I’m a long time Lemmy lurker and occasional Redditor. Since the Reddit influx, I’ve watched the frequency of shitty Reddit-type behavior, e.g., combative comments, trolling, and unnecessary rudeness, just sky rocket.
I’m happy to have more content on Lemmy, but I wish the bad actors and assholes would have stayed on Reddit.
Yes, I realize the irony of posting this on a new community that’s basically a Reddit transplant.
Seeing the low-quality comments starting to appear is disappointing.
Omg this!
/s
I haven’t noticed it too much but I feel like everyone is so used to how Reddit was that it would take some work and a collective agreement between users on the fediverse to shun the low quality comments.
I do remeber that somewhat working on Reddit for a while, but yeah once it became big enough there was no stopping the shitty comments.
It sounds terrible but I hope the ux doesn’t improve, as it acts as a barrier to entry to a lot of the shit-tier Reddit users.
If you want to stop more people coming, just go and tell people on Reddit to come here.
The trick though is that when you do, give them url’s for both Lemmy and Kbin. From what I saw, doing that somehow made understanding this place so difficult that 95% of people would just start shouting abuse at whoever did it and refuse to ever entertain the idea of switching. :p
I think this is a symptom of having a scoring system for comments. If you gamify your social interactions, people will try to play the game (meaning low quality comments, dad jokes, or anything that will grant them easy votes) instead of having actual discourse.
That ignores the effect of bad actors who will do it regardless though. There may actually be something to using such a score, at least as a qualitative if not quantitative measurement of trustworthiness, like for anyone with a magazine-specific karma score in the negative and spread out over at least ten comments, start hiding their comments by default (like still visible but you have to click to expand now), and allow the mods to decide what their communities rules will be.
Irl it’s like: punch me in the face once, twice, three times, and eventually ten times, and maybe one day I’ll finally start to think about considering making a plan of action to help you realize that there may be consequences… one day! (maybe) That could help so that if a troll is popular in one place but always shits outside of where they live, those receiving the raw end of that deal could have a way to automatically deal with it?
On second thought though, it’s probably too easily gamified, especially by alts created for explicitly that purpose, like it’s not that hard to make 10 accounts. But aside from minor UI concerns, something like that could actually change whether/how often someone feels welcomed to go visit a site.
Even back in the old forum days, we had replies akin to “yes, this!” “agreed!” “no” that don’t contribute much to the discussion.
So I don’t think it’s the scoring system that is at fault, but rather it’s just human nature. Sometimes people simply want to be a part of something, and those meaningless phrases help to accomplish that.
Sometimes you want to support a post or comment but have nothing to say. Comments increase engagement scores on most platforms
In my experience the only ones caring about engagement scores are advertisers. If you agree with a post/comment you don’t actually have to press any button (upvote, like, heart, etc) or even reply to it. We’ve been conditioned to do it because they have found a way to profit off of our “uh huh” and “yeah that’s right”. I’m not suggesting it’s all bad, I’m trying to put it into context.
I came across one earlier that was about as low quality as it gets. It was a thread about some big car accident and the only reply was “/c/fuckcars”. No commentary on the actual article, no attempt at starting any actual discussion, just a pithy one liner that serves no purpose other than grabbing some upvotes and killing any chance of discussion. I still haven’t seen TOO much of that yet but I find it weird that someone would make the effort to come to the fedi just to do the same low effort shit they were doing on Reddit. It’s disappointing but at the same time, my short time on the fedi has been filled with far more actual conversation than most of my time on Reddit was.
