tl;dr: Be excellent to each other, do something constructive here?
I'm not sure anymore where the Threadiverse is headed. (The Threadiverse being this threaded part of the Fediverse, i.e. Lemmy, MBin, PieFed, ...)
In my time here, I've met a lot of nice people and had meaningful conversations and learned lots of things. At the same time, it's always been a mixed bag. We've always had quite some argumentative people here, trolls, ... I've seen people hate on and yell at each other, and do all kinds of destructive things. My issue with that is: Negative behavior is disproportionately affecting the atmosphere. And I'd argue we have nowhere enough nice behavior to even that out.
I don't see Lemmy grow for quite some time now. Seems it's now leveling off at a bit less that 50k monthly active users. And I don't see how that'd change. I'm missing some clear vision/idea of where we want to be headed. And I miss an atmosphere that makes people want to join or stay here, of all of the places on the internet. The saying is: "If you don't go forwards you go backwards". I'm not sure if this applies... At least we're not shrinking anymore.
And I'm always unsure if the tone and atmosphere here changes subtly and gradually. I've always disagreed with a few dynamics here. But lately it feels like we're on the decline, at least to me. I occasionally keep an eye on the votes on my comments. And seems I'm getting fewer of them. Sometimes I reply to a post and not a single person interacts. Even OP seems to have abandoned their post moments after writing it. And also for nuanced and longer replies, I regularly don't get more than one or two upvotes. I think that used to be a bit better at some point. And I see the same thing happening with other peoples' comments. So it's not just me writing low-quality comments. What does work is stating simple truths. I regularly get some incoming votes with those. But my vision of this place isn't spreading simple truths, but have proper and meaningful discussions, learn things and new perspectives or just mingle with people or talk. But judging by the votes I observe, that isn't appreciated by the community here.
Another pet peeve of mine is the link aggregator aspect of Lemmy. I'd say at least 80% of Lemmy is about dumping some political (or tech) news articles. Lots of them don't generate any engagement. Lots of them are really low-effort. OP just dumps something somewhere, no body text added, no info about what's interesting about it. And people don't even read those articles. They just read the title and react (emotionally) to that. In the end probably neither OP nor the audience read the article and it's just littering the place. Burying and diminishing other, meaningful content. (With that said: There are also nice (news) discussions going on at the same time. And Lemmy is meant to be a link aggregator. It's just that my perception is: it's skewed towards low quality, low engagement and random noise.)
A few people here also don't really like political debate. And there's no escape from it here on Lemmy since so much revolves around that. And nowadays politics is about strong opinions, emotions and emotional reactions. And often limited to that. The dynamics of Lemmy reinforce the negative aspect of that, because the time when you're most incentivized to reply or react is, when it triggers some strong emotion in you, for example you strongly disagree with a comment and that makes you want to counter it and write your own opinion underneath. If you agree, you don't feel a strong emotion and you don't reply. And the majority of users seems to also forget to upvote in that case, as I lined out earlier. And we also don't write nuanced answers, dissect complex things and examine it from all angles. That's just effort and it's not as rewarding for the brain to do that as it is pointing out that someone is wrong. So it just fosters an atmosphere of being argumentative.
Prospect
I think we have several ways of steering the community:
- Technology: Features in the software, design choices that foster good behavior.
- Moderation: Give toxic people the boot, or delete content that drags down the place. Following: What remains is nice people and not adverse content.
- The community
I'd say 1 and 2 go without saying. (Not that everything is perfect with those...) But it really boils down to 3: The community. This is a fairly participatory place. We are the ones shaping the tone and atmosphere. And it's our place. It's kind of our obligation to care for it if we want to see it go somewhere. Isn't it?
So what's your vision of this place? Do you have some idea on where you'd like it to go? Practical ideas on how to achieve it?
Do you even agree with my perception of the dynamics here, and the implications and conclusions I came up with?
Continuing my post here due to the character limit:
What can we do?
Votes
I think we all know votes are broken. They just show the agreement level of the mob. Not necessarily connected with quality or if something is interesting to read. I think ultimately that's unfixable. But I'd like to invite you all to vote more. People who write posts or comments need to see it's worth typing it. There has to be some interaction or we're just wearing out people who contribute. And remember to vote on comments, too. Be generous.
Posting the news
I'd say don't do it too much since we already have RSS readers and news sites. But I'm willing to yield with my personal opinion. But(!) Please only post articles that you've read yourself. If it's too boring for you to read, it's probably also too boring for the other people to read any you're just contributing to make this place be littered with random noise.
Posting links with no attached (body) text
Connected to my previous point: Ask yourself: "Why am I posting this?" Is it because you want to discuss something? If yes: Put in a minimum of effort and contribute something yourself. At least write one or two sentences in your post and don't just dump a single link. IMO you should also write a short summary for your audience so they know if they want to click on the link. If you respect them and their time.
Reacting emotionally
We all do that. Just take a step back every now and then and see if your reactions are balanced in a way that you're comfortable with. Remember you can always down-vote someone and be done with it and not start an argument. But you don't need to keep silent. Especially if you're reading a text like this and making an effort, you're probably on the good side, so I don't want you to surrender this place to the people with less approvable behavior.
Be nice
I'd say everyone of us shapes this place by their behavior. If you want it to become a nice place, be nice yourself. We all know that's easier said than done, but we can make an effort.
Diversity
I think diversity is baked in to the Fediverse. We can have different instances with different focus, different moderation policies and a different tone of conversation. The technology isn't there yet to give everyone what they want, but I think we should embrace our diversity. And do something constructive with it. That's not easy. Some people like to have "free speech" and no moderation. Some like to have civil discussions without trolls and people who are constantly wrong, yet very aggressive and argumentative. Some are meme-lords or whatever and everyone is here for their individual reasons. I don't think we need to completely unite or agree on things. But we have to find a way to get along... Be liberal with other people who might be using this place differently. But don't tolerate unacceptable behavior.
Moderators and developers
You have quite some impact here. Use it wisely. Be fair, open-minded and make this a nice place for us.
Netiquette
People figured out in the 1990s, communicating over the internet is slightly different from communicating in the offline world. They wrote an unofficial code of policies that encourage good behavior on the Internet. Used to regulate respect and polite behavior online. It's called the Netiquette (If anyone has a better link, feel free to provide it to me.) It's a bit outdated so let me copy some guidelines and paraphrase:
Never forget that there's a human being on the other side!
Read and think before posting
Share something new
Your posts represent you - Be proud of them
Consider your audience
Be careful with humor, irony, and sarcasm!
Be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you receive.
Take your time when writing a post
Make things easy for the recipient.
Don't waste people's time. You should put in a bit more effort and in return save hundreds of people from spending extra time.
People's culture, language, and humor may have different points of reference from your own
Avoid posting "Me Too" messages, (use an up-vote instead)
Consider using Reference sources (Documentation, Newspapers, Google, ...) before posting a question.
Use spoilers when applicable
Don't get involved in flame wars. Neither post nor respond to incendiary material.
Don't feed trolls!
Deal with the issue, don't attack the person
Utilize the moderators. Flag/Report unacceptable content
Excellent summary overall.
One thing though, regarding feeding trolls. This was excellent advice in the earlier days of the internet, back when anyone trolling was doing it simply as a recreational activity, to have fun.
We no longer live in that world though. People have realized that there's real power here, where one guy on Twitter can start riots through an entire western European country with a single tweet. Where an online campaign can change the political makeup of your country.
Now, in this day, we have a civic responsibility to treat trolls as we would if we encountered these behaviors in real life, because there is no difference anymore. It would be unrealistic to set some utopian standard for our online interactions when the digital sphere has simply become an extension of the physical world, with all the same problems and issues, and thus a responsibility to engage as one's conscience demands.
As a side note, one idea I saw recently that I liked, I think it was mozz's, that people receive temporary bans for any examples of using a classic strawman argument. I think this would be fairly easy to enforce and quite productive. It's almost impossible to troll effectively if you can't strawman, it's probably one of the most common features.
You're probably right. The world has changed substantially since the 1990s. I mean all of the text is more or less the opinion of a random dude (me) who'd like to make Lemmy a better place. But I don't claim absolute truth with any of that. Thanks for your input. I appreciate your pespective.
We could easily add a community setting to make the body mandatory. I suggest you open an issue for that.