Asklemmy

Edit: Well, thanks for the gold kind stranger!

Growth for growths sake.

Not just at a platform level but at a community level too. Around 6 or 7 years ago I started to really notice people talking about growing their subreddits, making changes and tools designed to increase the subscriber count.

For what? There's nothing to gain.

The main subreddit I modded finally became impossible to moderate for quality when, despite our lack of "growth strategy", the influx of new users became too much for the communitys culture to persist and it slowly turned into a lowest-common-denominator topic-flavoured meme ghetto. And from the outside I saw many of my favourite subreddits fall to the same scenario.

So I would say, we should avoid or rethink the idea of growing lemmy for its own sake. Eternal September will come eventually, lets not rush it

Don't assume anyone replying to you disagrees. They can be on your side even if there are minor differences between what you said and what they said. If they repeated the exact same thought, there wouldn't be a point to replying at all.

This is 100% old-man energy, but I dipped back over to reddit after a week or so and man did I forget how many completely random acronyms get thrown around there... FW, TIL, ELI5, FWIW, IANAL...

Don't even get me started on ETA, which should mean "estimated time of arrival", but has instead been used to mean "edit to add", even though just putting EDIT means the same thing??

I see that kind of stuff a lot less here, and I'm assuming it's a mix of older audience and smaller user base, but so far it's been so much nicer actually understanding what everyone is saying here.

A few examples include s*x questions on askreddit, “this” comments, nolife powermods, jokes being more frequent than actual answers

All of these seem like inevitable consequences of human nature on this sort of platform.

Needlessly aggressive internet arguments and flame wars for no reason

Asking questions that are asked all the time in a sub or are already answered in the wiki. Not doing even basic searching for information before asking.

Always found reddit to be garbage, lots of pointless chained comments of adults trying to be quirky and funny.

A few that irk me (I think it's the grammar Nazi inside me):

Starting comments with "I mean" or "ngl" - it's completely unnecessary fluff

Mass typos - a typo/bad autocorrect here and there is expected, but when the title/comment is full of them I have to try real hard to understand what they're trying to say... spend a few seconds to proof read what you've typed!

The same regurgitated wit (if you can call it that) - you can almost predict the top comments before going into a thread

Being unable to have a serious discussion on serious topics - going into a news/science/political thread is painful; they're plagued with bitter, short tempered aggressive comments, and repeated misinformation they've heard from other Reddit armchair generals. Just do a little bit of research before stating a fact you've read from a stranger.

I really hope all the admins are able to keep repost bots down.

TIFU -insert sex story that oddly sounds like a scene out of a fantasy here-

This.

Restrict the API to each server? (just joking!) Perhaps we can try being more polite and kind towards each other. I feel that this is the case so far. I fear the moment that "mainstream" users find out about Lemmy!

Pretty obvious but just plain being rude to one another. I felt like I was stepping on eggshells every time I posted on reddit, like whatever I said was going to be given the least charitable interpretation possible. Let's be kind and polite to each other here

Meta drama communities.

A few examples include s*x questions on askreddit

Says sex questions on askreddit were a problem

Doesn't even write the word sex

Yeah, I don't think the sex questions were the problem, mate.

Questions that are answered in the sidebar or wiki should be deleted like in the old forum days. The entire content of some Subreddits was literally the same question being asked over and over again without new input.

Cross community censorship: For example on Reddit you wrote a comment in subreddit A (maybe even a negative one for that topic!) and then subreddits B, C and D permanently ban your account. If someone starts with that crap again they should be shunned.

Oh and verified users only communities, that sucked too.

It's not so much a dark pattern, but an emergent property of the upvote system: usually the first commenters tended to have an advantage and late good comments actually would never get enough exposure to float to the top.

Karma farmers would just sit at "new", spam comments and get visibility for joke and outrage comments.

The solution may be to randomly order comments below a certain threshold and/or within an upvote range.

Not having appropriate tools to detect and mod auto-generated or repetitive content submitted by companies trying to influence public opinion.

Mods having their own personal, perverted interpretation of the rules (or interpretation of your post)

No easy, transparent way to review their decisions.

It's important to be aware that any negative community tends to snowball to a ridiculous level. If you make an "I hate spinach" community, it pretty quickly becomes ridiculous and likely more serious than you intended.

Some negative communities can be important, but you have to actively combat this snowball tendency. And it's usually better to just avoid it altogether.

"Ladies of the lemmyverse, what's the sexiest sex you have ever sexed?"

Reddit started to feel extremely consumerist after the mid-2010s, which I always kind of assumed had to do with the general demographic of users largely being people having disposable income for the first time in their lives. It’s hard to describe exactly, but there was a general feeling of fandom around specific corporations that just felt weird to me. I’d like to see more distrust of corporations in general here.

Reddit also felt very Centrist to me, with discussion being this golden ideal. I have no time for discussions with people on the right pretending to argue in good faith and people eating that up.

Also, as someone who doesn’t know much about China or have much love for it, the Sinophobia in unrelated threads was weird, too.

So far most of these have stayed away from Lemmy, but I see some creeping up here and there. The communities here seem generally good at keeping them down, though.