Just seems like everything is “this company did this to their employees” and less about “this novel messaging protocol offers these measured pros and cons.” Or similar

And yes, I could post things, but I’m referring to what hits the top, 12h.

Can anyone rec communities with less of a biz and politics and wfh vs in-office vibe?

  • douglasg14b@lemmy.worldEnglish
    232·
    1 year ago

    It can definitely happen. This is just the result of a lack of quality or subject control.

    It degrades to the lowest common denominator. This was seen across reddit, constantly.

    It happened on lemmy in record time due to a lack of default outlets for the low quality content.

    • EatATaco@lemm.eeEnglish
      131·
      1 year ago

      I was on reddit for a very long time. And this is why I started to bemoan when communities would celebrate that they passed some number of subscribers.

      /pardon me as I yell at the clouds. Stop now unless you want to read a completely unnecessary rant.

      Two of my favorite niche subreddits were absolutely ruined by getting big: mindfulness and foodporn. The former was primarily a discussion about practicing mindfulness, there were even a couple of buddhists who actually deeply studied the tradition that provided very good non-western insight. It was a good place to go get help, albeit occasionally got a spattering of stupid memes, but you could easily get past them. As it grew it turned more and more into just memes, and then was just over-taken by new-age nonsense and pseudointellectual quotes over pictures. Food porn (while never exactly what I wanted) went from often having well-done pictures of good food, to shitty cell-phone shots of oversized hamburgers, half eaten food, and plates of food sitting on counters with all of this shit in the background.

    • rglullisAEnglish
      94·
      1 year ago

      This is just the result of a lack of quality or subject control.

      This is just another way of saying “having mods enforcing super strict rules”, which then leads to an ossified culture and a bunch of mods high on their power trip. This was also seen on Reddit and StackOverflow.

      Unfortunately, the way to avoid “lowest common denominator” issues that you mention is by going to the places where the denominator is relatively small, but big enough to have network effects in its favor. My experience was that all subreddits between 25k to 500k subscribers worked really well without excessive policing. Between 500k and 1M it could still go by, depending on the moderators. After crossing that mark, things started to deteriorate fast.

      If we were to scale that to Lemmy, it means that all communities with a subscriber count >= 1% of the total network will fall into “deteriorate fast” territory.

        • rglullisAEnglish
          31·
          1 year ago

          • Editing post titles does not count as quality control, in the same ways that some of reddits have such strict rules to the point that mods delete anything that is not exactly within the lines.

          • HN mods (dang, especifically) don’t care about power trips, because they have actual power

          • HN is not a single-topic community, like a Lemmy group. If you create a /c/technology and say it is a place to post “Anything that good hackers would find interesting”, it would quickly derail into a constant meta-discussion.

            • rglullisAEnglish
              2·
              1 year ago

              The extent of how single-topic a community is depends on the community and moderators. I don’t know what you’re trying to say here.

              The discussion started because OP wants to have “more hard tech” and less “tech biz news”. How do you think you’d enforce that, and how would you avoid splitting the ones that do not agree with that direction?

              On HN, it’s easy to avoid splittering the community because there is no “sub-HN”. The ones that are not interested or oppose the guidelines have no other option but to leave.

              On Reddit or Lemmy, it’s quite easy to “fork” a community or simply creating another for the more specific niches. So you don’t end up with a single /c/technology, but instead we get a “popular” /c/technology (for the lowest denominator) and the more specific “/c/hard_tech” or “/c/true_tech”.

                • rglullisAEnglish
                  2·
                  1 year ago

                  If my theoretical approach causes people to leave, that’s OK.

                  Right, but that will also mean that the community will no longer be “big”. That’s my point.

                  If mods started going as far as deleting threads on the basis of “this discussion is already beaten to death and is not bringing anything new”, you can bet that this will be taken as an act of “censorship” and will cause everyone to leave to form their own factions - except maybe the ones that are aligned with the mods enough to understand the principles behind the decision.