierarchy as well, getting them the visibility of a “big” community while remaining in the niche. It would allow focused communities to exist, but users browsing bigger communities to see them as an appropriate topical thing. This aggregation is user configurable, of course, but I think it’s very important that this visibility be the default.
And in terms of programming, I think it would be feasible? Admittedly I don’t know the architecture, but it seems like it would fit with existing paradigms.
Another idea I have is a replica of Twitter’s “community notes” feature. Perhaps if a comment gets enough upvotes and is flagged by the comment writer as a “community correction,” and fits certain criteria (like being below a word count, maybe a certain percentage of upvotes being from the host instance), it’s automatically displayed below the original post’s title.
This would allow, for example, clickbait or questionable sources to be called out, or misleading titles to be clarified. Or perhaps the source of original reporting can be hyperlinked.
Theoretically this is a mod’s job, but I feel that:
Mods don’t want to be heavy-handed
They’re often overworked/short on time.
And frankly, let a lot of clickbait/ragebait posts slide anyway.
And for all of Twitter’s failures, this particular feature is a good idea.
Again, it ties into the idea of “attention control,” to try and give information hygiene a chance over people’s impulses.
Mind you, these are very rough ideas. They probably need to be peeled apart, but I do feel strongly about the gist of what they are trying to correct.
I think these are good ideas speaking broadly, but are quite extensive in terms of implementation and getting them right.
What do you mean by this part? That if I as a mod of television@piefed.social incorporated another community into this hierarchy they’d essentially be a feeder community and I’d effectively be a mod of that community?
You’d (as moderator of /c/television) have no moderation power over their community, but you would have full control over which of their submissions are visible in yours. You control default visibility within your community, but can’t take down their posts. They’d be subject to whatever the global rules of /c/television are (which are distict from “local” rules for /c/television), and if there’s some unresolvable dispute, the “subcommunity” could leave, or you could kick them out. Mutual consent is required.
Perhaps (to help small-community mods with sheer volume of moderation) “parent” communities could optionally moderate sub communities? But this wouldn’t be default. Ideally moderation permissions would be granular and configurable.
By this I just mean that, practically, instance admins should probably set up some default heirarchy for the most prominant subs, for an “initial” structure to their preference, and let mods work it out from there.
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