Comment on I wish there were more articles about tech not tech biz
rglullis@communick.news 6 months agoThis 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.
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.
cosmic_slate@dmv.social 6 months ago
…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)?
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.”
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.
rglullis@communick.news 6 months ago
The discussion started because OP wants to have “more hard tech” and less “tech biz news”. How do you think you’d enforce that, and how would you avoid splitting the ones that do not agree with that direction?
On HN, it’s easy to avoid splittering the community because there is no “sub-HN”. The ones that are not interested or oppose the guidelines have no other option but to leave.
On Reddit or Lemmy, it’s quite easy to “fork” a community or simply creating another for the more specific niches. So you don’t end up with a single /c/technology, but instead we get a “popular” /c/technology (for the lowest denominator) and the more specific “/c/hard_tech” or “/c/true_tech”.
Hadriscus@lemm.ee 6 months ago
are they paid ?