I commonly browse all by new, and I block users who crosspost any given article to more than one other community. To me it’s almost always a sign that they actually don’t care about the topic or contents, but instead their own post count and user recognition.
Lemmy really needs to have some sort of built-in mechanism for grouping cross posts like this, because it does look spammy in the feed.
The users doing the cross posting aren’t doing anything differently than they’d do by posting a link to multiple subreddits. It’s just that there’s no sorting algorithm on Lemmy, so there’s no “smart” filtering happening behind the scenes to keep it from looking as cluttered.
I do think part of the problem is that people are treating this like Reddit. A quantity versus quality, shotgun approach to populating communities. It’s just uncurated noise.
True, but I feel like that’s a necessary evil in order to encourage growth in the platform. There’s gotta be something for people to see when they visit, otherwise they stop coming. And social platforms don’t really work if people aren’t being social on it.
Some may argue that this is actually a good thing and that it keeps uninterested users off the platform in the first place, but I feel like that’s putting the cart before the horse, because users need a reason to be interested in the first place.
It’s a little forced, to be sure, but I think that’s just got to be part of our growing pains for a bit until the community at large is a bit more fleshed out and certain posting conventions are established. A lot of things are also going to be changing pretty rapidly, since Lemmy is still in pretty active development, and the rush of new users has jolted that development recently, too. So there will be new features and a new culture to adopt to eventually.
