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What factors do you think contributed to the "Reddit Hivemind"? How do you believe it can be avoided? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I've been seeing more often (and others have posted the same) that some of the elements of "Reddit etiquette" seem to be taking over here. Luckily I can still find discussion comments but it seems the jokes and general "downvote because I disagree" are slowly taking over.

So the question becomes is it the size or the functionality of the site? The people or popularity? What's your thoughts?

edit: should I change it to Lemmy-hivemind? Exhibit A: the amount of downvotes without a single explanation (guessing it's anything to do with Reddit being talked about).

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[–] xmunk 30 points 3 months ago (2 children)

We've absolutely got hive minds here - it requires extremely good and dedicated moderators to keep in check but one thing that might help is adopting my favorite hackernews rule... you are prohibited from downvoting any comments that are direct replies to your comment. That single block works pretty effectively to untrain the habit of "downvote what I disagree with".

[–] [email protected] 21 points 3 months ago (1 children)

We also have a problem on lemmy that there is a subset of users who think that votes are how you curate your feed. They downvote anything that they don't want to see instead of blocking communities that they aren't interested in.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Consequence of lack of onboarding. Would be easily fixed by popping up instructions for voting and feed shaping the first time a new user votes.

Quora may be exacerbating the behaviour by automatically blocking topics when you downvote questions. They also downvote a question for you when you only want to report it for something. The downvote remains after the reported issue has been corrected.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

probably an unpopular view but tbh i think voting has ruined modern forums

firstly its much much easier to game, and for big platforms to fake

but more to the point, voting makes excellent sense when the topic is something with a clearly provable right/wrong answer. eg. technical questions are ideal for voting, where the wrong information does belong at the bottom because its simply wrong and in most cases most people can easily verify if it works or doesn't work.

instead we get voting for everything now, so it merely becomes a poll of opinions not facts, but unfortunately our monkey brains sees the numbers and somewhat equates emotions with facts.

oldschool forums ALREADY HAD a poll feature, so when we wanted a poll we could get one. now everything is a poll, and when everything is a poll nothing is especially meaningful.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I feel so stupid lol. I'm on a bunch of random forums still that I've been visiting since the early 2000's and trying to figure out why things go so bad socially (grouping/instance hating/etc) on platforms like this so quick. There's no voting on any of them, it's such a baked-in thing here and on reddit and so foreign on forums that I just didn't consider it for some reason. There's definitely dissent or butting heads but it usually just fizzles out and doesn't carry onto other posts (unless two users really hate each other, always happens unfortunately).

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

aye exactly. since voting is apparently a big thing now, if we have to work within it, some ideas might help such as mentioned above where hackernews prevents downvoting replies to you.

some other ideas

permit upvoting but downvotes require a textbox reply (imo downvoting without a valid explanation is just noise, and we want signal over noise right?)
self posts not being upvoted (all posts start at 0)
i really like how lemmy shows both up & down rather than final value on alot of sites
no voting until you 'earn your stripes'. not perfect, but somewhat helps at keeping voting within domain expertise.

eg. i 'fucking love science', but just because an answer feels nice to me on nuclear rocket surgery doesn't mean my vote should count. let alone be equal to someone with expertise