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Collectively, Lemmy has a substantive comment issue (dmv.social)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by cosmic_slate@dmv.social to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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tl;dr: let's stop the generic and almost-irrelevant-doom-and-gloom karma-harvesting one-liners that can be copy-pasted between any two articles written in the last century

Background

Anyone who has used Reddit for any decent period of time is probably aware of the drill -- when you create an account, unsubscribe from the defaults and find the smaller communities. It will end up in a better experience.

Why were people told to dodge the defaults? They were the largest subreddits. But because they were large, the quality was often regarded as "meh" due to post and comment quality.

How bad was it? You'd find news posted about something, then you'd click into the comments, find they're something to read, then move on.

A week passes and an article on a similar subject comes up. You click into the comments and a sense of "Is this deja-vu?" is felt. Is this comment thread for the article this week, or the article from last week?

Turns out, the discussion was too generic. It wasn't uniquely thought provoking to the article posted. The comments didn't offer much and could be copy-pasted between many news posts spanning any given year.

Reddit became boring after picking up on this pattern, especially as this became the norm on so many communities. The comments served as candy for feeding a doom-scrolling habit. At times I'd joke to myself that I could predict what the upvoted comments would be.

Why do I bring this up?

I've noticed that commentary in the most popular communities have been flooded with unsubstantial commentary as of late -- the type of commentary that could be copy-pasted between almost any two articles in a given month. It feels like cheap karma acquisition, even though Lemmy doesn't really incentivize karma.

The Lemmy community has a lot of energy and a lot of people who want to see it succeed. I do too.

So what should we do?

I am advocating that we collectively try to put in more thought in our discussions. I think Hackernews (sans the occasional edgy political take) and Tildes might be worth learning from. Let's make it a goal to contribute content that others may learn from and do away with the copy-paste doom-and-gloom comments.

Just unsubscri-

Yes, the popular refrain to a lot of concerns about Lemmy is "just unsubscribe from those and join another community". I disagree that is the right solution. This isn't limited to just one or two communities of a given type and what habits are created in one community easily spread to others due to the very large overlap in users.

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[-] Fizz@lemmy.nz 158 points 1 year ago

I think people should just comment whatever they want. Give me your off the top of your head thoughts. We dont need every comment to be an expert analysis.

Lemmy isn't big enough to gatekeep content and when it becomes big enough most people won't care about the gate keeping

[-] ryathal@sh.itjust.works 30 points 1 year ago

I think lemmy only has two types of posts, these with less than 10 comments and ones hexbear folks posted in.

[-] Gormadt@lemmy.blahaj.zone 42 points 1 year ago

Honestly I'd rather have the 10 comment threads than the ones with the Hexbear crowd in them. Those threads are always a train wreck of shit takes, sealioning, and bad faith arguments.

[-] flipthetube@lemmy.world 35 points 1 year ago

I’ve never heard the term sealioning. Is it really a thing?

I don’t think it is, but if you have any evidence to prove it, I’m listening.

[-] Gormadt@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 points 1 year ago

Here's the definition for those unfamiliar

And here's a fun comic example of it:

[-] teddy-bonkerz@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

Holy shit, not me.

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[-] zoostation@lemmy.world 87 points 1 year ago

this

[-] cosmic_slate@dmv.social 27 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I walked into this one -- this response is inevitable and only makes this man weep after his rant to the world.

[-] theodewere@kbin.social 7 points 1 year ago

don't ever let them see your tears, it's how they multiply

[-] LarryTheMatador@sh.itjust.works 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

[-] bloopernova@programming.dev 11 points 1 year ago

this

yarp

[-] o0barkbarkbark0o@lemmy.world 39 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

How do I stop being just a lurker and start contributing something meaningful? I'm jaded from Reddit and fear I'll have people jumping down my throat like happens so often on there. Edit: two words

[-] abracaDavid@lemmy.world 17 points 1 year ago

Asking questions is a great way to start if you don't know the subject at hand but you find it interesting.

[-] Metal_Zealot@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago

This. I asked "Why are people mining coal again lately?" on AskLemmy.

It was something I easily could've spent time googling, but it was interesting to see peoples different explanations and the discussions that it led to.

And if someone Google's the same question later, who knows, that thread might show up in the results

[-] cosmic_slate@dmv.social 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I'll promise to (try to) be nice :)

I think it all varies for how to contribute.

Perhaps if someone posts something about a product you use -- let's say an article about how some feature is broken but you've known about it for some time, just chiming in with "I've noticed this issue ever since an update last year" would provide interesting information. If I'm someone who hasn't used the product, now I know it has been a historical issue.

For something that's a bit more effort, say someone posts a news or politics article. If you know any additional context about the issue, that might be worth contributing. Let's say an article comes out about a representative pushing for a certain policy at a national level. If you know this politician has pushed for this policy at a local level, contributing a link so that others can read more about their efforts would be beneficial.

[-] imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works 11 points 1 year ago

Good suggestions. On the one hand you're right, but on the other hand I don't want to totally discourage people from posting a silly/low effort comment if that's all they have to say.

Although it's true that Lemmy comments are not always substantive, there is an associated problem whereby a lot of posts barely get any comments or discussion at all. So I think we also need to recognize that even a low effort joke can help stimulate further discussion and maybe result in a more substantive comment in the form of a reply.

[-] Sigmatank@midwest.social 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I've been trying specifically to comment on posts in areas where I want more content with something related to the post. There hasn't necessarily been more NBA discussions, but I usually get a response from the poster, which is how you start the snowballs rolling I think

[-] theodewere@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago

jaded from Reddit and fear I’ll have people jumping down my throat

that's not easy to get over, but trust yourself

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[-] paddirn@lemmy.world 27 points 1 year ago

[-] sbv@sh.itjust.works 22 points 1 year ago

The duplicate bot posts and lack of organic content are my problem. Low effort comments can be ignored or used as a conversation starter, but if there's nothing posted, then there's nothing to say.

[-] Pons_Aelius@kbin.social 17 points 1 year ago

At times I’d joke to myself that I could predict what the upvoted comments would be.

That was no joke. It was a regular occurrence.

Reddit's biggest strength was also it biggest draw back, its size.

If you came across a thread that was more than 30 minutes old, there was little point in making a longish, thoughtful and nuanced response as it would be burred at on page 4 and lucky to be seen by anyone. Let alone read by someone who would take it on board and reply to any points you made in a meaningful way.

The main way to gain any visibility was to reply to one of the top 3 or 4 comments, which often lead to a large number of actually replies that were correcting a minor error of fact in the comment, rather than addressing the point of the comment.

The response to this by some people was to hang out in r/new and post comments in the fresh posts in the hope of getting some visibility that way. The down side was there was still little point in spending 5-10 minutes (or more) writing a long form post as two things would usually happen.

1: The post would gain no traction, get lost in the flood of new posts and never be seen on the main tabs, so your reply would be unread.

2: The post would gain traction but in the 10 minutes you were writing a decent reply, the flood of the same jokes and one liners have already drowned out any real discussion.

Whether you cared about Karma or not, the sheer volume of comments and votes drove those that did to endlessly spam the same responses over and over again.It is a great example that at some level humans on mass are no better than the pigeons B F Skinner placed in his boxes endlessly hammering away at the button in the hope that this time a treat will pop out.

Now, I assume, many of us here have had a similar experience. While we may not have liked it, conditioning like that is really hard to break. Personally, I am willing to admit that my first thought was to hit add comment after only writing the first line of my response.

The only thing that is harder than forming a habit is breaking one that is maladaptive and not serving you well.

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[-] CrayonRosary@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Seriously. Every top comment is some dumb doom and gloom, one-sentence hot take. Or at least super cynical.

Like just yesterday some post mentioned a YouTube Music strike, and the top comment was "People use YouTube Music?" What a waste of comment space. Yes, people use it, obviously.

And that is almost every thread. Just some idiot making some idiot comment. Who the hell up votes shit like that? It's still the top comment and has even more upvotes now.

[-] OpenStars@kbin.social 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

(1) Do you remember that ennui engine article that was making the rounds a few months ago as Reddit collapsed? I had already started thinking along those lines so it being more advanced along that road, it really helped me realize that social media being that way is the point. Also, it was extremely well written I thought, or perhaps it was just so very timely, but in any case I recall that I could barely put it down bc I wanted to just soak up that article. I shared this thought both bc the content is relevant, but also bc I want to read more content that is like that, which really makes you think rather than as you say simply doom scroll. (Although typing on a mobile, I have to fight it from changing fully formed words making perfect English sense, to using entirely different words that do not match, which further matches our theme here in saying how technology is not always so friendly.)

(2) Check out this post if you would: https://kbin.social/m/BestOf/t/177639/u-at-lvxferre-at-lemmy-ml-discusses-the-dichotomy-between-effective-moderation-vs-low-content. First it is once again relevant in multiple ways to the discussion at hand, but also note the magazine it is in: an entire one dedicated to highlighting and sharing the "best" content on the Fediverse. Note in particular how there have only been 4 posts since my own that I'm linking here... that was from 2 months ago, which REALLY helps underscore the exact message about the content: the higher the quality filter, the less of it there is. We would love to see an excellent post in our doomscrolling once a day, but what if it were only available once every other month? That magazine btw does not accept primary submissions such as my former one, only secondary content i.e. it takes a second person to nominate a post.

I would love to see a similar magazine geared toward deeper thinking. If you create or find one, please let me know?

(3) If there were such a one (probably there could be and I simply not having done the due diligence to find it yet:-D), I would share this video to it: https://youtu.be/R943_eAvnWw. If you don't want to watch the full thing, maybe skip to just the end summary, but I am saying that I found it highly relevant to again the type of content we are talking about here, compared to typical YouTube videos.

And once again, the only question is what to do about it. We cannot control others, who e.g. Won't Look Up, all we can control is ourselves. So what will we do, who want such as this? I cannot create such a magazine btw bc I am on Kbin which iirc has zero moderation tools (or an API). I might create a Lemmy account purely to create such a magazine, but then I cannot migrate my existing account over... that was a major selling point for the Fediverse but turned out to be a lie (for now). So the state of the current tools really does impact the end result. If you have a solution though, e.g. if you will create such a space for deeper thoughts, I would love to join it.

Note it is easy to make a bookmark to a specific magazine, so that someone can check that (once a day? week?) and still have access to doomscrolling on their mobile devices, which ngl is a heck of a lot easier to perform than to type (especially on Kbin using a browser rather than an app).

[-] Pons_Aelius@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago

Great response. Thanks for putting this together.

I had seen the first two links/points you mentioned before and they are both interesting reads.

The third I had not seen before.

On a meta note:

If you don't want to watch the full thing, maybe skip to just the end summary

When I read this my thought was: "Oh, is it an hour long deep dive into a subject" and was surprised that it was only 8ish minutes long... and you included a TLDR. Which is a great example of one of the issues with social media now. The collapse of attention spans.

A big factor in this for me is the lemmy-mobile/Kbin-desktop divide. I know it is not true for all people but accessing via mobile seems to exacerbate the short comment, little engagement issue. In part, I think due to the relative ease of typing on an actual keyboard vs a mobile screen.

I gave up viewing reddit on mobile several years ago due to this and to restrict my time on the site to when I was at home. (this was also the reason to access the fediverse via Kbin) Case in point, I would never write comments of the length I have in this thread on mobile.

While reddit and the fediverse look and behave a lot like old school forums that were desktop based, I think it is safe to say the majority of users access it on a mobile screen which changes the interaction dynamic and rewards or encourages the short comment and move on behaviour.

This is also why image based posts gained in popularity as they are easier to consume on a small screen.

I have no real answer to this as I realise that to many people, social media only exists in the mobile space but the way media is consumed does have a strong effect on what is consumed and I haven't really seen this aspect of doomscrolling talked about in discussions like this.

[-] OpenStars@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago

Re the TLDR: you can tell I have gotten used to a Reddit-style audience indeed:-). But also I enjoy "unpacking" myself here much more:-D. (e.g., can you tell that I also have switched now in this comment to a keyboard? :-P)

You are very welcome and thank you very much for the thanks!:-)

I put that in emphasis b/c I want to keep coming back to it, by adding some new points relating to it:

(4) There really is a "social" side to this place too. That is not a bug but really truly is a feature. We like it even? At least when it is short and easy to pass over - it provides a short-term value, and probably a longer-term one as well, in keeping communities civil & dare I say welcoming?

Sites featuring blogs and articles also exist, if we want to seek those out. The Fediverse would serve as a great way to collect them together, making them more discoverable, but the primary purpose of the Fediverse seems to me to be a "social media" site, so focusing more on the social than on the exact content - and that I seriously doubt will ever change, so any thinking must keep that foremost in mind, the practicality side.

(5) I actually disagree about the mobile issue - or rather I think a much MORE foundational issue is that Reddit was for-profit. That caused them to enshittify their product, regardless of which means you used to consumed it. But then yes, I do see how the device used further compounded that and even here in the Fediverse is going to affect things moving forward, like the overall UI/UX needing to work for both mobile and desktop, putting constraints on what can / will be implemented compared to what would be most optimal for just the latter alone.

(6) Highly relevant to this discussion, it also seems to me that it is a problem of the class of "finding information", such as how you would handle your email. There, putting things in folders has its set of pros and cons - needing effort up-front, especially if a message concerns multiple topics, plus as the set of folders itself grows larger the problem meta-escalates (one email account for home, another for work, each with its own set of folders, so now which account, which folder, in which other sub-folder, is the thing I want? again, especially crossing multiple boundaries like a non-work meeting, but with your work friends, but during non-work time - is that "personal" now or...? in any case it may need to go onto your "personal" calendar if you do not have access to your "work" machine at that time, but anyway the division lines are not always so clear-cut). Conversely, leaving all messages in one huge pile has its pros as well - you'd need to design a "query" to find it later anyway, but how often do you really "search" for emails to begin with, compared to simply read them and move on? - although it is much easier to "miss" messages this way. Which style we use probably says more about our emotional preferences than which is "best":-D.

And relating back to the "social" messages such as emphasized above - those legitimately add information too? They indicate receipt of the message for one, as well as friendliness of the recipient. But is that primarily short-term information, so should those simply be "deleted" after being read, or instead stored along with the rest, especially if they are quick to glance at and pass over while looking for something else? Or should the sender not have even bothered to send them, if they were to be considered a waste of the recipient's time?

Applying the former thought to the Fediverse, how do we "find" the content that we want to see, other than ofc creating it ourselves?

(A) we can create a new sort algorithm, adjusting the "Feed" to suit our preferences, the benefit here is that it affects everyone across the entire Fediverse, who can elect to use the new algorithm or not. But it would take coding, creating consensus, and could take months to more than a year. Google got its whole start as a company this way even, as did the predecessor to Reddit iirc, so the solutions could range from simple to very very complex.

(B) we subscribe to existing magazines, which takes mere seconds and gets us most of the way there insofar as threads at least though not comments.

Oops, it says this is too long.

[-] OpenStars@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago

Continued:

(C) we create a new magazine where the culture is to only offer worthwhile messages. But... whereas my long-as$ essay here may be full of "information", is it truly "worthwhile"? THAT is in the eye of the beholder. Hence a niche sub where the collection of like-minded people upvote/boost comments that are of interest to them could be of value...

Until it gets poisoned, maybe by a bunch of kids just wanting to have fun, or people who legit disagree about the end goal, and it subsequently all falls apart - e.g. reviews on sites like Amazon or Yelp or whatever, which seem worthless these days? I really wish a reviewer would say something like "this year's phone model is crap - buy last year's instead", but instead the professional reviewers all have to say that "it's the best one yet, it has zero problems, maybe a slight one with the corners not being as round as I'd like", and most of the negative normal-people ones I see are more like "I did not enjoy the packaging they sent it to me in, I wanted gold filigree instead, engraved with a President's signature personally to me" (WTF DOES THAT HAVE TO DO WITH THE FUNCTIONALITY OF A PHONE EVEN!? ahem:-P), and ofc the ubiquitous "when I opened this I was standing next to my husband, who was wearing a red shirt at the time, and I distinctly recall that I craved donuts...but there were none to be had". Translation: I am saying that the default state of the universe is to increase rather than decrease entropy, and if we want to work against that, it is going to require more than a little effort to build a good thing, and even more effort to maintain it, and defend it from "attack".

And the only solution I can think of is that a community of like-minded people becomes self-reinforcing. New people come in, step out of line, and are put in their places by everyone else. The work is spread out among many people, making both the overall effort easier (b/c people don't even bother bucking the system) and also the personal efforts can be spread out among many. The entire Fediverse does not need to change (which is fortunate b/c that was never in the cards to begin with!:-P), but those who want memes can have them, those who want a place for yo mama jokes can likewise have their space, and too for those who want deeper introspection? Which again, might even exist already, I simply have not done much looking beyond that BestOf community I linked to.

[-] Franzia@lemmy.blahaj.zone 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I really hate seeing hacker news all over lemmy. Stop telling me to go there. Stop telling me they're better than me. If you like another site so much, use it. You will like me less.

OP if you want better comments, try asking better questions.

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[-] TheFeatureCreature@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago

This is, for sure, an issue carried over from Reddit, but it's also a byproduct of another issue we carried over from Reddit: Most posts have a substantive issue.

Obviously not every community has this issue, but so many of them seemingly serve as nothing but news aggregators and do absolutely nothing to promote engagement or discussion. It is no surprise that the quality of comments has dropped when there are entire communities that are just copy-pasted news sludge with no other sense of community or engagement.

When the content on your website feels disposable then people will treat it as such. Lemmy as a whole has this exact same issue as Reddit does, which is not surprising because Lemmy is basically a clone of Reddit. I made a post on Beehaw a while ago about how the instance lacked any sense of community and I've seen similar sentiments expressed in other instances here and there. People, such as myself, who expected something better from Lemmy and getting frustrated when we can't find it. There was a supreme opportunity presented to us when the Reddit migration began, to make new communities and spaces for discussion of a higher quality than Reddit could ever provide but Lemmy completely squandered that. Lemmy sucks - and that's because it clones so much of Reddit... which also sucks.

[-] Corgana@startrek.website 8 points 1 year ago

I think moderators should feel free to shape their communities however they are fit, DaystromInstitute deletes low effort comments, Risa rewards them. both are great.

[-] problematicPanther@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

Holy hell

[-] silentknyght@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

Which comes first, the comment or the content?

I'm happy to comment, but (1) it takes a lot of effort to make a good comment, and I'm not sure I regularly have meaningful things to contribute, and (2) many posts are retread memes, reposts, or iterations on slow-moving US political nonsense, and as such not worthy of commenting, and (3) new newsworthy posts are rare.

This is when I browse everything. It's even worse in my subscribed communities.

[-] lolola@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 1 year ago

How much of this is due to the subjects of the posts? If news articles are pretty similar week to week, I'd expect the discussion around them to be similar too. That shifts the onus on users to stop posting and upvoting same-ey content all the time, or moderators to take more of it down.

[-] loobkoob@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago

I agree with the OP, but I do somewhat agree with you, too. A lot of the news articles we get now feel like "micro-updates" to the same story: Elon Musk does bad thing that is bad for Twitter, Russia says shitty thing and attacks Ukraine some more, the American right-wing tries to do something else to take away abortion rights, etc. They can sometimes be interesting developments, and I don't want to minimise the importance of any of them because they are important (well, not most of the Musk spam, but the others, certainly), but most of the commentary on topics like those has been played out over the last 12+ months and there's not necessarily much new content to analyse or discuss.

However, OP is right that comment sections here are often disappointing. I find myself commenting here a lot less often than I did on Reddit simply because there are fewer interesting comments to reply to, and because my own comments get fewer interesting replies. Part of that is just the nature of having a smaller userbase, but it doesn't stop it being a little demotivating when it feels like you're commenting into the void, or when no-one really wants to engage in an in-depth discussion.

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[-] alienanimals@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

[-] cosmic_slate@dmv.social 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

You’re demonstrating exactly my point of behavior that I am advocating against.

The Elon-stan spam is annoying for sure but on Lemmy it’s the complete other direction. A substantial amount of commentary is still talking about him, just venting. We don’t need some shitbag billionaire’s name plastered everywhere.

It is very, very, very safe to assume most people on here agree (myself included) that he’s a horrible person who feeds off malicious controversy and often publicizes viewpoints that are dangerous to the marginalized.

I believe your comment offers little substance because its general gist is repeated so often and isn’t at all related to this post.