Maybe it’s just because there’s less content on Lemmy as of right now, but I remember doomscrolling Reddit, but now I only briefly open Lemmy once or twice a day.
Could this be an example of the affects of addictive social media?
Oddly enough, people are pretty adamant about demanding that we add a lot of addictive features into lemmy, just because they exist on reddit and on other big tech platforms. I usually push back, but I’m always downvoted to oblivion. I conciously wanted to avoid putting these addictive, psychologically harmful things into lemmy-ui.
So its great to see posts like this one. Social media doesn’t have to be a negative experience, or addictive. The time we spend here should be short, and positive.
I’m curious, would you tell me about some of the anti-features being requested? I wonder what kind of things are flying entirely under my radar.
Thank you for that
o7
I feel similarly. To add to that, I don’t even like the fact that people have been pushing so hard for Lemmy apps. I get that people want something to entertain themselves with on the train or in class or wherever they might be, but phone based social media apps seem to encourage superficial engagement and doomscrolling by design. I much prefer a rich desktop experience as it encourages depth of discussion and debate. One thing I really liked on reddit, though, was something I saw a long time ago on r/TrueFilm. Comments had a hard minimum for characters. If your comment was below 250 characters, or something like that, it was automatically removed on the basis that if you had anything to say, you should have thought about it enough to warrant more than 250 character submissions. It also functionally murdered smartphone or tablet based commenting. I kinda wish you could do similar on certain lemmy communities.
That’s an interesting idea, but it would completely butcher conversations.
Or restrict them to people who have something meaningful to contribute. Low effort vs. high effort. You’d have to be explicit that that’s the purpose of the community and that’s how it works. I remember some great posts on r/TrueFilm back in the day. A lot of it was by people who were either film students or who had degrees in film studies and had the kind of academic background needed to speak at length about a topic without it becoming trite. I have to say, I do miss it. The internet has gotten way dumber and way lazier over the years, in a lot of ways.
I suppose there could be communities focused away from conversations. Like an auditorium you rent for your class of 200 to watch a movie that isn’t in print anymore and then discuss it afterwards. I imagine someone would stand up in said auditorium when they have a well formed idea or rebuttal to an idea, but refrain from standing just to add some conversational space filler like “I agree” and then sitting back down (which is kind of comical now that I think about it). Port over this idea into the internet and you get the communities you’re talking about, correct?
Hmmm, not really. Rather, the community is specifically focused around conversation. But a different type of conversation. Typical internet conversations on reddit (and a lot of other places), especially over the last several years, seem to mainly occur in short bursts and at a fairly superficial level. The kind of community I’m envisioning is one in which there’s a central topic or theme (such as film), but it focuses on fairly deep or complex conversations. If someone wants to respond to a comment made by another user, it’d typically be point by point with supporting evidence and argumentation. Or at least a well reasoned perspective. An okay, if not spectacular, example would be this post on reddit from a couple of years ago on r/TrueFilm (https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueFilm/comments/khlrnv/a_brief_rant_about_my_cinema_students_and/). The post itself is a few hundred words and focuses on a central concept or observation made by the OP. Most top level comments are a paragraph or two. There are brief responses in the individual comment threads, but the actual discussion is fairly robust and provides new ideas and perspectives beyond just people saying “lmao same” or similarly useless comments.
That makes sense; maybe require a wordcount for the base level comments and a much lesser word count requirement for the replies?
Short positive social media is my dream
I’m really thankful for it, so thank you for pushing back. One of the biggest reasons I chose Lemmy over Kbin was the lack of overall user score. I’m fine with posts and comments having a score — it sort of helps one determine what is and isn’t good content for a community, or what might not be good advice — but summing those up on your user profile only leads to weird score measuring contests and a sort of “number go up” addictive cycle. Thank you also for giving us the ability to hide scores if we don’t want to see them.
Does Lemmy even need any more features? Can we please avoid feature bloat and don’t break what doesn’t need fixing?
I think that depends on what you would call a “feature”. Most everything I can think of that could be “added” would be front end stuff, and third party devs can do those if they want.
What would be an example of an addictive feature that could be added to Lemmy?
Infinite scrolling, karma, targeted content.
The lack of karma is one of the reasons why I prefer lemmy over kbin.
Karma we can definitely do without. I don’t know of anyone who actually took it seriously anyway.
Bots took Reddit karma very seriously.
Infinite scrolling is a big one. I need to get out. Help.
I hate to be the one to do this to you, but old.lemmy.world has infinite scrolling… and is designed to look exactly like old reddit
In some sense, Lemmy has targeted content since you can subscribe to communities. It’s just less aggressive.
Well here’s some upvotes for you, brother/sister man/lady
I mean those features are addictive, so it isn’t that odd that people want their fix.
Lemmy for me feels like the early days of social media. Think early 4chan and reddit. I do miss the days of simple forums though.
yeah social media should be more functional and easily put away when not needed. I love the fact that I just don’t get attention consuming notifications. I love the fact that there isn’t an algorithm that promotes the most inflammatory point of view for “eNgAgEmEnT”.
I just don’t feel like a product here, it feels real compared to any platform.
I feel like with Lemmy, it’s harkening back to a period of the internet where you can approach it and put it down for later. It’s not yet constructed in a way like all of the other social media platforms, that want to keep you invested, even if you know what to expect. Facebook, Reddit, Instagram, Twitter .etc all remind me of the days in the old internet, where you had web portals. These web portals were from MSN, Yahoo and AOL primarily.
They all had things there, to keep you attracted to them. They had their search engines, they had games, they had news, they had weather and many more things. All to keep you in one place and to keep you from venturing out to other places unless you used their search engines before Google became the juggernaut of that.
Social Media today, is designed now, to be like them. Except it’s worse because they’ve got algorithms in place that they extract the data from, i.e you, to pitch to you things that you may be particularly interested in just to keep you invested.
For all of the numbers those social media platforms have, they sure do say a lot of nothing.
Completely agree with the last sentence. For all the hours I’ve spent on shitty social media, I couldn’t remember a single post or comment I read there to save my life.
After decades of platforms trending towards monopolization, bring on the fragmentation.
The community here is small and I love it. Maybe I don’t spend as many hours on here but I also don’t get pissed because I read an idiotic comment, and I feel like I can post an opinion without getting downvoted to hell.
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Same here.
I am finding more time IRL now that I’ve converted to Lemmy. I’m learning a new language as well as learning chess. I think it’s because much of the new posts aren’t showing up in ALL/Subscribed so I end up consuming much of it faster than Reddit.
Thanks Reddit for giving me the push I needed to run the fuck away!
I feel that, my friends asked me how Lemmy is and I told them it’s great, but I find that I spend a lot less time because it’s harder to find new content.
I still scroll both Reddit and Lemmy 🔥
Same. Especially for the smaller communities on Reddit
I don’t understand. How is Lemmy not a form of social media?
It is, but they are spending less time on lemmy than they did on reddit.
Not sure if that is a diss or not
I probably spent a bit less time too, but the bigger difference for me is that I’m doomscrolling less but instead I’m commenting more and posting more.
I have seen the same behaviour in myself. Reddit was the only social media I used and when they pulled the plug on third-party apps, I took it as a goodbye.
I see myself sometimes opening my phone to “do something” but I have almost no apps to waste time on. I’ve reused that time to do better things, which feels nice. I read a little more here and there, I learn stuff of wikipedia when I’m on my phone, or I get up and do something else. It’s been great for me, even though I’m kind of sad to see it go. Lemmy is a great community, though I’ll try not to start using it so much, just for my own sake and not on the fault of the platform itself.
Same. I find myself scrolling through my apps and can’t decide what to do. Got me to open Duolingo which I had forgotten was installed. At least doing something productive now.
I’ve found myself taking my Steam Deck into the washroom instead of using reddit in there. Play a game for 10 minutes instead of doom scrolling.
Same here, but as of now just need to find things to fill that gap. Started reading a little more this morning so hopefully that will help with that
I was already learning Spanish, but not having Reddit has upped how much time I’m spending learning. So yay I suppose. Plus, less doom scrolling is probably healthier.
Same, I had a birthday recently and my wife got me a kindle. I’m not great at reading and often have to look up words as I go, but that’s easy. I just finished The Name of the Wind and am on to the second book. I highly recommend it as it was easy to read and very engrossing.
I read every chance I get now.
To me there’s less engagement right now in Lemmy than there it was in Reddit, partially because there is less content, but hopefully this will change in the near future
Yeah this is actually preferable to how I used to open Reddit a thousand times a day for absolutely no reason :)
I feel like I am spending less time on Lemmy but am more satisfied with my time here.
On Reddit I would scroll endlessly. I’d find a comment or sentiment that was wrong and start typing out a reply, or once in a while a topic I knew about or had a story for. Then delete it because I don’t want to argue with an idiot and no one will ever see the comment because of the flood of “jokes”.
I feel like I can actually interact with the content here.
Me too! I’m on kbin but same effect. I’m here less than I was on reddit but it feels like I’m actually interacting.
It’s also way more positive and less toxic.
Well, picking an instance itself already requires a bit of technical knowledge which filters out most of the idiots. That combined with lack of karma counter makes an average Lemmy interaction more genuine and less karma whoring
Yeah Lemmy is a wasteland and nothing to see here. Reddit is so less usable without Boost I rarely use it now either, also some of my communities are still in blackout or even non existing.
Same. And I’m quite happy with the reduced time. When I tried to quit reddit cold turkey I found myself back almost immediately. But lemmy is a nice substitute. Content gets replaced at a slower rate, moderation is looser or less annoying. Fewer bot nonsense. And tough there is a crowd here on lemmy spewing a lot of nonsense, I almost prefer that they never get concealed. Shows more truly the divide on the issues. I almost don’t want lemmy to grow to Reddit size, tough I feel it might, with time.
Yes, this is quite homely.
