Asklemmy

Gamifying the voting incentivises people to make low quality posts and comments. That’s why Reddit is now basically just rage bait fake stories with comment chains that all look exactly the same. And now it’s all just ai generated anyway.

I sometimes visit and read the AITAH type stories and I’m dumbfounded that people can believe or enjoy reading them. All the subtleties and nuances of the early days are gone and it’s a race to who can karma farm the hardest.

The other thing that made Reddit great in early days were the small communities being visible on the front page. It made the content varied and there were different types of posting hitting front page. I think Lemmy is struggling with this because politics is just so loud that we don’t have enough volume of other content being made.

I think the difference is when you have a small group everyone sort of considers themselves co-custodians of a space—lifting each other up and helping people integrate. But get enough people and it starts getting exhausting constantly trying to enforce norms against an ever growing community of people who don't understand or respect them. It's like social enshittification.

The universal problem is that there’s no shared definition of what a downvote represents. Is it “this is spam and should be removed”? “I don’t like this”? “This doesn’t belong here”? “I want to see less of this”? “I disagree”?

That’s not even a Reddit problem - it’s innate to any social media voting apparatus. Extend it to Facebook, even. Does the laugh reaction mean I’m laughing with you or at you?

Most comments and posts I’ve downvoted have been because I accidentally swiped too far right and my upvote changed to the downvote action and I didn’t even notice. So those downvotes don’t even mean anything!

I think the right answer is to stop worrying about votes. Even if they all mean the same thing they’re still meaningless. It’s better to change your post and comment sorting setting than to try to social engineer a way out of it.

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".

if we can avoid Lemmy's most active city being Eglin Air Force Base, we just might be able to avoid the hive mind

Whenever I saw someone complaining about the "hivemind" over there, they were invariably whining about people not liking their unpopular opinion on something. When you say "hivemind" you are equating anyone with that opinion to insects/drones/NPC etc. Just because you're different doesn't mean you're right.

Moderation and mods being accountable.

Public modlogs help a lot

Moderation is a big part. Heavily libbed up mods such as the Lemmy.World ones are only allowing one perspective to be posted. Which is why the place is slowly turning into Reddit

This is done in three ways:

• Restricting what content is allowed to be posted using made up metrics like MBFC or calling anything they don't like an opinion piece.

• Allowing users to insult those with differing opinions EG call them Russian bots or Trump supporters and only banning users when they insult those trolls back.

• .World/WorldNews style just banning anyone who doesn't have a Biden style Zionist worldview.

The centralization around .World is one of the biggest issues facing Lemmy right now.

The structure of Reddit’s content aggregation and curation leads to a regression to the mean. Things that are broadly agreed-upon, even if wrong, are amplified, and things that are controversial, even if correct, are attenuated. What floats to the top is whatever the hive mind agrees is least objectionable to the most people.

One solution that seems to work elsewhere is to disable downvoting. Downvoting makes it too easy to suppress controversial perspectives. Someone could put forward a thoughtful position on something, and if a few people don’t like the title and hit the downvote button, that post may be effectively buried. No rebuttal, no discourse, just “I don’t like this, make it go away.” Removing the downvote means if you don’t like something, you can either ignore it, or you can put effort into responding to it.

The “downvote to disagree” thing isn’t just an attitude problem, it’s a structural issue. No amount of asking people nicely to obey site etiquette will change the fact that the downvote button is a disagree button. If you don’t want a hive mind, you necessarily need to be able to allow for things you don’t like to be amplified.

Twitter is actually better for this than Reddit because it has the quote function. You can amplify something you don’t like as a way of getting other people to hate it with you. It’s not perfect, but there’s no way of having it both ways. “Reddiquette” was never a real thing, just a polite fiction that ignores the Eternal September world that we live in.

If you have the same structure as Reddit, you will recreate Reddit. Lemmy isn’t going to be different if all the incentives and interactive elements are the same.

Literally nothing can be done to avoid it. The "Reddit hivemind" is the human hivemind. When enough people start contributing to a certain community, certain ideas usually unanimously shared between individuals get boosted up to the top and become general consensus.

They hive mind is just as strong on lemmy as it is on Reddit. which has led me to wind-down my engagement on lemmy and will very soon drop it all together. going back to RSS I guess or might try nostr next.

Users upvoting/downvoting leads to a hivemind, even if the moderation is not complicit (which it often is).

If users were able to migrate their accounts that could help against centralization

It was moderation and up/down votes influencing comment order.

On reddit you are punished very harshly for downvotes. Your comment gets put at the bottom, hidden and you get rate limited so you can only comment once every 10mins. Mods also nuke threads that go against their ideals and perm ban people in those threads.

Reddit culture shifted a lot during 2015 and the site mods felt they needed to control the discourse.

I don't know how we would fix that problem but I feel like instances and a modlog goes a long way

Remove downvotes. Unironically, its a good idea. Requires people to actually engage with something if they disagree rather than just downvote and move on. Gets people talking & raises user engagement. Will be an uptick in shitflinging for a short while till all the assholes out themselves, get banned, and site culture improves from that alone.

We talk about it as a hive mind, but I think it is actually a problem of large numbers of users and an algorithm that needs tweaking, plus some shady mods.

You post but you're too late, or you have a legit opinion that needs a few sub comments, but it's too late.

Or you get trolled, you respond in a similar vein, and the mod bans you but not them, because the mod likes their opinion more. And I don't blame mods for being soft in general, because it is a shit job. But sometimes it's frustrating.

Imo, it likely was/is due to the voting system — and, in a similar sense, awards. Redditors want to increase their Karma scores and seem to, at least subconsciously, view it as clout. So, they'll create posts with the intent of farming these points — ie they post things that they know will get a specific response from the masses. What also doesn't help, and is something that Lemmy similarly suffers from, is that there generally is no established consensus on how votes should be used. An upvote could mean agreement, or that a post is funny, or that it's good quality, or that it's on topic for a community, etc. A downvote could mean that the person disagrees with the post, or that they think that it isn't relevant or they simply don't like the OP. In reality, all that votes do, at the fundamental level, is tell the algorithm where it should place posts (a personalized recommendation algorithm changes this a bit, but the effect is essentially the same) — a post with a large upvote to downvote to ratio gets shown higher up and, by extension, more than one with a smaller ratio. This creates a sort of feedback loop where the posts that get farmed for upvotes get shown more. People don't want their post to be buried, so they'll only post what they think will get upvotes. And since upvotes are usually used for things that illicit an "agreement" response, only posts that people agree with will be shown.

The solution to these issues, imo, is to create an obvious standard for how votes are used and change how they're interpreted by the algorithm. Imo, Facebook was on the right track with how they were using emojis as the voting method. People generally react to posts with emotion, and an emoji is a good representation of that. You could potentially still have an up/down form of vote (alongside the emotional voting options), but it would be standardized to only be used as a metric for relevance/importance/correctness. This could be enforced by moderation, if votes were publicly viewable, by allowing moderators to remove people that are vote brigading (not including emotional votes). Emotional votes probably shouldn't be considered by the algorithm so that emotional bias can be avoided. Or, at the very least, there should be different algorithms that take these voting types into account I'm different ways (eg if you only want funny posts, you could sort to primarily get posts with a laughing reaction). In addition to this, also removing the gamification aspect (not showing (at least not publicly) total scores on profiles).

Stop over-policing people. Just because you disagree with something someone says, doesnt mean you have a right or duty to shut them down

I have a hypothesis that all the good people with a moral compass left Reddit in disgust over the API changes, and effectively being forced into using the official Reddit app. What remains of Reddit are the sociopathic assholes.

It may be impossible to prevent such community-wide erosion especially on an individual basis, but I think the best one can do to at least not contribute to that erosion is maintaining a sense of vigilance about the foundational idea at the heart of Reddit's site-wide rot: "I am smarter than the out-group, and anything I do within the in-group to increase my score affirms that I am endlessly clever and funny."

Tildes is a good example of a healthy community that allows for differences while encouraging good faith discussion. They police for tone instead of wrongness and it's been working out over there. People are generally happy with the discourse.

A lot of it is in site design, too. There aren't downvotes, because they're not needed. There's a lot of proactive moderation coming from the community by using comment labels. Labels help push comments up or down, and some require you to type a reason why, which encourages thoughtfulness instead of knee-jerk hivemind reaction and pile on. The only publicly visible label is the "good" one, so it keeps things positive. The "bad" label alerts mods and has a cooldown time limit, so it's less likely to be abused. I believe once it's used on a comment, the person can no longer reply to it, which helps avoid negative back and forths.

Between the Boston bomber and the APIpocalypse it seemed to me like the hive mind got a lot better, even on Reddit. You could find a lot of different perspectives, and it was rare for one that's definitely wrong to stay on the top. Unless you just define "hive mind" as insufficiently conservative or whatever.