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this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2024
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Unpopular Opinion
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I would argue the actual solution is to curate your feed by subscribing to communities you enjoy and "unsubscribing" from the ones. You can even create your home (or whatever the subscribed feed is called) feed for your "finer" taste and then block communities you don't want to see in the "All" feed.
That's how I've set up my Lemmy. I have my home feed for niche communities that generally don't end up in the all feed, and for general news I have the All feed where I've selectively blocked out communities I really don't care about. Ideally I would like to set up multiple feed because there are some communities that are so small they don't end up in my home feed either. I would need a separate feed for the extra niche communities so I could participate in them and help them grow larger.
While a tag system could achieve something similar I feel like tags would probably be more annoying to use because you'll be at the mercy of whomever sets the tag. If you look at how people use tags on Steam the tags can easily overreach. I had blocked sexual content tag on Steam to get rid of sex games, and it blocked Baldur's Gate 3. Technically Baldur's gate 3 contains sexual content but there's a world of difference between an RPG with sexual content and an actual porn game. I think Valve added some other way to filter out adult games so now I use that and I don't even bother with tags.
Frankly I also browse by "Subscribed". However that is not an actual solution for the problem, unless you have a sensible way to encourage/force other people to do it.
Multiple feeds (a la multireddits) is a great idea that pops up often. I hope that the devs are at least considering it.
The solution doesn't need to be perfect to be useful. So even if posts within a grey area get tagged in a way that reaches a wider audience than they're supposed to,, it's fine.
What do you mean? People already post things in the correct community and moderators make sure wrong posts get removed. My suggestion is that people should make use of that by curating what communities are they see or don't want to see. There's no need to encourage/force other people to do anything, they're already doing it.
First of all, wouldn't the tag system need other people to be encouraged/forced to do it? Secondly, if the tagged grey area posts reach a wider audience then it doesn't solve the problem because the problem is that people don't want to see specific posts in their feed. Posts in the grey area can contain posts people don't want to see. If the unwanted posts still end up in their feeds then the problem isn't solved. The tags should be used to exclude posts not be used to include posts.
I mean that what you call "the solution" (to curate one's feed) already exists and did not solve the problem for the platform as a whole, as attested by the OP. Because regardless of what you or me think that people "should" do, they're still browsing by "All" (that's fine) and then downvoting content geared towards other audiences (that is not fine).
And it is not just porn; you see the exact same issue with content in other languages. Same deal: the resource exists (you can set up the language of your content, as well as the ones that you want to see) and people still don't use it.
You're suggesting that people should make use of that resource, but our suggestions mean nothing if people won't follow them. We do need a way to at least encourage the usage of those resources, and discourage this idiotic "this content is not made for ME! ME! ME!, how do they dare? Downvoting time!" tendency.
It might not solve the problem but it does alleviate it. There's a big difference between seeing 10% or 50% of irrelevant content.
But tags have the exact same issue as the current solution, which is that someone has to set up what tags the user wants to see and the only one who can set them up is the user itself. The current solution already does a better job at solving the problem than tags would and people don't use it. If the people don't use the current solution why would they use tags? Why not just improve the current solution so people would use it?