Okay but how do we quantitatively and unambiguously devise a metric for quality? More importantly, how do we come up with a satisfactory approximation to that metric? I’m open to ideas.
Comment on Lemmy MAUs climbing back up! You love to see it.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 6 months ago
More users is nice, but the real metric should be the quality of the content and discussions. And for me that’s the real winner with Lemmy.
Quality over quantity.
PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S@lemmy.sdf.org 6 months ago
twilightwolf90@lemmy.world 6 months ago
How about a ratio of post upvotes to avg upvotes per post in a community? At least upvotes somewhat correlate with post quality.
PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S@lemmy.sdf.org 6 months ago
I like this, but I think that upvotes correspond to things people enjoy, which may or may not be of high quality. I.e., shitposting subs would probably be rated “high quality”.
Also, as stated, that means we have to sum over the entire time history of the community. We would probably want to limit the time history of what is summed over, subject to a maximum for subs with high post counts (like the shitposting subs.
IMO it’s a great suggestion, but I think it needs to be part of a weighted combination of factors.
brbposting@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
Character count and thread depth (number of replies deep threads go) are interesting, while imperfect.
A language model could rate discussion quality.
User surveys…
Hard to think of anything perfect.
weeahnn@lemmy.world 6 months ago
You can’t.
PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S@lemmy.sdf.org 6 months ago
I absolutely think we can approximate it, and MAU furnishes a flawed example of such an approximation.
rockSlayer@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Personally, the only reason to come up with that kind of metric is to justify “profitability”. Lemmy is completely and entirely devoid of the need of profit, so imo it hasn’t, doesn’t and won’t matter
nix@merv.news 6 months ago
Quantity helps the quality in some important aspects though. For example we don’t have an equivalent to r/LegalAdvice or r/AskDocs because there isn’t large enough amount of people that are doctors/lawyers using Lemmy
TheGreenGolem@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 months ago
Or AskHistorians. God I miss that sub.
swab148@startrek.website 6 months ago
But we do have an excess of Trekkies and Linux nerds!
It’s me, I’m the Trekkie Linux nerd.
shotgun_crab@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Quality is subjective, you can’t really measure it. Actual numerical stats like these are more useful imo
Nima@lemmy.world 6 months ago
it’s why I’ve stayed since the initial huge migration from reddit. I find myself caring more about interacting with other commenters.
I never did that on reddit because comment sections just kinda felt like battlefields or playgrounds rather than discussions.
greencactus@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Yes! I fully agree. And it feels just much more… Enjoyable. Because if a post only has 10 instead of 1000 comments, I’ll actually read them and react. And gosh, the few discussions I had on Lemmy were very nice and I actually learnt something new.
nicetriangle@kbin.social 6 months ago
I just hope the platform will expand into more niche content over time. The big topics seem to be news, politics, and some specific tech subjects. Would love to see arts/crafts/hobby related stuff take hold here as well.
That said, I do think a lot of the discussion happening here is pretty high quality and the place does seem to be improving over time. Time will tell. Hopefully more people wake up to the fact that reddit is not gonna hold up on the long term. I expect them to go IPO crazy this coming year and I don't think a lot of the core users are going to like it.
TeaHands@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Might not be the kind of arts and crafts you’re talking about but I mod both !knitting@lemmy.world and !lemmy_stitch@sh.itjust.works, plus there’s !crochet@lemmy.ca , !sewing@lemmy.world and plenty more that would be happy to have you!
nicetriangle@kbin.social 6 months ago
Yeah unfortunately not quite what I'm looking for, but cool to see they're there