This community has been around for a few months now. How do we feel about it? Are things working out? Any plans for further growing the community?

This is one of the topics I’ve been thinking a lot about quite a bit for the past few years (i.e. how to set up a community that values discussions with diverse viewpoints), so I thought I’d share some of my thoughts in relation to what I’m seeing here.

  1. I think such a community necessarily needs to be a full self-contained instance, or else you’ll get very little activity. Think about how these discussions usually start. Someone posts an article/meme/question/etc, a few people show up and comment with similar thoughts about it worded in slightly different ways, then another shows up and goes against the grain, everyone dogpiles on them, and that’s when the real discussion starts. Very rarely do people go out of their way to ask “what do you think of X controversial topic?” And even if you do, that only leads to a very high level discussion that very quickly gets stale. If you get discussion in the context of specific events, then these discussions can be grounded in reality and lead to more unique context-dependent takes each time it comes up.

  2. Regarding upvotes/downvotes: as stated in the rules, they should be used to measure whether a post/comment is a positive contribution to the discussion rather than the number of people who agree with your viewpoint. I don’t believe there’s a way to actually enforce this with the voting system we currently have, but I also think a relatively simple change can fix it. It will require a bit of coding.

    My proposal is a voting system with two votes: one to say that you agree/disagree, and another to say good/bad contribution. With this system, you can easily see if someone only thinks posts they agree with are good contributions, and you can use that information to calculate a total score that weighs their votes accordingly. It’s also small enough of a change that I think most people won’t have a problem figuring it out.

Thoughts?

Also, thank you Ace for taking the initiative in creating this place. It makes me happy to see that others want to see this change too.

  • Ace T'KenMEnglish
    2·
    3 months ago

    Figured I’d make a new reply in hopes the system notifies of a response.

    1. It’d be cool to do an instance, but I don’t have the time (or maybe resources) to manage such a thing. Even getting help to manage one Community is hard. We have had two mods vanish, and I can only imagine running an instance being much harder. Our largest issue is actually getting replies instead of drive-by-downvotes. New threads that aren’t pretty obviously tuned to the attitudes of Lemmy at large get buried quickly in no-discussion downvotes. For example, the thread about overpopulation was insanely downvoted, with very little actual discussion occurring. It was reported to admins, and I was told multiple times that it was a fascist dogwhistle. I have no idea how or why this is, because nobody explained it or responded to questions. I replied with data, and was told in no uncertain terms to fuck off in PMs. People don’t respond because they don’t see the thread due to downvoting, won’t reply if they do see it due to dogpiling, or can’t back up their opinions and stop responding after making insults. This has been my experience of trying to discuss anything of substance on Lemmy. It’s a huge problem. I would absolutely help run a new instance, but I couldn’t spearhead the effort.

    2. I like the multiple vote system, but my preference would be to simply disable downvotes altogether and leave it at “upvote only.” I don’t think we’ll ever get through to users that a downvote isn’t a “disagree button” to many people. Disabling downvotes would have to be done instance-side, or so I’ve been told. I don’t think the entire instance wishes to do that however. I’ve requested more Community controls, but there’s been a distinct lack of them at present.

    I’m totally open to any ideas to help though!

    • howrarOPEnglish
      2·
      3 months ago

      Our largest issue is actually getting replies instead of drive-by-downvotes.

      That’s exactly what I mean in point #1. People rarely go out of their way for an in depth discussion. It just happens upon you, and the way this community is currently set up doesn’t really allow for that. You have to come here deliberately looking for this discussion.

      I don’t think we’ll ever get through to users that a downvote isn’t a “disagree button” to many people.

      I don’t believe this is possible at all. Hence the proposal for a two vote system, because that allows you to easily filter out those who treat everything as an agree/disagree button.

      Another benefit that I didn’t mention is that this also allows you to sort/filter in more interesting ways. E.g. Sort by diversity where each subsequent comment has minimal overlap with previously seen comments in terms of the set of people agreeing with it, or filter to only show comments I agree/disagree with. It also lets you analyse the distribution of opinions in the overall community and take action to correct things if it ever skews too far in one direction or another.

      Running a full instance is indeed a lot of work. I don’t have time to do it myself either, but if anyone else wants to do it, I would be very happy to help.