- Exclude explicit software bugginess or missing features
- Include experiences or knock-on effects that may have arisen from (1)
- Comparisons to Reddit are ok. We know the reasons for the differences, but this is just about expressing yourself
To me, all the complaints in this thread are a great filter. It keeps away all the people that are too lazy and/or incapable to figure out basic things, which are not the people I want to interact with online anyway
My thoughts exactly. One of the reasons I came here was to get away from elitist attitudes and punching down at people. If I wanted that, I would’ve just stayed on Twitter X. Musk and his cult do plenty of that.
“It’s a good filter” is often just an excuse to not improve the UX. You hear this way more from open-source technically-inclined folks than you do from folks who care about building a product that people want to use.
There shouldn’t be votes. Activitypub itself shouldn’t have votes but I can understand the broader community around it wanting them to kludge in functionality of places they’re trying to ape.
If you’re coming from Reddit or wherever though and don’t see this as a perfect opportunity to get rid of the part of the site all the problems stem from or are enabled by, I don’t know what to say.
Get rid of the votes.
How do you sort the content without votes? How do you pick out the good stuff from the spam?
You read it and when it’s good you respond with a contribution or expansion on the ideas presented.
Maybe you quote the post but write nothing, or put an emoji nodding and smiling and pointing at the quoted text.
When something’s spam you either ignore it or tell that person to fuck off. Maybe you report their posts, then a mod drops in and confirms that they should fuck off and either gently corrects them or bans them with whatever level of granularity is appropriate.
Are you willing to accept the assumption that bad content (e.g., spam, advertising, trolling, low effort posts) is far more common than good content (I.e…, high effort posts)?
If you are, then it seems to me that your system would involve a lot more people interacting with a lot more bad content than they do good content. Down votes are a mechanism that let’s one person’s time wasted interacting with bad content reduce the probability that everyone else will have to waste their time on that content.
It’s “starting off” by being flooded with admins and mods* from reddit, many of which didn’t listen to their communities and were power hungry. Lemmy today is basically reddit 2.0 but with growing pains and teething issues.
Loads more unnecessary and weird political comments on completely unrelated posts. On Reddit it depended much more on the subreddit whether you’ll get those weird comments, on Lemmy I found lots of comments up high on various non-political communities which just repeat certain political combat slogans on many posts.
Even when I sympathize with ‘that side’ moreso than the opposite one, it’s just dumb and annoying to me.
Onboarding is unclear for people. So if they just Google Lemmy it’s a bit of a adventure for them to figure out they have to make an account where to make the account.
The friction around account creation is difficult. Many let me instances require manual approval, so that slows down me onboarding funnel.
Let’s be Frank most people don’t want to make an account, entering email and password and validation. Using some federated identity like Google Apple would make The onboarding easier for people
Discovery is very difficult, especially if you’re on a smaller instance, you have to know what communities to individually subscribe to. There’s some mitigations with find a Lemmy community websites but they’re not built into most of the apps yet. So unless you’re joining a very large server, Lemmy’s going to feel pretty empty.
There’s some gaps between Lemmy and other platforms around media rich posts, especially videos and GIFs. Posting a video on Lemmy is difficult especially if you’re on a mobile device.
I still love Lemmy, these are just observations with respect to your query
