cross-posted from: https://reddthat.com/post/52386265
Right now, big communities dominate the feed. I’m wondering what sort algorithm could level the field so niche or hobbyist communities have a fair chance to get seen.
There’s a good related post: Niche Communities won’t be able to reach their true potential until Lemmy adds a sort that takes engagement into account. It puts it well:
“If Lemmy is to truly start having active hobbyist communities instead of being 95% lefty US politics, Shitposts, and some tech stuff, it needs a sort that takes into account the user’s engagement.”
What do you think should be the default sort for a more balanced Lemmy?
You realise if Lemmy/Piefed even doubled in size, /new/ would just be useless. Just a wave of low quality posts, spam, and topically non-relevant posts to most people.
It doesn’t scale.
I know. But is scale all that matters? I know what you mean and I swipe through a lot of them.
But that also happens with the Hot and Popular filters. Because if I just swipe through the All option across all the federated instances using the Hot or Popular filters it’s mostly memes, circlejerking and rageposting. Is this what is wanted? Because nobody needs Lemmy for that. Reddit and all of the other platforms are already serving that low level of engagement with slop to spare.
This actively rewards it. Exactly the same way.
I don’t remember who said it …“Scale is the death of virtue”… but it is definitely applicable here.
I don’t know what you want out of lemmy, but if that outcome is what you intend to have, the end product will have virtually no distinction of its’ counterparts and people will see no reason to change. As there will be none outside of it’s not “corporate owned”. But if it’s still slop, people who want a change, will just skip the whole thing. As I did for a while. And if it wasn’t for Piefed, I don’t think I would be still hanging around here anymore either.
Beware that a lot of the people who seek these alternatives do not want anything similar to what is huge out there. And you’ll essentially be killing the appeal to the larger target audience that will bother to “learn” federation and how instances operate in its context.
This is a hard bargain. And I do understand what you mean, and I have to suffer through it. But if you don’t recognise what I’m speaking of, then I don’t think we’re having a honest conversation.
I have not used those filters in a long time. But I’m betting that the enraged posting about what’s happening in the U.S. (and justifiably so), shitposting, circlejerking, memes and Tankies causing controversy again are taking the entire feed until one gets bored. If I’m wrong I bet is not by much. But hell, I could’ve stayed on reddit for that back when I was there which was a while ago.
Meanwhile the communities with intellectually engaging posting, real propositions of solutions and thoughtful discussions get slided to nowhere like on every other platform. They’re here and they are incredible. But guess what, they’re also on reddit, youtube, instagram and so on. And they get even more traction than in here. And also no traction in comparison to everywhere else. Just like here. But they do still get more people than here in the end. So what is the appeal of changing?
I know a lot of people who want to make ideas like Syntropy, Permacomputing, the circular economy and many other wonderful things known, and these communities do exist around here and are wonderful, but they’re even smaller than everywhere else. The proportions in ratio in everything remain the same here as in every other platform. “Hey, we don’t have far-right wing nuts and that many transphobes here!” - true. But it doesn’t seem like we actually use the space to do anything but complain about them and make the real solutions and discussions as invisible as everywhere else. It’s absolutely soulcrushing.
The reward of rage and disgust still leaves on. And we get to nothing different with it. The loop that made our world even more deranged is not broken.
Hey, if this is what everyone wants, I’ll just leave if I’m the only one bothered, no need to change anything on my account. But judging by the interactions I had over the two years since I’ve been around (first on lemm.ee and now on piefed), I can tell you a lot of people come here for the opposite of everywhere else. There’s a lot of older, reflective, literate individuals with a lot to share with others and eager to learn that come looking around these parts, and I stop seeing their names around because I think they eventually give up on what is essentially the same invisibility to high value conversations and the reward of rage and disgust as the media experts kept warning us about and nobody listened.
If you read this far, I thank you for your attention.
I hope you don’t think I don’t want the fediverse to succeed, I absolutely do. But not at any cost. And especially not at the cost of what can make it truly valuable as a difference and an actual change in direction.
I use /hot/ for local and subscribed posts after not looking at them for a day or so sometimes.
If someone could only look by /new/ on the /all/ anything older than an hour or so would just be completely gone unless they kept scrolling. The feed would be irrelevant to most people or dominated by frequent posters who flood their communities. In fact, it would make it more desirable for community owners to flood communities full of low-effort posts as the only way to attain visibility would be to be ever-present on the /new/ feed.
Why do you imagine a mandatory sort by /new/ would be less likely to be a feed of memes, circlejerking and rageposting?
As I said: Only /new/ existing would make it more desirable for community owners to flood communities full of low-effort posts as the only way to attain visibility would be to be ever-present on the /new/ feed.
A platforming being ‘slop’ won’t be any less slop purely because it removes its /hot/ feed. In fact, you might as well just outright remove upvotes and downvotes at that rate. And then it just isn’t a reddit alternative anymore.
You can just outright remove all of the ‘tankie’ instances from your own viewing if you want. Especially on Piefed. You can block all the shitpost and circlejerk and meme communities.
What communities are you referring to here?
Well I came here because I wanted to run a particular community that I couldn’t run or help on reddit. Reddit has exhausted itself for people who want to community build. Almost all names are taken.
There are many other issues with Reddit too: people being able to hide their post history (thus making it much easier for bad faith accounts to hide their posting history), no voting visibility (I didn’t know the Fediverse had this before I joined, but it’s very good in that it cultivates a high-trust culture), a broken block system, and its beginning to administrate via AI tools meaning people are getting their posts hidden or removed based on its poor understanding. On the Fediverse you can actually directly interact with instance owners and admins, making each instance much more accountable to users - and if you don’t like how one community is run in one instance, you can create it elsewhere and take their users (if enough people agree).
I want to start by saying… Thank you. And also that this is precisely why I’m still on this platform. You engaged thoroughly and thoughtfully with everything I wrote. And I mean it… thank you.
All that you pointed out is valid criticism.
But to be fair I didn’t say that killing those filters would solve every problem, just that it would eliminate that implicit incentive to seek the reward to be highlighted at the top. Through “easy to be enraged by posts”, “karma-farming like reddit posts” or just hoards of low effort memes just to mention a few.
It’s low effort but it works. On me to.
And to be completely honest about how the only “New” filter being hijacked the way you mentioned by barrage posting… I have no solution to that end. It already happens. There’s like five names (I’m not counting an exact number so it’s figurative) on lemmy that seem to post more than the rest of the lemmyverse in its entirety combined. They completely hijack the feed in any filter one chooses. I also want to say that I find that these are passionate individuals that want the lemmyverse and the fediverse to grow and I still find that they are doing a great job to that end. But one doesn’t need much insight to know that these will turn into a problem as well. Unless they are all gracious and know the perfect timing to slow down as more traffic takes off. I have seen some of them being criticised for it. And I think at this point it is unfair, but soon it might not be.
Mentioning the upvote/downvote system, I always said that we could do without it and it would be for the better. I said it on reddit for many years. I say it here as well. It’s actually the most easy to hijack feature of them all: bots, brigade hits, you name it. I never thought of this being the defining feature of reddit, but its biggest flaw. The community building, the interchangeable branches of discussions, that was what reddit got right and was stolen to the end of the earth for it. Virtually every platform stole this after 2005/2006.
Upvotes/downvotes are not only low effort, they actually reduce valuable engagement and lack any clarity. People will downvote this comment or even upvote it and I will have no idea of what was they agreed or disagreed with. It means nothing. What you and I are having here is valuable to me. You are not just disagreeing with me, but adding elements to my perspective that I might miss on my own. This is what these platforms were genuinely made for. From all the way back from the mirc chats in the 90’s.
One of the things I can point out is people mentioning to me, “you can just hide the upvote/downvote system” or “don’t use the Hot or Popular if you don’t like it” or “just block communities you are not interested in”, but these are features or elements that are driving the engagement of the people around me in here. It would be pretty silly of me to think that hiding upvotes/downvotes would change anything but to cover my eyes to what is around me. For as long as they exist, I’ll displayed them and separately. They’re here and they’re driving engagement regardless of what I think of them. No point in hiding from it. The same for everything else.
Like I said, I have the list of communities as my homepage and then I go through them chronologically in whatever I’m interested to check out that day. I don’t know what you mean by never seeing any posts past an hour. I don’t follow any communities here that if I don’t come here for three or four days (which happens frequently) that I couldn’t go through them quickly. Even back then on reddit, I didn’t have this issue with the communities that I followed. But I never followed high traffic nonsense.
You have to admit that these filters are hijacked the way that I said, just that I have to admit the new filter is hijacked by persistent posting as you said.
This right here, what you and I are doing is what some call “yellow team”… we’re tracking the issues and how unintended or deliberately so consequences can emerge.
My question is what do we do about it?
We should have like a “town hall” like instance for all federated administrators and mods to talk and vote on directions to take and have users vote. This is only valuable if we implement the same rails and safeguards as in the structuring of a great democracy. And Lemmy can function like a beacon to why federated municipality should be the future of democracy. Even deciding a cap on the number of maximum registrations per instance is not a bad idea to start throwing as numbers increase. I was on Lemm.ee. It was nothing terrible that happened there, it was just too much.
It’s better to have large numbers spread around many instances, than to have them in just a few. This is the right way to scale up. The more centralised and large the more easy it is to corrupt it. And the harder it is to manage it. Smaller instances will know better how to maintain its base and to manage it. Rimu (the piefed creator) already said he is thinking about closing the registrations on the instance he manages. Which is the one I’m on.
After a certain number, people should know to close the registrations and just maintain and manage the instance well. I would say some people don’t listen to their instincts and keep pushing beyond what they can take on and ruin their experience and the instance with it. That is the cautionary tale of lemm.ee that others should learn from. It was no bad apples and awful people, it was just too much for too few to handle.
By all means help people set up other instances, but have them be small. Lemmy.world is constantly being hit with new registered trolls and instigators and it is very clear why they pick it, because it is the larger instance and hijacks the lemmyverse attention in the process through this same filters we are speaking of, which is whay I’m on this detour. I also want to say that the administrators and mods have done a great job, but I’m seeing the same cracks that I saw on lemm.ee start to show in that is becoming too much for them to handle so much. It’s not that they are making bad decisions or becoming terrible at all, is that it is starting to become impossible for them to keep the standards they have maintained so far. It’s too much to handle. That’s all.
Like I said before… “Scale is the death of virtue”. Still can’t remember where this is from though. Aging is fucked.
Just one last quick mention, I absolutely agree with you regarding the transparency of having our comment history visible. Nobody needs to volunteer their identity, but it’s the least we can do as to gain trust to let the things we say here be visible to all. And absolutely that was one of the (many) problems of what it went so wrong with reddit. But I gotta say, reddit was amazing for a while. Then it wasn’t anymore. That is why I’m worrying in advance about this place.
Anyway, thank you for this exchange. I really appreciate thoughtful discussions and you gave a few things to ponder. I’m gonna sit with them and see what comes out.
Much appreciated.
There is no karma-posting on here though. People post a lot because they want their communities to grow. This is the case with /new/ only or /hot/. The habits won’t change.
Remember though that the Fediverse has public voting, so any attempts to game it are often caught and the perpetrators banned. This is very unlike Reddit. Upvoting/downvoting as a system is not perfect, it’s incomplete - and alternative systems could exist, however a react system of some sort is necessary to curate content across the board for the audience.
I mean that if only /new/ existed, then after an hour or so - a small community is invisible unless they keep posting constantly. Because people are unlikely to scroll back and notice posts from that community.
The Fediverse is far too small to even discuss bringing up guards against growth now. In addition, instances can have wildly different - and do have wildly different local policies on community creation, account creation, federation, upvoting (some disable upvotes and downvotes) and many other things if possible. Some instances - as I’m sure you are aware of just don’t get on with each other and their own respective userbases would have different opinions over policy.
I must have missed Rimu saying that recently. I am also on piefed.social. He only communciated that for storage reasons to me in the past.
This is part because the Lemmy software lacks trivial safeguards against day 1 trolls by the way. They can’t even delay community creation for X days for new accounts because Lemmy simply doesn’t have it built in as an option.