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Comment on The best thing *you* can do for the fediverse is *just be kind*

Most people know this in some capacity, but it’s not talked about enough: the shape of the platform massively shapes its culture. Every mechanism, intentional feature or not, is a factor in resulting user behavior and should be accounted for.

Reddit Karma was (shitty) reputation from the start, but Slashdot user IDs became one despite being mere sequential identifiers; negative user feedback such as downvotes can be harmful to communities (yet, users without an outlet may lash out in other ways e.g. reports); even how the platform communicates with users influences them; and so on.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t be nice and incentivize others to do the same, but unless the system naturally leads to the desired behavior, you’ll have a bad time in the long term because building culture by interactions doesn’t scale. By the time you realize there’s a shift, it’s too late; interactions will compound and affect how the average user acts faster than you can try to course-correct.

I wish lemmy was more experimental, because by building a clone of reddit, we’ve copied too many of its faults. We’ve already got gatherings to complain about mods, and the one time devs considered changing a core component, discussion was killed by an onslaught of users. Problems with the current setup that were brought up then will likely never see that amount of people thinking about how to solve them.

Contrast with Mastodon, which gets crap for not being a more faithful copy of twitter, but their reasoning for not including quote-reblogs is understandable. They’re now putting a lot of thought into how to add them safely. Not ignoring functionality users want, but also not ignoring how it will affect culture, that’s compromise.

I’d like it if we could talk more about how our platforms work and, specifically, how they affect us.

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CalipherJones@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
What if we had a tribunal instead of moderators? Actually just in the time it took me to write that out I could see it going terribly wrong LMAO

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- supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  The point of this system isn’t to centralize control under moderators, this isn’t some bug to iron out or a duct-tape solution that is meant to be temporary until we can figure out how not to centralize power.
  
  The point of this system is to encourage communities to create an explicit shared set of values, those values have to be attached to a specific community and thus that community will then have specific people tasked with dealing with grey areas and problems that occur when people don’t adhere to the values.
  
  People need to stop focusing on the moderators and focus on what it means to be explicit with a positive step forward about proclaiming the kinds of values you want to hold in a shared community space. THAT is what gives this place such immense power to shape the world.
  
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  - ArtificialHoldings@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    It’s hard for me to imagine any system as flexible as Lemmy communities NOT operating under centralized control, outside of notional attempts at democratic procedures held by the community owner themselves.
    
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Cris_Color@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I 1000% agree, the design of the space we inhabit shapes our behaviour.

I don’t think collectively we can stop at intentionally being kind, but forming a coherent design vision to effectively shape human behaviour and social outcomes as a community project is HARD and legitimately takes an actual vision and understanding of incredibly advanced design cobcepts very few have the experience to have any realy expertise in. Still important, but I think this is an easy way everyone can contribute. Similar to making donations.

They’re not the only things we need, but they’re a small thing that becomes valuable when the culture decides we collectively prioritize them.

You couldn’t possibly be more right though. Erin kissane has talked a fair bit about that idea in her research. If there are specific design features of Lemmy you wish were different I’d be curious to see discussion posts on this comm about how we can design a space that facilitates more compassionate interactions and healthier community! (Or just to hear about them from you if they’re not fully formed enough yet to post about :)

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- supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  I don’t think collectively we can stop at intentionally being kind, but forming a coherent design vision to effectively shape human behaviour and social outcomes as a community project is HARD and legitimately takes an actual vision and understanding of incredibly advanced design cobcepts very few have the experience to have any realy expertise in.
  
  Yeah if you want to get a PHD in this shit, but you could also just become friends with a bunch of artists and ask them how they like this place, and notice how they talk about it feeling free and vibrant or dead and dying.
  
  By the way, we are already doing this work and it barely feels like we are… because the work is a basic product of the world views, shared values and shared explicit ideological and practical goals of this community space.
  
  You don’t need this crazy apparatus to make this place a vibrant garden, having expert gardeners is definitely helpful, but it is about getting out of the way of kindness and empowering kindness, not coming up with some grand unified strategy to manipulate people into being better humans.
  
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Angry_Autist@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
People were right to be angry about removing voting visibility.

The surest sign a community is toxic is voting patterns and removing our access to that removes our ability to combat the continuing enshittification of lemmy.

And there are many, many mods that need to be complained about.

Though you are right that no-nuance upvote/downvote is a really shitty metric

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