I've noticed I was reliant on the TLDR bots that shorten news articles by like 70%.
I kinda miss them because of simplicity and efficiency, but I'm not minding the actual comment discussions
this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2023
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I think at this point there should be a LLM extension which does it quickly for you everytime you end up on an article.
I'm torn.
Yes, article summaries can be nice, and often demonstrate just how unnecessarily wordy the original is.
On the other hand, not needing to follow links to the original is at least part of what's killing original creators, especially journalists and their outlets. As much as we dislike ads, subscriptions, and requests for donations, those are what fund the sources we most cherish.
there are too much journalists. if they agree to consolidate into less numerous news outlets and share a universal pay to read platform (the same concept of flipboard), i would gladly pay/or allow ad playback. but they agreed to disagree, they now must bear the consequences.
actual comment discussions
I sincerely hope that everything stays this way. Filtering, tagging and reporting users who constantly was posting those obnoxious low effort oneliners was basically becoming a full time job. It killed all the discussions in the bigger subs. It's already obvious on some of the bigger instances/communities that some users unfortunately just switched platform.
Personally I didn't like some of the popular bots like autotldr but I can see why other people did.
I've seen a few of those bots on Lemmy, so it might just depend on what community/instance it's posted on. I'm sure more will come :)
Yes. There’s less fluff/firehouse level of content. I’ve mentioned this to friends as a selling point. It’s also much easier to feel like your comment might actually be seen.
Plus since there’s less content, I’ve gotta actually read the articles if I want to kill time
Yes—and there seem to be more linked articles, compared to linked YouTube posts. I prefer to read, rather than wait through ads and a blah-blah-blah intro explaining why I should want the content about to be revealed by the loquacious host.
Reading is a highy efficient way of transmitting information. It feels like a giant step backward in cultural evolution to force information into an aural format with visual candy-coating as enticement.
I'm with you on the YouTube thing, but you seriously should consider investing some time on getting those ads blocked.
Also SponsorBlock! Watching a video on Youtube is much nicer when you don't have to manually scrub through the interminable VPN sales pitch.
Thank you; is there a way to get this to work on the Android Toob app?
You mean the official Youtube app? Almost certainly not, Google isn't going to add that kind of functionality since it would give users a way to avoid ads as well. The SponsorBlock Firefox addon also doesn't natively support Firefox mobile unfortunately. You might able to combine Firefox mobile, the Tampermonkey addon (which does support Firefox mobile) and a userscript sponsor blocker to get the same effect. I tested this briefly just now and it does seem to work, but it's not something I use every because most of my video watching is on desktop.
Yeah; I could cut and paste the url into NewPipe. But links seem to default to the Toob, and if I just want to get a quick glimpse to see if the material is worth my time, I can't be bothered.
I'm fairly certain you can set NewPipe as the default app for YouTube links, I think I've done it in the past. I'm just using Firefox now though, not too big into YouTube videos.
I'm half and half on this. I agree that reading is more efficient, but I also tend to skim through the article on first read then sometimes would have to read it again if I missed some information.
Listening to it in video or podcast format forces me to absorb the entire information from start to finish, thus I don't really need to listen to it again. Added benefit of podcasts for me is that I could listen to it while driving, and it helps me not to fall asleep on the highway 😂
I very much agree, all the youtube videos that could have better been an article.
I think a reason for this is that there's far more botspam than anyone guessed on Reddit. I have no idea exactly how inflated their user numbers are, but the fact that traffic only went down by ~10% during the blackout is quite a big red flag.
For me, it's because the number of comments is too low to expect that some one may summarize the article.
Yup, 100%. More often than not I read the article now if it sounds interesting!
For me it's a combination of being very careful with what I subscribe to, and a lot of the news subreddits putting the text of the article in the post. Makes it near impossible to justify not reading the text rather than jumping to the comments, and it's guaranteed to be in a decently readable format (unlike most news websites, for some reason)
Y'know I didn't notice I was doing this more until you pointed it out! It's very refreshing to see
Overall discussion quality is higher, of course people are going to want to read the article directly to talk about it.
(I just block World News Reddit Repost Bots and that seems to improve the experience massively)
I'm still burnt from reddit, so I haven't engaged as much as I used to. Why put in the high effort when I still don't know if things will last long enough to make it worth it?
But, yeah, the community of lemmy/kbin hasn't gotten taken over by cheap bots and karma farming, so there's more quality to what's here. It means that most discussion is better too. It gives hope.
No, not really. I used Reddit more for discussions on niche topics/subreddits and tend to particpate more in text posts than link posts. I was never on Reddit for news or politics and its the same here. I'm engaging in fewer discussions on Lemmy so far, simply because there are fewer of them here right now.
yeah, lemmy and kbin is a link aggregator
tbh the quality of posts here are in a league of their own. 4 years ago i used to browse reddit and had to filter almost all subs to find some meaningful content. idk why people here are hyped over lemmy's user growth. if the sum of major lemmy instance users add to 1 million, we should probably limit singing up to the next 9 million or something. reddit users count as much as 400 million. the 390 million left should stay there or something.
Thats not even accounting for all the bots, alts and inactive accounts; it wouldnt surprise me in the least if the majority of those were bots or throwaways. Another benefit of lemmy's setup is that individual servers will be fairly small so theres tons of space for smaller communities with higher quality discussion, even if it does end up causing duplicate communities across instances.
captcha and motivation paragraph while signing up should filter bots. and duplicate communities are just natural: if an instance seems to be struggling in hosting communities, it should be natural to create a community of the same content in another freed up instance, just to distrbute the bulk of the load. they could reconsolidate later if an instance is capable enough. i saw earlier someone complaining about duplicate communities (with no duplicate content): some people are just plain whiners.
I was definitely of the check the comments to see if the article was worth the click mentality. Too much clickbait and spam to bother otherwise.
However, one thing I'm hesitant to do here is start the conversation when it's just an article with no comment or commentary given. I tend to just read and move on.
It's like "oh, that's interesting," and then I'm on to the next thing.
Yeah because the comment sections are smaller I feel like I need to read the article so I can make an informed relevant comment. It's good.
Similar experience here, the curated feed and smaller community seem to encourage more at ease discussion, I feel more inclined to engage with the content.
I avoided all comments on reddit except for a handful of subs. Most big subs had a misinformation problem that they either couldn’t or wouldn’t address, and threads would get flooded with sealioning and straight up misinformation so often that I just kinda gave up.
But I hardly ever read the linked articles either. I basically used Reddit as a glorified RSS reader, just scanning headlines and moving on unless something was really interesting or important.
Now on lemmy I do both. I read the article and the comments. Not sure how long it’ll last, though. I fear it’s just a matter of time until the garbage finds us here.
As long as the link doesn't lead to a paywall. Bless those folks who post the transcripts or mirror link!
Better content overall being posted and way better comment discourse.
I think larger groups of people act much differently than smaller groups. I have always preferred smaller.
I’m the opposite. I had my subreddits curated to ones that supplied good deals discussion for posts and good articles for links. For link posts, I primarily read the linked article and ignored the discussion. Here, I’ve been doing both.
I’ve actually been finding myself reading articles more also that are linked on Lemmy, and I often find myself engaging in discussion more than I ever did on Reddit.
This is really great, I m loving it
Yup I have. I used to do the same thing but now ive actually been clicking them and giving them a whirl. Ive actually enjoyed it because I can add with a real understanding
Yeah it feels good to read, also the slower pacing of the content makes everything less overwhelming.
I'm not sure I'm any more likely to read the article (that is, I read articles a lot on Reddit, too), but there are some big differences otherwise:
- On Reddit, by the time I saw a post, there were often hundreds, or even thousands of comments. What I might want to say was often already said, or I just wasn't going to read all of them to see if it was. This is more like sorting Reddit by "Rising," where I'd feel like there was more room to be heard.
- On Reddit, there is always a giant number of people who just want to make a pun or joke, which is fine, but those comments were always upvoted to the top several top-level responses, so I often didn't really feel like engaging with them.
- Similar to above, the comments here seem to be more thoughtful on average. I'm not sure Reddit had fewer thoughtful responses, but they were more buried in the jokes (many of which were repeated thread after thread), so here it just overall seems more conducive to discussion.
Yeah because on Lemmy there are usually only few comments or none at all