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This weekly thread will focus on Helping Us Fix Weekly Topics. This Community seems to have a problem. I generally do my best to create open-ended topics that don’t lead the reader to respond in any specific way, all while providing what I think are interesting starters. I’ve purposely picked other moderators that do not think the same as I do on many topics, but have the skill to explain why they feel the way they do. Results of all of this seem to be extremely limited.
If I try and introduce some opinion in a topic for people to pick at (even if I don’t believe it), they tend to get very aggressive and seem to insult moreso than discuss. They focus on moral arguments instead of logical ones and abandon discussions when challenged which sort of defeats the purpose (and goes against the rules) of the entire Community to begin with.
Some Starters (and don’t feel you have to speak on all or any of them if you don’t care to):
- Can we do anything with moderation or rules to help encourage you to respond more?
- Are there any format changes you’d like to see that may help?
- Do you ever feel that Lemmy is a more aggressive form of social media and therefore limit your discussion?
- Does the activist nature of Lemmy help or hurt further adoption?
- What topics would you like to see covered?
- Is Lemmy even a good platform for discussion to begin with?
- Would you like to be a mod and help out?
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No, but for a different reason.
Conversations have extremely short life spans. After a day, conversations dwindle down to individual threads with back and forths between two people (at best), since they are the only ones revisiting the post (due to notifications).
Even if people were committed (and/or reminded) about revisiting posts, the threading makes it difficult to find what’s new.
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Huh. That’s actually a really good idea.
Or… and hear me out here… Maybe it could cost 10 cents to downvote someone. Not enough to be egregious, but the funds could be used to help keep the server afloat and would make you think twice about downvoting comments you only mildly disagree with.
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Great questions! I hope I can jump in without being too short.
I wonder if something like debatemap.app or kialo-edu.com would offer a better UX (“user experience”) than Lemmy. I’ve also heard that substack.com has done a good job of attracting high-quality discussion (but I worry, what’s stopping them from traveling down the enshittification path like all the rest?)
OTOH, I think online discussion itself has some weaknesses that can’t be easily overcome–perhaps in-person, local discussion is (usually/almost always?) better. For example, one study indicates that engaging in political discourse with people online leads to an “uncivil comment rate” of 10%, while a “mixed political / non-political” discourse has a lower uncivil comment rate [1].
Personally, I find it to be generally true that I need to trust someone in one or more non-controversial areas of life before I take their controversial (to me) opinions seriously. Simple time and familiarity also helps.
[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/political-science/articles/10.3389/fpos.2021.741605/full
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Thank you for the reply. The majority of my thoughts were very much in line with what you said and it’s sort of what I feared.
I’m not sure how to continue with things as they are as it feels like trying to start a dialogue with a wall at times. I hadn’t considered mobile platforms as part of the issue, but you are most likely correct.
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