Ask Lemmy

Trying to be a Reddit clone.

Reddit was shit to begin with. It was a dumbed down forum site for people who found sites like Plastic or Kuro5hin too intimidating or complicated(!).

Slashdot-style upvoting would instantly solve a lot of "Reddit"-type problems, because instead of just good/bad, or like/dislike, the reason for the vote is noted, such as "insightful", "funny", etc., and you can then filter and sort comments much easier. Just filtering out "funny" comments saved soooooooo much time.

Another thing: Why don't creators of threads have the option to admin their own threads? It's their thread! It wouldn't be appropriate for discussion threads (for obvious reasons), but for interpersonal posts and questions, it makes perfect sense for the creator to be able to have control over what appears in the thread to keep it on topic and the trolls at bay. It's pretty rare to see a post where someone asks a question that doesn't quickly devolve into an offtopic mess, and the creator is usually attacked for trying to bring it back on topic. This has made Reddit useless for question-answering (and besides, the most upvoted answer is almost always wrong.)

Is the purpose of these forums to enable authentic conversation, or just to farm content regardless of quality (to be sold to AI companies, presumably)?

Same as with every other social media ... the people.

lemmy.ml and its admins being the developers at the same time.

The lemmy.ml instance not being treated the same as the rest of the Triad in regards to defederation

Some highlights from the link:

"Don't worry guys, the Uyghur Genocide was REALLY just birth control! ~dessalines, .ml admin, dev https://lemmy.world/post/30580167

"See! nobody died IN Tiananmen Square, just AROUND it, so it doesn't count!!" ~ Davel, .ml admin https://lemmy.world/post/30673342

.ml admin, Nutomics continued transphobia https://lemmy.world/post/29222558

CW: Original transphobic Comment from Nutomic

"NK is actually good and anything counter to that is Western propaganda!" ~dessalines, .ml admin, dev https://lemmy.world/post/31595035

General negative sentiment to other instances who haven't "seen the way" yet ~davel, .ml admin https://lemmy.world/post/27426510

"If you don't support Russia then you just don't understand geopolitics" ~dessalines, .ml admin, dev https://lemmy.world/post/27352415

And a long list of bans/censorship and allowing the proliferation of known propaganda and misinformation outlets clearly demonstrating use of their instance and recognition to force a political narrative

Niche communities. Large spaces are built of small niche interest groups. The tooling around small spaces needs to be first class if we want the larger space to be healthy

Lemmy was architected by people whose philosophical intentions are out of alignment with the software they cloned.

That system was designed to invite as many idiots as possible, to bait as much engagement as possible, with virtually no controls on quality or intelligence.

Well congratulations Lemmy, you've made the next Reddit. There's no reason to be here, it's just a pile of morons for the most part.

1. Not enough people.

2. People here are way bigger smug assholes than even Reddit.

3. Sense of invulnerability and mod neglegence just because Lemmy is defederated. People naively think that makes it invulnerable to similar issues as Reddit (like toxicity/hivemind/bad modding.)

Back in 2023 I joined Lemmy because Reddit got rid of 3rd party apps. At first I was extremely impressed with the content here. While the community was small, meme channels were hilarious and had fantastic content. Same with the nsfw communities. However, now all the communities are filled with AI slop, political ragebait posting, onlyfans subsciption bait posts, and various other trash. So as far as I'm concerned Lemmy seems to be circling the drain. I can't in good faith tell anyone I know to switch to Lemmy. If a friend were to ask me "hey man, how's Lemmy?" My honest answer would be that it kinda fucking sucks.

The lack of content compared to reddit. If you look at !learn_programming@programming.dev for example, there is only one post this week, and 4 posts this month. How is it that, with all the web developers and AI vibe coding shit, no one is actually asking questions?

When I was on reddit, I had to hide posts because there were 10 or 20 interesting questions every day.

Onboarding. I think it'll be better if people promoted individual instances instead of Lemmy as a whole. As a whole, it seems vague.