Has anyone else been reading linked articles more often on Lemmy?
When mindlessly browsing Reddit, I found that I usually just jump directly to the comments, read a couple, and continue. Lemmy seems a bit more curated (read: smaller), and therefore it's easier to actually engage in discussions, which leads me to read the article, think critically about it, and respond (if I have something to say) in the comments--bigger is not always better!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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 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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.