Love the words. Once of my early positive impressions of lemmy was coming across longer form comments. It's so hard to get thoughts across in tweet format especially when we're all completely anonymous with potentially wildly different perspectives. I'm following your ideas here and I'm rarely opposed to experimentation. I have learned from experience that there's more to successful implementation than is apparent before you start and even the best plans can't account for real world testing.

It's been a couple days now but I think that manipulation of automated processes is sort of what I was alluding to when I didn't want to commit to an idea. People will figure it out and fuck with it.

I guess my approach is more about patience and subtle changes (outside of experimenting in small time limited areas). What we're talking about would be a major change in the context of lemmy and it's too complicated to predict the outcome of something like that. As a fun thought, there is some point in the history of reddit that would have set it onto the path it arrived at today. Maybe awards? The voting system? The composition of moderators? Changes should be done cautiously and gradually. Onboarding is a pressing problem, but I think it could be treated in isolation until a sites-wide solution is more obvious. Lemmy is doing great! Lemmy users are capable of self managing the issue of ideological influences across instances, even if it appears haphazard it seems to work, maybe, for now. Loads of problems to address outside of this as well.

I'm also a fan of sudden chaotic changes. I have a 'be careful but also break it if you want' thought process. I love the theory of evolution and I think as much as we want to be careful things are going to happen we don't want and can't predict and it can be fun to just throw a wrench in the motor and see where it takes us.