Comment on I wish there were more articles about tech not tech biz
rglullis@communick.news 6 months ago
You are not going to get that at any of the larger communities. We’ll need to grow the niche communities instead, more specific to your interests.
Could you please take a look at fediverser.network to see if gives you anything interesting?
douglasg14b@lemmy.world 6 months ago
It can definitely happen. This is just the result of a lack of quality or subject control.
It degrades to the lowest common denominator. This was seen across reddit, constantly.
It happened on lemmy in record time due to a lack of default outlets for the low quality content.
EatATaco@lemm.ee 6 months ago
I was on reddit for a very long time. And this is why I started to bemoan when communities would celebrate that they passed some number of subscribers.
/pardon me as I yell at the clouds. Stop now unless you want to read a completely unnecessary rant.
Two of my favorite niche subreddits were absolutely ruined by getting big: mindfulness and foodporn. The former was primarily a discussion about practicing mindfulness, there were even a couple of buddhists who actually deeply studied the tradition that provided very good non-western insight. It was a good place to go get help, albeit occasionally got a spattering of stupid memes, but you could easily get past them. As it grew it turned more and more into just memes, and then was just over-taken by new-age nonsense and pseudointellectual quotes over pictures. Food porn (while never exactly what I wanted) went from often having well-done pictures of good food, to shitty cell-phone shots of oversized hamburgers, half eaten food, and plates of food sitting on counters with all of this shit in the background.
rglullis@communick.news 6 months ago
I know that is a big ask, but would you be interested in helping bootstrapping these communities here? I recently created healthy.community/c/mindfulness and sfw.community/c/foodporn as part of my fediverser project, but these are not communities that I am not personally invested in. It would be a lot better if someone already helped to shape its general direction.
CommunityLinkFixer@lemmings.world [bot] 6 months ago
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !mindfulness@healthy.community, !foodporn@sfw.community
rglullis@communick.news 6 months ago
This is just another way of saying “having mods enforcing super strict rules”, which then leads to an ossified culture and a bunch of mods high on their power trip. This was also seen on Reddit and StackOverflow.
Unfortunately, the way to avoid “lowest common denominator” issues that you mention is by going to the places where the denominator is relatively small, but big enough to have network effects in its favor. My experience was that all subreddits between 25k to 500k subscribers worked really well without excessive policing. Between 500k and 1M it could still go by, depending on the moderators. After crossing that mark, things started to deteriorate fast.
If we were to scale that to Lemmy, it means that all communities with a subscriber count >= 1% of the total network will fall into “deteriorate fast” territory.
cosmic_slate@dmv.social 6 months ago
That’s just not universally true. Hackernews is a probably the best example of a site with strong moderation (going as far as editing user’s post titles) and a fairly interesting set of posts mixing news with cool tech stuff.
You can have strong moderation that works out if mods enforce the rules for the sake of quality content, not for the sake of being an internet hall monitor.
rglullis@communick.news 6 months ago
Editing post titles does not count as quality control, in the same ways that some of reddits have such strict rules to the point that mods delete anything that is not exactly within the lines.
HN mods (dang, especifically) don’t care about power trips, because they have actual power
HN is not a single-topic community, like a Lemmy group. If you create a /c/technology and say it is a place to post “Anything that good hackers would find interesting”, it would quickly derail into a constant meta-discussion.
Hadriscus@lemm.ee 6 months ago
are they paid ?