this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2023
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Now Lemmy Explain: Simple Explanation for Complex Topics

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Locked for now. Will reopen if there is interest.

Inspired by r/eli5 and Casually Explained.

Now Lemmy Explain: Starting the "Now Lemmy Explain" community.

I've always felt like the name "Explain Like I'm 5" is patronizing (yes, I know, it's from an Office joke). I want to see a community that's better and more entertaining to read than how it was on reddit.

Now Lemmy Explain: The Rules:

  1. All post title must start with "Now Lemmy Explain: "
  2. All topics are allowed (within reason) but try to avoid ones that will start a flame war.
  3. Keep your explanation concise and entertaining. Remember though, comedy is subjective.
  4. Be excellent to one another, and have fun.
  5. If you see someone else do a great job explaining a particular topic, you are encouraged to cross-post it here, but be sure to credit the original poster for their contributions.

founded 1 year ago
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MargotRobbie
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Now Lemmy Explain Further: Why? (self.nowlemmyexplain)
submitted 1 year ago by MargotRobbie to c/nowlemmyexplain
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Modified from what I've posted on our partners at No Stupid Questions:

I've felt that /r/eli5 was some of the best content in the Old Country, but somewhere along the way, it lost the fun aspect it once had. Everything there is so sanitized that it no longer has the feeling of community anymore.

In the age of large language models, getting a simplified summary of a complex idea is pretty much just a copypaste away, and I don't really see the need of having a place for what ELI5 currently is when it can be automated away, but I'm willing to admit that I may be wrong.

Now, the specific issues I have with ELI5 on reddit is that the mods there seem to make and enforce the rules arbitrarily and without any rationale, which just led to serious mod abuse. For example:

  • Your answer can't be too short, that's too low effort.
  • Your answer can't be too long, that's too specific.
  • Your answer can't be for something someone asked before.
  • Your answer can't be how you literally explain things to a real 5-year-old, despite that being the very name of the subreddit.

Just ridiculous. And I think we can all do better than that.

My ultimate goal would be having a place for people to explain things that would not be possible for machines, it should be entertaining to read as you learn, instead of making your eyes glaze over, because first and foremost, on Lemmy, we are rebuilding a place specifically for people to get engaged and inspired by each other, because that's what a community is.

(Hatefulness would NOT be tolerated, of course.)

There's overlap between our partners at "No Stupid Question" and "Now Lemmy Explain", of course, but I think the best way to explain it (or, Now Lemmy Explain: ) is that NSQ focuses on getting any answer to simple questions, while NLE focuses on getting simple answers to any question.

I'm mostly expecting that if this works out, NLE will probably be the more casual counterpart to NSQ on lemmy.world, which would be the reverse of the situation on reddit.

So, if you have any topic you'd like to have explained, please make a post there, and we'll all try our best to explain.

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[–] ConTheLibrarian 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

That's not really how this kind of community works though. I think you are in the minority as far as your engagement style cuz I personally never subbed to ELI5/etc despite commenting regularly.

The way I engaged ELI5/NSQ/OOL/ETC was via all/rising. If a question came up that interested me or I knew the answer to than I'd engage. From there if there wasn't already lots of comments or a top answer I might give my 2 cents.

Communities like this function more like a staple in that people know they're the correct place to ask certain types of questions. In the short term what we need is people to upvote questions (and for lemmy.world to successfully update so we get some proper sorting options) so they get visibility and as answers flow in people will ask more questions.

[–] MargotRobbie 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You may be right, but I've pretty much never actively tried to engage in the defaults, I was always more of the "specific niche hobby" type, but I firmly believe that having good, original content is what will make people stay and draw more good people to this place, so that's my focus right now.

I do admit that I was in the minority of reddit users though.

[–] ConTheLibrarian 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I actually blocked the defaults... but reddit only lets you block 100 subreddits so I used RES to filter out the rest I didn't like. (Mostly crypto bs).

IMO these kind of communities grow in tandem with the greater community. All we can do is upvote questions and wait for Lemmy Explain to become a known entity.

[–] MargotRobbie 2 points 1 year ago

Guess we'll have to settle for adding "Now Lemmy Explain" to our Lemmy vocabulary for now. :)