Comment on I wish there were more articles about tech not tech biz

• 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.

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  • 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.

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    • 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

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• rglullis@communick.news ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  This is just the result of a lack of quality or subject control.

  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.

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  • 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.

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    • 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.

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      • cosmic_slate@dmv.social ⁨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.

        …huh? It leaves discussion threads intact while fixing titles to be more reflective of the source material or more reflective of updates to an event. How is this not quality control (and, in turn, moderation)?

        HN mods (dang, especifically) don’t care about power trips, because they have actual power

        Please take a moment to read the comment you’re replying to. See the last statement where I call out “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.”

        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.

        The extent of how single-topic a community is depends on the community and moderators. I don’t know what you’re trying to say here.

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    • Hadriscus@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      are they paid ?

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