this post was submitted on 09 May 2022
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Asklemmy
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Ultimately, Lemmy is a Reddit clone and one problem with Reddit-like platforms is the upvote/downvote system heavily promotes groupthink since dissenting opinions are downvoted into oblivion while consensus opinions are promoted. Lemmy attempts to solve this problem by being open source, self-hostable, and federated (which are all great things), but these aspects alone can't totally solve the inherent groupthink problem, it just makes it easier for those with differing views to spin off and start their own instances, which will likely have their own groupthink.
As politically centrist myself, I've basically just unsubscribed from the political communities and focus on the more tech-related ones. If an apolitical or more centrist political Lemmy instance which federated with lemmy.ml was started there's a good chance I'd join.
It's an interesting point, but what's the alternative? Activity-based ranking like forums and imageboards might be appealing, although it is worth acknowledging they naturally bias towards controversy, for better or worse. Probably worse for a 'centrist', which is a relative non-term but I assume it means pro-status quo liberalism who doesn't like radical ideas.
You can actually set that up on Lemmy's front page (not comments) by using that New Comment sorting, but that's not a default anywhere so its not relevant unless an instance chooses it as a default.
Anyway, groupthink is an interesting problem in the case of recuperation and 'sanewashing' of ideas. reddit's /r/antiwork is a prime example: it was initially anarchists who wanted to abolish the concept of work (not necessarily labor) as we know it, but it became popular and reddit's pro-capitalism pro-liberal groupthink got to the point where their founding(?) moderator's views, congruent with the resources in the sidebar, caused massive outrage. Like you said, dissent and discussion is overwhelmed by funny memes and fulfilling anecdotes.
I agree that pointing out the problem is far easier than finding a good solution. I don't think activity-based sorting is much better since, as you said, that just tends to promote the most outrageous content. Facebook and Twitter-like platforms suffer from that issue more than Reddit-like platforms do. In short, I don't have a good solution and I acknowledge the benefits of the upvote/downvote system (such as outrageous and irrelevant content being filtered out by the community without the need for as much active moderation), but it is a poor tool for fostering civil, ideologically diverse communities.