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No, it’s not a joke. I’m frustrated and I’m probably not choosing my words carefully.
This community has had steadily falling engagement - our last 3 weekly threads have had a grand total of 1 (excellent and well-articulated) response, and the number of topics not generated by myself (or the other mod) since the inception of the community has also been 1.
Very few people want to actually talk. From what I’ve seen, the masses want the same things that they wanted on Reddit:
- Memes
- Articles they don’t read (but will bitch about endlessly) that reinforce their opinion
- Angry responses to someone (who may be trolling) that reinforce the current politics of the reader (that they couldn’t have given a fuck about a few years ago until it became heavily politicized)
- Shitty easy jokes
- Personal politics circlejerking
I hate that I can see a hundredth point-free meme post and view 200 replies on it. I hate that it’s just the same talking points being strawmanned over and over again in every thread. I hate that any point outside common groupthink is downvoted to oblivion and buried instead of discussed.
The reason I’d like to back away from Lemmy seems to be the same reason I started this community: we need more people who can articulate points, and less downvoting, but it doesn’t seem to be getting better.
Maybe one day, but today is not that day. Lemmy needs to mature in more ways than one.
This community didn’t really feel like a place to discuss, it seemed more like a place for the mods to have a soap box for others to listen to them.
Also, some of the “topic starters” were incredibly leading, and also completely out of no where. On the division in the USA “Can it be remedied, or is civil war the only option?”. Civil war? Do sane people think that would solve the political division in your country?
I mean… that’s what starting a thread is as a CMV, article, or Steelman (among others). As a mod, it’s kind of our job to create threads when the Community isn’t large enough yet. Do you feel someone would start a community called Actual Discussion and not have anything they’d like to discuss?
They were common talking points I saw in other threads ripped almost directly from top replies, not my opinion. And you were never required to speak on the starters, they were simply things to get people thinking and responding.
All in all, I’d say you’re being rather uncharitable in your descriptions.
In your main post, you complain about the quality of posts you find online and how people aren’t voting on quality, so then why use highly upvoting as a metric?
That’s not what I said.
I said that things didn’t feel like discussions.
The points weren’t chosen for quality, they were chosen because they are commonly parroted. This was in order to encourage people to discuss things that are commonly spoken, but may not be ideologically sound. In other words, they were chosen specifically to be debateworthy. If a poster chose, as long as they were on topic, they could also completely ignore them or create a new thread. Often in order to discuss something, you must give an opinion first and not merely sit and critique what other people say.
The topics where I wrote out a bunch of stuff that was ripe for picking apart were the topics that were discussed the most heavily. If you don’t feel like that’s a discussion, then I’m not sure what you would feel like one was.