Been thinking about the voting system lately and how it inevitably kills in-depth discussion in growing communities.
Every sub/community follows the same trajectory: starts small with passionate users sharing quality content/discussion → grows in popularity → memes and low-effort posts flood in → actual discussion gets buried or downvoted.
I’m guilty of this too tbh. I realized I use upvotes/downvotes as personal “like/dislike” buttons rather than judging relevance to the community.
Here’s my hot take:
- Voting should be restricted to subscribed users only
- Downvotes should be capped at a fraction of total upvotes a user gives out
The clearest example of this failure is gonewild. The demographics mean male content (which is 100% allowed) gets mass-downvoted into oblivion while female content dominates the front page. It’s not about quality or relevance anymore - it’s just a popularity contest.
Anyone else feel like the voting system needs a complete rethink?
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Lemmynsfw solved this by disabling downvotes. I don’t think memes were a problem there.
An alternative is strong moderation to keep off-topic comments and posts out.
My instance disables downvotes and it’s much better.
I really think removing downvotes or requiring the downvoter to explain the downvote would make communities better.
Is there any way to stop the mods from going mad with power?
probably the piefed social credit score killing those communities tbh
I just block meme-posters and meme communities and my Fediverse stays interesting as a result. No need to convince/wait for the world to change when I can conveniently block the slop myself, it’s one of the most appreciated features of PieFed/Lemmy imho.
Recall that whole db0 defederation of feddit.org? Was not a problem for me at all because I had already blocked the instance long before the whole thing kicked off simply because I didn’t speak German and didn’t want my feed full of German posts I couldn’t understand anyway.you can just untick “german” in your language settings…
Only English is ticked… Don’t worry mate, I already solved the problem!
Isn’t the situation in gonewild a clear sign it’d be wise to set up two separate communities? gonewildgals and gonewildguys or something? If a community is “too broad”, niche content will always lose out. The answer is usually setting up a new community specific to that niche.
Fighting low-effort posts and memes either means setting up a meme community, more moderation on the posts or both.
People could discuss pretty much anything in old school forums which had only a handful of boards. Now we need millions of communities just because Reddit has them as well, even if there isn’t enough activity to justify them. I feel like the Fediverse already has enough fragmentation issues as it is because of all the similar communities in different instances. Separating niche communities into even more niche ones when those communities are barely active to begin with just doesn’t make sense.
I like that on hexbear and some other communities here you have just an upvote and no downvote. It makes posters who disagree have to either just move on or actually make a decent argument instead of just pressing the “I don’t like this” button.
I don’t think any form of rework on voting system would work; everyone has their own criteria, and it won’t always make sense to everyone. Preventing upvotes/downvotes would just be a hindrance, and it also opens up a way to manipulate votes to however mods want.
One solution would be to have a community dedicated to discussions so that they have a chance to appear at the top.
More communities in a platform saturated with abandoned communities seems like the worse possible idea.
True, but I think that’s the best you can get. Lemmy itself isn’t very thriving compared to Reddit in the first place. It would have been a lot better if multiple communities could share a post cross-instance, but we don’t have that.
Come to think of it, does Lemmy support flares? I think having a flare for niche stuff would help a lot in terms of discoverability without splitting the community.
WWIII is happening and you’re worried about optimizing your gooning
WWIII is happening and you’re worried about someone worried about optimising their gooning.
How about post-Epstein files people stop letting anyone speak like this about the epimping segment of a website that gained notoriety for having a community centered around stalking and grooming underaged girls
They almost had me in the first half with the discussion-of-discussion, which is relevant to everything if you lie to yourself. And god knows we do
