this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
272 points (90.7% liked)
Asklemmy
43958 readers
1558 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
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
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I really don't understand the hostility towards nerd/tech oriented communities. Every time an online community dares to be on the nerdy side you get people loudly proclaiming how that's the worst thing ever, and that we need to expand until every Tom, Dick and Harry has a user acount.
Usually, when a site is adopted by the general public, the quality of the posted content goes down the toilet. Bots, shills and intrusive advertising follows, and the site dies a slow death. Reddit's r/all was a museum of ragebait, reposts and celebrity gossip, and I certainly don't want Lemmy to do an enshittification speedrun because some users refuse to learn how the fediverse functions.
I do not have a problem with the nerd/tech bubble being on Lemmy and I am not hostile towards them. I have a problem with them being the ONLY community able to participate because how complicated some aspects of this platform are. Why would Lemmy have to be ONLY "on the nerdy side". Different people with different interests can coexist because you can create whatever community you want and they can also decide what content they want to see or not. Who are you talking about when you say "We". It's not like you or the tech community owns the feediverse. They might host most of the servers because guess what tech savvy people know how to do that but that's just part of the problem.
I strongly disagree with the whole idea of a site going down in quality when everyone uses it. There will be more bad content but only because there will be immensely more content in general which is the major benefit that Reddit had. "Bots, shills, ads" are a side effect of a site being popular and you can't have the one without the other. Reddit did not die a "slow death". Before the whole API things millions of people browsed Reddit everyday and created interesting content. If you don't like r/all the solution is obvious: Don't go there. Only visit the parts of the site that you are interested in. That's the whole concept of the home page. It has nothing to do with users refusing to learn but rather the site making it harder that it has to be.
The "complicated aspects" are the central idea of the platform as a whole. The concept of multiple servers united by a single protocol is not that hard, and any user not being able to grasp something as elementary as that would not make a good community member. Call me a snob, elitist, whatever. Lemmy is not a commercial project and has no YoY growth projections or sharholders demaning growth at all costs, and I would like it to remain so.