this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2024
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Actual Discussion

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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!

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For more casual conversation instead of competitive ranked conversation, try: [email protected]

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(WEEKLY / CMV) I should close this community (lemmy.ca)
submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Reminder: This post is from the Community Actual Discussion. You’re encouraged to use voting for elevating constructive, or lowering unproductive, posts and comments here. When disagreeing, replies detailing your views are appreciated. For other rules, please see this pinned thread. Thanks!

No, it's not a joke. I'm frustrated and I'm probably not choosing my words carefully.

This community has had steadily falling engagement - our last 3 weekly threads have had a grand total of 1 (excellent and well-articulated) response, and the number of topics not generated by myself (or the other mod) since the inception of the community has also been 1.

Very few people want to actually talk. From what I've seen, the masses want the same things that they wanted on Reddit:

  1. Memes
  2. Articles they don't read (but will bitch about endlessly) that reinforce their opinion
  3. Angry responses to someone (who may be trolling) that reinforce the current politics of the reader (that they couldn't have given a fuck about a few years ago until it became heavily politicized)
  4. Shitty easy jokes
  5. Personal politics circlejerking

I hate that I can see a hundredth point-free meme post and view 200 replies on it. I hate that it's just the same talking points being strawmanned over and over again in every thread. I hate that any point outside common groupthink is downvoted to oblivion and buried instead of discussed.

The reason I'd like to back away from Lemmy seems to be the same reason I started this community: we need more people who can articulate points, and less downvoting, but it doesn't seem to be getting better.

Maybe one day, but today is not that day. Lemmy needs to mature in more ways than one.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Can you think of any software features that might address the issues you raise?

I'm building a lemmy alternative and greatly prefer 'actual discussion', too.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (3 children)

  • Better ways for Communities to surface themselves. Starting with such a small community, it's hard to get more people unless they come in from browsing the equivalent of /All. I've also been active in promoting this Community to people who seem to want to discuss things on other threads and were frustrated by the same things I was, but we're still pretty small.

  • More controls (and decoration) available to the Community itself. It'd help us out a lot if we could disable downvotes, for instance. As it stands, we can't discuss any remotely controversial topic without no-comment downvotes from random people burying threads. That means that if the first few people don't like the topic or my initial outlay of it, they kill ANYONE from seeing the thread who is not subscribed.

  • Better moderation tools. For instance, we can't properly remove deleted content, and it's all mostly visible still on mobile clients. Hell, we've seen deleted rule-breaking comments continue to accrue upvotes somehow.

  • Ways to pre-emptively surface sub rules to mobile users who never see the sidebar (especially if they are breaking them). Lemmy seems to think that people browse communities, but they do no such thing. The Community is popped into a feed, and people see a topic, but most never even look at the Community itself.

  • Stopping bad users. Things like... there need to be ways to stop a user from going into user history of others and downvoting every single thing they've ever written because they didn't like a take they had. We also need ways to appeal bans and stop brigading.

  • We've had threads reported for using terminology a user didn't like. The threads then vanished. We, the mods, were never notified that a large and actively debated thread was now gone and could do nothing about it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

Ending downvoting entirely ends your last item. The whole voting scheme of Lemmy is broken. I have never, not even once, seen a site that has up/down voting that wasn't a festering pile of groupthink and performative political twerps.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

It’d help us out a lot if we could disable downvotes, for instance.

Did you consider moving to an instance with downvotes disabled? https://reddthat.com/ is a great instance without downvotes, it might suit well for your community.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (2 children)

That's... not a terrible idea. Do you know what that entails? Is there an easy way to move things, or is it just a matter of starting the new one up fresh?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Hello,

Just coming back after a few weeks for a small feedback: we successfully moved from [email protected] to [email protected]. It's definitely doable, especially if your community is quite active and you announce it beforehand

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (2 children)

[email protected]

Nice! Link updated in the sidebar. How has it affected the Community so far?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Thanks ! Not a lot, activity is at a similar level if not more, so all good!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Also, https://reddthat.com/ have solved their federation issues, so you could definitely move there if you wanted to

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

You can just open another one there, and then when everything is ready, you open a post here to redirect people there, and you lock the community to make sure that people use the new one.

One caveat with Reddthat: the comments and posts and synchronized correctly, but votes from LW can take some time to synchronize (this is mostly due to the over centralization of people on LW, and the way Lemmy manages queue).

That might not be an issue if you don't worry too much about votes, but that's for you to decide.

More details here: https://reddthat.com/post/16122033?scrollToComments=true

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Great list, thanks! Gives me a lot to think about.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Lemmy seems to cloned Reddit without much thought into what was wrong with Reddit (besides the ads, and the corporate ownership). So it's not much surprise that Lemmy has many of the same faults (I blame the design decisions, rather than the users).

As for 'actual discussion', it can be difficult to switch gears if you associate the app you're using with simple dopamine hits, to go from 'scroll, scroll, chuckle, scroll ... ' to start properly engaging. Also, I think people genuinely find it hard to know what to say: if you ever see a link that leads to another platform that allows comments, you can see for yourself how often people take a comment from there, and copy/paste it back to into Lemmy.

Re: this community. There's no great advantage to deleting it, at worst just let it fester with the thousands of other dead communities, so it's still there to revive if you get back into the mood. In the meantime, it's probably worth investigating the alternative platforms (both Fediverse-based on non-Fediverse-based). The challenge will finding one that's both more serious and satisfyingly active (e.g. tildes is more geared to discussion, and has expanded on the simple upvote/downvote system, but it's a bit quiet)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Well, you're right. I probably won't delete the Community, but I won't engage either if my mind can't be changed. Some discussions on here have been awesome, and it'd be a shame to wipe them out.

I wish there were a way to have to force users to have to opt into the shitty dopamine hit mode you mentioned instead of it being the default. It's one of the main problems with modern social media and one of the reasons I feel that Forums were dramatically better.

[–] AchtungDrempels 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

I just learned about this community from the piefed issue tracker. Glad that i found it! Looking forward to hopefully take part when i have something to say. I feel like this community here is especially hard to find, just because it is so broad and not a niche interest that is easy to search for with an obvious keyword. I was also wondering if communities being home to instances with a localized TLD may have it harder to grow because people just assume it's a f.e. canada centric discussion. I may remember this wrong, but i think last summer the [email protected] community was the largest and most active cycling community (it was very small though), but somehow [email protected] has now more than three times the subscribers (looking at lemmy.world numbers), even though i'd say that [email protected] is still the most active english language cycling sub (strangely the german speaking [email protected] community seems to be the most active of all of the cycling communities that i know of).

I thought quite a few times that i need to leave lemmy, i felt like all the negativity i was exposed to had a bad effect on my mental health. I was also thinking that i didn't want to be associated with all these super angry people. I blocked a lot of meme, politics and news communities but it still seeps through. Still i have some hope that this can take off more, i generally like lemmy.

I had high hopes for the "scaled" sort, to find some interesting communities, but i ended up not using it at all. Maybe i should give it another try. On lemmy.world they have this "community spotlight", where they promote a smaller community on top of the homepage. I think that is a pretty cool idea, although i feel it would be nice if they changed it more often, or cycle through a group of communities for a month randomly, then on to another group.

All in all i think this community here has great potential! I will have a look if i can propose this community for the lemmy.world community spotlight if you don't mind.

*edit: i have now suggested it for the lw community spotlight, i hope that's ok.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

I have to admit that as, I think, the author of that 1 response, I found the utter lack of engagement to the points I made rather dispiriting. It definitely coloured my decision not to reply to the next one (well, that and me not being boots on the ground in USAville, so not having a meaningful opinion to warrant a full-on response vis a vis division).

I tend to agree with you on what Lemmy contains. Especially #5. As a result I'm probably going to drop Lemmy entirely from my list of sites to visit.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Yeah, I should have replied, but last week was one of the busiest weeks I've had. My apologies. The response was great and definitely deserved more people engaging with it.

I'm not American either, but the division seems to be a worldwide phenomenon. It's definitely in Canada where I am and seems to be feeding off the American version.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Hello,

Sorry to hear you are closing this community. I didn't contribute as much as I would like to (busy myself animating other communities, and real life stuff too). Do you want to try advertising this community once more to larger communities like [email protected] ? Maybe that could help getting better people on board.

Also, you might want to have a look at https://tildes.net/ . This website is heavily focused on discussion, so maybe the issue you have is that people that could be interested in your community are already there

[–] gimpchrist 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Holy shit A softer world in the Wild, whoaaaaaa

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

I have about 200 of them saved that are my favorites and have been going through them when I find something that is related in my mind. I generally put them on the weekly threads to try and bump up engagement a little bit as it's something more than just text, and it's something that I love as well.

I think you're the first one to comment on it. It is appreciated!

[–] gimpchrist 3 points 7 months ago

That's really awesome I used to cut every single one out of The Coast and just collect them back in the day.... I've lost them all, so it's really friggin nice to see them again... what a small world!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

This community didn't really feel like a place to discuss, it seemed more like a place for the mods to have a soap box for others to listen to them.

Also, some of the "topic starters" were incredibly leading, and also completely out of no where. On the division in the USA "Can it be remedied, or is civil war the only option?". Civil war? Do sane people think that would solve the political division in your country?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

it seemed more like a place for the mods to have a soap box

I mean... that's what starting a thread is as a CMV, article, or Steelman (among others). As a mod, it's kind of our job to create threads when the Community isn't large enough yet. Do you feel someone would start a community called Actual Discussion and not have anything they'd like to discuss?

some of the “topic starters” were incredibly leading

They were common talking points I saw in other threads ripped almost directly from top replies, not my opinion. And you were never required to speak on the starters, they were simply things to get people thinking and responding.

All in all, I'd say you're being rather uncharitable in your descriptions.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

They were common talking points I saw in other threads ripped almost directly from top replies, not my opinion.

In your main post, you complain about the quality of posts you find online and how people aren't voting on quality, so then why use highly upvoting as a metric?

Do you feel someone would start a community called Actual Discussion and not have anything they’d like to discuss?

That's not what I said.
I said that things didn't feel like discussions.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

The points weren't chosen for quality, they were chosen because they are commonly parroted. This was in order to encourage people to discuss things that are commonly spoken, but may not be ideologically sound. In other words, they were chosen specifically to be debateworthy. If a poster chose, as long as they were on topic, they could also completely ignore them or create a new thread. Often in order to discuss something, you must give an opinion first and not merely sit and critique what other people say.

The topics where I wrote out a bunch of stuff that was ripe for picking apart were the topics that were discussed the most heavily. If you don't feel like that's a discussion, then I'm not sure what you would feel like one was.