Comment on What should the subset of the Fediverse that is Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed be called?
ilinamorato@lemmy.world 1 week agoI don’t think likes serve the same function as votes. The downvote, the ranking as a function of score and recency, and the surfacing and consensus-building that comes as a result are the main point of this sort of platform.
By contrast, the microblog “like” (at least on a platform without an algorithm, like Mastodon) doesn’t do anything other than express appreciation.
Threads are common in pretty much every form of social media now, from friend-aggregation sites like Facebook and Friendica to messaging services like Discord and Revolt. They’re hardly exclusive to a Reddit/Lemmy-type service. Mastodon even organizes posts into threads.
OpenStars@discuss.online 1 week ago
No I did mean up & downvotes, and you added a good perspective. I don’t use Mastodon and my main experience there was Kbin, now Mbin, which has both Boosts and actual upvotes (and reduces, which aren’t shown, and downvotes).
I think you are correct: the voting was always the core behind why people liked Reddit, as compared to others at the time.
Although it seems like people are more adamant about remaining with Threadiverse, for the sake of history.
But if a new term was to be used, it would be good for it to reflect voting. Like Forumverse does, perhaps?
ilinamorato@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Yeah, I think “forumverse” isn’t bad. Though I have always felt like a Reddit-like interface and a forum interface are fundamentally different, in some way I can’t really put my finger on. I’ve been involved in bulletin board forums (fora?) in one aspect or another since the late 90s, so maybe it’s just nostalgia vs. recency bias; though it could also be the feeling that a “forum” seems like it should be hyper-specific, with different subforums on an already-niche bulletin board scoping down to even more niche and specific areas.
(Side note: Actually, now that I think about it, maybe the forum -> topic -> thread connection is why people like the name “threadiverse.” The word “thread” definitely seems like it arose from there.)
Anyway, I am fully ready to admit that I’m yelling at clouds here. Get off my lawn, dang kids and all that.
OpenStars@discuss.online 2 days ago
I got busy and did not respond sooner, but wanted to say that I think you are correct: it’s not merely the listing of Topics, which e.g. an RSS reader could do, but rather their ranking of those topics that was an enormous part of made Reddit so popular.
Although didn’t some forums offer that functionality, even if not all?
So as you say it’s the Threaded content, ranked by users as to priority order, that people want to see.
This ofc is all justification after the fact for us here - for whatever reason, people decided on that name, whether they should have or not, and I guess now the question is would a better name be worth the pain of switching? :-)
ilinamorato@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I’m sure there were some forum software packages that offered voting and ranking and such. All of the ones that I was a part of were quiet enough that you didn’t need such a thing, though; you could keep up with every post, even if only to decide that you weren’t interested in it, if you read it every third day or so.