I am a reddit refugee. Keep seeing that this is supposed to be somehow better than Reddit. As far as I can tell, it follows a similar format, less restrictive on posts being removed I suppose. But It looks like people still get down vote brigaded on some communities. So I’m curious, how it’s better?
It still falls into some of the same pitfalls that Reddit had (groupthink, reflexive commenting, power-tripping mods), but some of those problems I don’t know that there’s a way to get around them in this format, they’re just a human nature sort of issue. I appreciate that Lemmy doesn’t appear to be owned by a giant mega-corp trying to harvest our “intellectual”, but we’ll see how that pans out in the future. I’ve just gotten used to every online service I’ve used eventually going to shit.
I like that there’s no advertising at the moment, I don’t know that I would mind it so much if there was advertising, as long as it was kept minimal. I know these things don’t just happen for free and if money is needed to help keep the lights on and such.
A very obvious solution to groupthink is to do away with the silly voting system. I don’t know why they kept it. A very simple solution would have been to just assign votes to a topic based on how much attention it’s getting. In simple terms, If opposed has 10,000 people that have viewed it, 1,000 people have left a comment, compared to a post that has 100,000 views and 15 comments, you can tell which one should have more attention score. The upvote and downvote system is too easily used as a dislike or like system. Many of us have the maturity to upvote something because we think it’s a good discussion point even if we don’t agree with what the person is saying. But a lot of people don’t think that way mentally. They see something, they read it, immediately go into toxic hater mode and just downvote it for no reason
The problem is that you then end up with sites based on attention, leading you into the (imo even bigger) pitfall of every other social media site, where things like attention-grabbing, clickbait, and sensationalist content has a massive advantage. Look at what gets sorted to the top on platforms where that is the main metric, things like Mr. Beast’s low-brow, cacophonus videos, children’s content, scantily clad women and softcore porn, and gambling or otherwise particularly addictive content. Even focusing on comment count alone means a focus on topics that are both broad-appeal and controversial, more like what you get out of Twitter’s trending topics: mostly politics and flamewars rather than experts sharing their research, or artists sharing their (non-pornographic) art.
Don’t get me wrong, voting isn’t a perfect system at all, but it correlates with quality far better than engagement does.