Actual Discussion
Are you tired of going into controversial threads and having people not discuss things, circlejerking, or using emotional responses in place of logic? Us too.
Welcome to Actual Discussion!
DO:
- Be civil. This doesn't mean you shouldn't challenge people, just don't be a dick.
- Upvote interesting or well-articulated points, even if you may not agree.
- Be prepared to back up any claims you make with an unbiased source.
- Be willing to be wrong and append your initial post to show a changed view.
- Admit when you are incorrect or spoke poorly. Upvote when you see others correct themselves or change their mind.
- Feel free to be a "Devil's Advocate". You do not have to believe either side of an issue in order to generate solid points.
- Discuss hot-button issues.
- Add humour, and be creative! Dry writing isn't super fun to read or discuss.
DO NOT:
- Call people names or label people. We fight ideas, not people here.
- Ask for sources, and then not respond to the person providing them.
- Mindlessly downvote people you disagree with. We only downvote people that do not add to the discussion.
- Be a bot, spam, or engage in self-promotion.
- Duplicate posts from within the last month unless new information is surfaced on the topic.
- Strawman.
- Expect that personal experience or morals are a substitute for proof.
- Exaggerate. Not everything is a genocide, and not everyone slightly to the right of you is a Nazi.
- Copy an entire article in your post body. It's just messy. Link to it and maybe summarize if needed.
For more casual conversation instead of competitive ranked conversation, try: [email protected]
Needs more posts.
I don't see as many insightful comments as I did on Reddit, but that's just a function of the number of comments/users.
I like that there are enough posts to keep me entertained.
There's a lot of smart people here, but I feel you're correct. There's no need for smart people to show themselves when everybody agrees with them or they're afraid to give a dissenting opinion.
It feels like we're all knowledge workers. I fit into the middle aged, D&D playing, politically left, software developing dad demographic. It feels like most of the posters here check many of the same boxes.
As someone who is not, boy does it get annoying hearing shit like "just change jobs and you'll get a big raise!"
Sorry for that, the software people tend to forget they live in a very comfortable bubble.
The funniest thing is that if people actually decided to "learn to code" as the common mantra goes, software types will be the first hurt as a surplus of labour in their field presses down salaries.
That already happened, at least where I live. I make only slightly less than an entry level dev as a tradesman at a grocery store. And all the dev jobs are in Vancouver where the cost of living is about 30% higher. But they're not making 30% more than I am.
My biggest issue with Lemmy so far is that it feels like we've got an awful lot of lurkers, and whilst that's fine I do struggle with the idea that the place lacks content, whilst also having a relatively quiet userbase.
It puts a lot of strain on a few people to bring the content. If those people don't bring it, it can be pretty quiet, especially on the smaller communities.
I sort of agree, however I'd much prefer fewer, higher quality or actually helpful comments over Reddit's abundance of absolutely useless comments from people looking to get some quick karma.
If you remove the empty comments from a given post on Reddit I guarantee it'd look a lot more desolate.
I mostly lurk, but if I don't have something to say I just don't say it, rather than throw in some random quote, reference or quip to try and get some votes.
I think that was the case on Reddit too. It was just less pronounced because of the sheer amount of people.
The conclusion is the same though, we need more people if we want the Reddit-like experience we are used to.
But as Reddit grew, a sort of eternal September happened where it lost the 'magic' and became ever more like regular crappy social media. I'm not sure how to solve this.
In my opinion, it starts with contributing to good communities!
I was never a fan of content for the sake of content or the various numbers games that get played. I wouldn't have a clue about the actual statistics, but my perception is that postings and comments are generally higher quality than on Reddit.
For the most part I agree, but I also have a small counterpoint. That means those of us that actually produce content have a higher chance of it being seen as well.
Strong agree. Hopefully it will improve with the next wave of migration for Reddit, but indeed sometimes it is a bit overwhelming.
There’s a lot of things here I didn’t realize Reddit had lost over the years. A big one is how comments don’t get lost in the deluge of a popular post, and the top comments aren’t low effort jokes that weren’t funny on the last 3 posts. There’s also a joy in finding new communities (like this one!), that fades once you’re adding the thousandth x-porn or meme sub.
Although content was pretty slim at the start, over the past month or two I’ve had moments where I didn’t realize I was on Lemmy instead of Reddit or vice versa. (Reno for reddit is great, because it’s a shit app. Best way to stop going on there is to get disconnected due to multiple API requests. Shoutout Voyager for being great.)
Reddit has also gotten significantly worse since the exodus, which is a bittersweet feeling as a former head mod whose sub got banned for joining in the protest. I miss the glory days, but I’m fucking glad it’s dying. (Dipshit admins didn’t remove me when they re-opened it, so I passed it over to someone who’s still on there.) I’m happy to see Lemmy is gaining steam.
Negatively, I think a lot of people over here are seriously terminally online. I’ve read, bar none, some of the worst takes I’ve ever seen in comments here. (I’m not talking about my comment history, fwiw, although the dude who equated guns to cars is pretty up there.) The “hivemind” leans quite left, which I honestly like, but it does feel like there’s very little nuance for dissenting opinions. That being said, fuck nazis, and fuck reddit for allowing them to disperse their hatred under the guise of “sharing ideas”.
Fuck me, that was a bit of an essay
the top comments aren’t low effort jokes that weren’t funny on the last 3 posts
Someone quoted a Simpsons episode to make a point, let's spend the next 20 comments quoting the rest of the episode at each other
Sounds good. Let’s do the exact same thing when this gets reposted
Short essays are kind of what I designed this community for, so you are directly on point!
I agree with absolutely everything you said above.
I use it for quick reading material while doing other stuff and to monologue. I’m a spectator that likes to give my lengthy opinions unprompted, but otherwise open comments purely for reading material. This colors my thoughts hugely.
I like that it’s not Reddit. Didn’t like that company. I have found Lemmy users to be a lot more willing to stand up against corporations and boycott acceptable products due to ethics— something very lacking in society now and a massive contributor to the disrespect companies treat consumers with. For enjoyers of certain niches, it has good content and good people. For me, the community is a much needed reprieve from a world that feels increasingly consumerist and accepting of evil.
I don’t think the discussions are very high quality. They don’t contain as much useful information or corrections as Reddit, which due to user count had more relative experts. Misinformation is nearly as bad here but less insidious because Reddit misinformation was sneakier, but it’s more obnoxious so it elicits more confusion than annoyance like it did on Reddit (which is better, to be fair). Comment sections feel repetitive due to lack of unique ideas or analysis, and they usually will not delve further than knee jerk reactions to parent commenter knee jerk reactions. So much so that I strongly believe that, if Lemmy was fed into an LLM, 95% of comment sections could be more efficiently created by bots. It’s a lot less civil than most of the new internet, vitriol and bad faith arguments that never acknowledge the other commenter’s statements are common. Lemmy is wildly tribalistic with little room for disagreements, even minor. This makes for poor reading material.
So it does remind me of the older Internet, before the forced civility and mainstream use that leads to deeper discussions. I sound critical but a lot of this is nostalgic, and I like it. While I’d love for Lemmy to improve, these flaws are familiar and some part of me is glad to see them again. Reddit was kind of feeling stale and sterile by the time I left, and I expect it’s significantly worse now (and quite possibly actually mostly bots). And the benefits, primarily the anti-consumerism, is refreshing.
Honestly speaking, I wouldn’t say Lemmy is good and I could never suggest it to “normal” people. But I like it, and it makes for solid quick reading material, which alone offsets the negatives.
Oh, and the questionable quality discussions here make it easier to stop reading comments and reconnect with real life. This past week I found myself actively watching the waves on a beach. Back on Reddit I used years worth of beautiful places as a backdrop for what felt like more interesting information on the app, and sometimes came off as an ass for doing so. I would never return to Reddit for that alone, and I think it’s part of why I’m okay with Lemmy staying this way.
You summed up a lot of my feelings quite well on why I wasn't sad to leave Reddit.
My personal dissatisfaction with a lot of what is going on on Lemmy is why I created this community now. Groupthink, even if it is correct, often does not understand the reasoning it is correct. They present weak arguments and straw man the opposition and frequently will even strawman undecided readers.
I don't know where in the last 20 years this became the de facto way to convince people that you are correct, but it isn't.
I ran a somewhat large forum for about 10 years from the mid-90s to the mid-2000s and we used to argue forcefully on there. If you argue even somewhat forcefully on any of these public-facing "forum replacements" now, you get absolutely shit on without anybody countering anything you said. At some point, it seems every group has just made the assumption that they are correct and will not ever discuss it.
That’s actually pretty much the issue I have with the discussion here, I hadn’t really seen it put to words. I’ve read what should have been respectful disagreements turned into what I feel are autopilot arguments with name calling peppered in. It often feels like people are waiting to get a response so they can go in, but they don’t always read the response first. I assume it’s for the benefit of the “audience,” but it frequently strawmans them too, as you noted. Compared to a point-counterpoint setup which is more interesting and actually has a chance of convincing someone, the oddly common Lemmy discourse feels kind of pointless. Like, who is it for?
When I first came here, I believed the talk about how the discussions were high quality so I said more. I don’t think I ever ran into the people who churn out dissatisfying arguments but I also only very rarely got good talks. That combined with the bottom-tier fights that happen with controversial subjects? I see why most people only lurk.
On the subject of controversy though, my current guess is that most people here are so similar that any deviation on strong subjects leads to a need to crush opposition as fiercely as possible. I sometimes feel it happening to me, which is the clearest sign that I need to step back and reevaluate to make sure I’m not falling into the same vice. It’s also part of why I don’t engage in controversial discussion— there’s no real point, and I’m here to have a good time not fight people.
Yeah, you seem as disappointed in the way things shook out the same as I did.
The intention for this community is to help to understand other views, not bury them. I feel that's what makes us different. Hell, sometimes I want to make sure I'm correct on something and would like people to pick apart my view to make sure I'm logically consistent.
Problem is, most people are not logically consistent themselves and tend to not be able to articulate their position when pushed. It used to be perfectly fine to not have a stance on something, but as the internet grew, you HAD to have a stance on everything, even if you were deeply uninformed. Now people create a stance first and just get mad and block anything contradicting it.
I am somewhat disappointed, but I hope these are growing pains and that the community will improve. I don’t think Internet toxicity like I see is sustainable— who would want to only have interactions like that? It’s exhausting to read, participating must feel like a chore of unbelievable pointlessness. I can see a better Lemmy on the horizon where they get it out of their system, so to speak.
Commenters learning how to argue would go a long way. I took years of debate and honestly feel like one semester should be a requirement. There are respectful and effective ways to argue, but Lemmy users are more prone to unconvincing attempts to bulldoze. On Reddit that led to being buried, with quality arguments on the same topic getting upvotes. Here, the quality arguments are rarer so you only see the bad faith ones.
Still, I’m not giving up on Lemmy. I truly believe it can improve. But I can also see it driving away new users, or turning into an extremist platform like Voat. Now Lemmy is nowhere near the cesspool that Voat was so I’m optimistic.
I wish there was more variety in the userbase. It's too easy to predict which kind of comments receives love and which hate.
dae republicans bad????
For example, my veganism thread in this sub had three downvotes with under 30 seconds of me posting it.
Some people downvote things without reading them which is one of the big things this community was designed to avoid.
I knew that stating an opinion outside of the activist opinion would get attacked.
I like that the community is pretty cool and you make a post it will probably gain good quality engagement more so than Reddit. Downside is there aren't many people so smaller communities are pretty much stagnant and dead.
Usage is pretty much the same, still doomscroll, respond, post.
First and foremost is that it is decentralized. I don't mean that in any technical sense where the workload is distributed and the network is resilient against the loss of nodes. I mean that it's easy to go "instance shopping", because the decentralization has created another level of categorization.
Most people standing up and moderating a server seem to have a vision comparable to, but larger than that held by someone creating and moderating a community. That allows for larger collectives of like-minded people. As a result, I almost never filter by subscription, but by "local". As a result, I often find myself participating in communities that I would never subscribe to.
Perhaps related to that, one of the things I see on lemmy is that people are generally polite. If I'm getting downvoted for something, I usually know why. I can either infer the reason by rereading and thinking about it a bit or someone tells me in a comment. It's not that there are no drive-by downvotes, but they're much less common than on Reddit.
Also, I see people getting thanked for sharing more often than on Reddit, and those thank-you notes get upvoted by more than just the direct participants. And when the beneficiary responds in kind ("thanks for reading") that also garners upvotes from more than just the direct participants.
Discussions don't seem to devolve to fighting as often. When they do, they seem to be less abusive and peter out quicker.
That's the positive. On the negative side, I find that it's more common to see upvotes without continued discussion. I learn so much by bouncing ideas around and having people ask for clarification, provide counterpoints, provide examples or counterexamples, etc. I occasionally get frustrated that an opinion in its infancy just seems to disappear into the ether, trailing a voting history behind it.
I agree with the majority of this. Maybe it's just because I tend to play Devil's Advocate on some very broken logic that other people have, but I see a lot more downvotes per view here than I did on Reddit.
I can't disagree. It's not like I did any kind of analysis, just an impression I got.
Voyager is close enough to Apollo, so happy on the UI side.
Miss having MLB game live threads that made watching along and commenting with strangers fun.
I like the small community vibe. I've read some arguments that the negative effects associated with social media might come from the fact that it caters to everyone.
The idea is that normally businesses wouldn't try to sit a whole bunch of hunters next to a whole bunch of vegans, but social media companies do just that. In fact, the heated arguments between these groups drives engagement, which means their algorithms are incentivized to make opposing groups angry at each other.
There are no algorithms driving engagement on Lemmy. There is no incentive for instance owners to gain as many users as possible. Lemmy is more of a small forum that links to other small forums, which is actually what the internet looked like before search engines and social media existed.
I am very much a fan of not being at the whims of "the algorithm".
Every single time I am forced to go on to Facebook by some family thing I'm reminded why I never want to go back to Facebook.
For me is the lack of recommendations and the usability to discover new communities organically as in reddit.
Using Boost and still learning. What gets me most is seeing the same post linked a dozen times because each instance has its own news group.
That is something I would really, really like to see implemented; Lemmy needs some kind of aggregator feature.
I'll skip repeating what others have already said but add the default UI needs to be less cramped on desktop. Not sure about mobile as I've had a mostly positive experience on Sync (thanks to competition from a selection of 3rd party apps btw but I digress)
One major issue with lemmy is centralization, its just leading to another reddit with everyone being concentrated on crappy major instances. Like, .world and beehaw is known to have some of the worst moderation, but that's where a lot of people are concentrating. Centralization also leads to those few servers pushing every other instance around with the threat of defederation.
That said i find the people of lemmy to be generally better than the people of Reddit (who are in turn better than Twitter) at least. If you're in anime lemmy you're probably going to be talking to otaku, same for every other niche on lemmy even if it's small. Much less chance of getting involved with the new puritan movement or children.
And it's already my new primary form of social media!
Well they haven't been asking me to use the app every three seconds so there's something.
But just think of the poor corporation trying to get their IPO out there! Just display all the ads and give them your information, they tell me it's better that way somehow.
So far so good and it keeps getting better.
I’m in 👍