this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
747 points (97.6% liked)

Asklemmy

43989 readers
1406 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy ๐Ÿ”

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. 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.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

As a long time Reddit user, there's something about Lemmy and the fediverse that feels really refreshing and new. I think it has to do with a few things...

  1. People are more respectful of each other and interested in discussion and being social.
  2. Less trolls (users are probably older?)
  3. Due to it not being absolutely huge, I feel like people will actually see my posts and comments instead of being lost in a sea of content. I suppose once Lemmy grows this will change, however the cool thing about the fediverse are the new servers. So you can stick to the server when you want smaller community discussion and go to "all" when you want more populated threads.
  4. The clean UI feels refreshing and clean, almost like the early internet.

What have you noticed? Do you find it refreshing too?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

I both love and hate the upvote/downvote mechanic. I like seeing quality posts bubble to the top, I also like seeing the general consensus of lurkers, but I don't like circlejerk posts or that downvoted comments get dogpiled on, which often both result in a toxic, self-righteous flame war. And the solution is obviously not deleting the downvoted comments, because then you're just censoring unpopular opinions.

I think something worth trying would be not visually distinguishing between posts with no votes and posts with more negative than positive votes. I think an instance could enforce this on their own communities with only positive results.

The only counter argument is that dishonest arguments can't be "buried" by downvotes (hidden behind a "[show]" button). Another strategy would be to allow burying, but somehow throttle the responses to them; maybe limit the comment depth, or limit the number of responses per user, or allow users to flag flame war threads as "unproductive" which at some point would block further responses.

To be clear, I don't think the lemmy "spec" should adopt any of these measures, I think these regulations should be decided by instance/community mods, and up to the users to regulate and provide feedback on.