Content jacking and top posting other people’s content is really bad for Lemmy. It’s also just being a dick to other people making content on the platform.
- feed is spammy
- divides conversation
- chills engagement
- makes Lemmy less friendly to posters
This pattern is very common on lemmy, and needs to stop.
This is often used to attack or force migrate conversations from a instance someone doesn’t like to another instance they do like. It’s offensive by its very nature.
If you want to make a better community, great, do it but not at the expense of other Lemmy posters.
I feel you. This is quite an interesting thread to read and the different opinions in the comments.
I also think this is a problem for Lemmy. We could be better than other social media sites. Have genuine human conversations. Post high quality content that matters to us. But we regularly don’t. We dump the news, re-post memes… And I mean there are people who like it. But I don’t. I’m here for the comments and I’d rather talk to people than have a lot of noisy content dumped at me, burying human interaction with fabricated activity that’s following some ulterior motives, like make the place seem more busy, or do some internal politics… Which may be warranted. But those aren’t genuine in my opinion. It’s not some other user who likes to talk to me, but someone fabricating something, and it regularly makes me feel used. Plus I’m pretty sure I see it chill engagement.
I wish people only posted things they wanted to talk about. That would mean the entire feed are possible conversations to have.
I try to only post things I’d be happy to talk about.
Maybe it would be interesting to see a poster score based on how many of their posts they don’t engage with once someone makes a comment.
I thought about that as well. It’s a bit tricky to pull it off. But ultimately I think the entire voting system on Lemmy and hence the way it sorts posts is a bit suboptimal. People upvote memes, the ragebait of the day, simple truths. Content that I find interesting or an interesting and long opinions regularly end up with 0-3 upvotes and float to the bottom. So I mainly discard what kind of scores this place has and sort by “new” anyway. It’d be really great if I had some score available to tell me if some content is what I like to read.
A hundred percent that.
I’m pretty sure we’re the minority here. Most people seem to like it the other way around. (Need…more…posts in everyone’s timeline.) I’m pretty sure it’s also a big part of the equation of why Lemmy always stagnates and we’re stuck at 45k users. We’ve been doing it the “re-post” way a long time now, and we can see the results of that. We shove around content because of some reasons, but we should come up with original and genuine content instead. I think what we need is foster a nice atmosphere. Genuine human conversation underneath posts with above average quality. That’d grow Lemmy and make it a better place. (And instead we dump more posts/noise, and we can see where we’re headed with that.)
Preach!
What makes hackernews, metafilter, lobsters great is the community and not the posts.
Beehaw wanted to have this kind of very curated approach, their communities aren’t much more active that on non-curated instances.
If you want very in-depth conversation, maybe try to revive [email protected] ? It seems to fit your requirements.
You talk about original content, it is not contradictory to have both OC and reposts from elsewhere. A thing to keep in mind is that people posting OC will only do so if they get enough reactions on it. [email protected] used to be quite busy when it first started, but the main mod who used to post a lot hasn’t been active for a year, probably because there weren’t enough people here to justify posting here on top of Reddit.
It depends. I post about things I care about. My latest post was about a new movie coming, there were 68 comments: https://piefed.zip/post/153138 , and it was a legit conversation, even though it was a repost from a new movie poster. Reposting existing content isn’t contradictory with having genuine conversations.
It’s a multi factor issue.
To have genuine conversations on a certain topic, there need to be at least a minimum userbase interested in that topic.
With 45k MAU, we can talk about generic topics. The more userbase we get, the more niche topics we can have.
When I talk about Lemmy on Reddit to try to get those additional users we need, the first issues they have with the platform is the political stances of the devs, and the fact that a lot of communities are still hosted on the hosted instance (you’ve read cm0002 comment, so you’re aware).
Lemmy has a bad reputation due to this, and while this will remain true, this will prevent us from getting more people. That’s also why Piefed raises a lot of hopes.
Last potential example of growth: a niche community moving.
Db0 had a large influx of users (625) following a post on Reddit about their instance: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/37167077
[email protected] is mostly reposts with news about piracy, not a lot of OC content, but it being out of Reddit is enough for people to use it.