I’ve been using Lemmy for a couple years now, and unfortunately I’ve noticed a significant decline in the niche communities that were originally active. When I first joined I saw much more variety when browsing the All feed. But over time, the communities I liked have faded as shitposting and meme communities have come to dominate the platform.
I think this shift has changed the culture of Lemmy. There seems to be more of a herd mentality now, where people downvote reasonable opinions they disagree with. The discussions don’t feel as nuanced. Some people have even been attacked for innocuous comments that don’t align with the prevailing groupthink.
The niche communities that made Lemmy special are fading away, and the resulting monoculture makes me less inclined to participate. I want a platform that supports substantive discussions in my interests, not just memes and shitposting.
I don’t know what the solution is on a platform level, but a culture shift is needed if Lemmy wants to retain users like me who valued the diversity of opinions. I may have to move to a platform that allows better filtering and proportionality between niche interests and funny or stupid content. I want Lemmy to succeed, but right now I’m finding myself drawn back to Reddit because the niche communities there seem more active. I’ll keep checking in, but Lemmy needs to recapture its original spirit if I’m going to make it my main home.
I only downvote toxic ass holes.
I wish I could turn off seeing the voting system because I think the voting system is meaningless. No matter the topic there will always be people who are uneducated and have a lack of experience in it upvote an incorrect comment to the moon, whilst the person who is trying to share their in depth knowledge on the subject get downvoted to the bottom of the earth. So it becomes an echo chamber of the most popular opinions.
In Reddit’s wiki they state that the voting system should be used to upvote relevant conversation that adds to the topic and downvote practically everything else. So it should be a self regulating system to filter out nonsense. But most people use it as an agree/like, disagree/dislike system and it appears people have brought that philosophy over to Lemmy.
Completely agree. This is how Hacker News does it.
IMO a first step is to get rid of the downvote counter. On a healthy forum a comment will generally have far more upvotes than downvotes. So it seems to me that showing the exact number of downvotes is putting disproportionate weight on the negativity. 400 upvotes but 9 people downvoted it, what bast***s! You often see this kind of indignant comment, which suggests that people love to focus on the negative if given the chance. We should not be pushing people to focus on this number. It’s completely counterproductive if the objective is quality and not just mindless engagement.