Discussion - How to make Lemmy a better place for everyone
Discussion - How to make Lemmy a better place for everyone
First, I want to say how great it is to see success in a social media platform not owned by some giant cooperation. That said, right now we are at a turning point where we can still change the platform in major ways and I think we all have a shared interested in Lemmy becoming the best it could be.
Let's face it, Reddit had many problems even before the API changes. The toxic herd mentality, over and under moderation at the same time, small posts getting drowned out by already big ones and so much more. As you probably are already aware of, social media can quickly end in filter bubbles, extremization and bringing out the worst of the human psyche. These are not problems simply fixed by better moderation. Rather, these are problems resulting from the engagement driven design of most platforms (Post controversial statement -> many comments -> Post gets delivered to more people -> even more engagement -> ...) I want Lemmy to be a place that brings people together instead of dividing us apart.
Therefore, I wanna start a conversation on what design changes Lemmy should implement in the future to make sure the platform remains humane and everyone can engage in respectful conversations.
I think a good starting point are the recourses of the Center for Humane Technology, like their course on Foundations of Humane Technology
I'm looking forward to hearing your opinions and ideas on this :)
I think Lemmy being decentralized and not having user karma by design already gets a pretty good base. With the concerns of censorship, admin drama, and protecting marginalized groups, the rest has to come from your instance admins and moderators of communities you follow. With the nature of the platform, you can create toxic places but those are easily defederated and/or blocked.
We are definitely off to a good start :D Still there are starting to show problematic signs
In some news communities people are obviously upvoting news article based on nothing more than the headline. This creates an environment where only articles with polarizing headlines succeed, and a real discussion becomes impossible
How do you prevent that? I think that might simply be inherent of unrestricted news communities, not necessarily the platform itself. You can have a more restricted news community that disallows click bait or polarizing titles or only allow posts by approved users (or go further and lock to instance like beehaw).
We are definitely off to a good start :D Still there are starting to show problematic signs
In some news communities people are obviously upvoting news article based on nothing more than the headline. This creates an environment where only articles with polarizing headlines succeed, and a real discussion becomes impossible
So a straightforward one to get started, and one already in the GitHub issues:
- Allow the feed to be less viral: the “value” of posts from smaller more niche communities will be weighed against the size/popularity of its community rather than all of your feed. Can even pin this weighting by the size of the community at the time of the posts creation.
Combined with allowing multi-communities defined by the user so that various communities can be grouped together, any user should find it pretty easy to avoid just seeing the big viral posts. And, AFAIK, this would be something Reddit never did??
I think that's one great step 👍 It's always been a frustrating experience asking for help (maybe with a PC problem) and either getting deleted by mods or getting no answer at all
undefined> various communities can be grouped together, any user should find it pretty easy to avoid just seeing the big viral posts. And, AFAIK, this would be something Reddit never did??
Reddit has this feature, it's called multireddits.
Combined with allowing multi-communities defined by the user so that various communities can be grouped together
These multi-communities should also be followable and shareable by others, kinda like how Matrix Spaces work!
I have an idea for news communities:
When a post is just a link to an article (so no other context) you should be required to click on the link before voting, to incentive users to at least skim the article. Of course posts would get less votes (wich needs to be taken into account when ranking) but voting on headlines alone is useless and bad for informed discussions.
This might sound funny or weird; - Can we consider to implement The Kaizen Philosophy into this platform? I am all taking this seriously. The overall quality of the software & hardware products that we utilize could significantly improve - continuously over time.
I have no experience in software development but believe it could work, based on what the project is.
Here are some short steps, that can be followed through for all things in life;
- Why is this step important?
- What positive value am I adding by doing so?
- Where should I do it?
- When should I do it?
- Are there any other people involved?
- Is it being done correctly?
- How often must I do it?
The PDCA - Cycle;
- Plan - 7 Question System
- Do
- Verify
- Act
Above is based on science and it's implemented on many industries past few decades. Now it's content or checklist that the Lemmy Communities could implement, should be based on the general consensus here. See above as an template.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. It’s fun we are at a stage in which we can define what we want this community to be like not just technologically but as people. Also note this can be done on an instance by instance basis, too.
I think the human component is even more important than the technical. The inventor of the facebook like button kind of regrets his invention. He didn't forsee all the bad consequences (people being excluded by getting few likes and people doing everything (even dangerous things) for likes and validation)
Maybe controversial …
Enable us to follow people as on microblogging platforms like masto. A person, if they’re open, has varied opinions and interests. Plus, as there id a personal relationship, a posture of respect is natural. It isn’t hard to get a varied feed once you follow enough people. Combine that with subscribing to communities, and the cross-pollination and you should naturally get a more varied diet of posts.
If you don't want to wait for that feature in Lemmy, you can interact with Lemmy users and communities on other AP speaking platforms. Kbin seems to do this in an all in one approach, but you can easily follow Lemmy users in Masto too. I've been splitting between Lemmy for communities and Masto for people so far.
That's a great idea, but I don't know if it fits this platform. What makes Lemmy (and Reddit) great for me is that I can follow specific communities (specific video games, movies, kinks...)
Paste the Lemmy username into your Mastodon search bar, you can follow them there.
https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@[email protected]
I think it will only start syncing all their new posts and comments once you follow them
That sounds like some authoritarian lunacy. No thanks.