Asklemmy

43984 readers

1200 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

Does the reddit style format breed toxicity? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by Joe_0237@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

83 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Does the reddit style format inherently make for a toxic environment? Or is it a culture of toxicity from the influx of reditors? For lack of a beter example, on stackoverflow, when someone down votes you, it comes with a comment saying how to improve. On mastodon, people can't downvote you. These platforms are a joy to use, lemmy is depressing if you post. Its depressing because every post or comment, no mater the quality comes with downvotes, and usually no criticism to accompany it, you are left not knowing if youve made a mistake, or if its just trolls, bots, or idiots. At the end you feel insulted not improved. What do you think?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] lvxferre@lemmy.ml -2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I think that the current downvote system is far from ideal, and ideally there should have some piece of "forced" feedback when you downvote someone, but keep in mind that a downvote is just "this should be less visible". For example, people often downvote OK answers because an even better answer popped up, and they want the later to rise to the top. So a lot of times there's no actual hostility in the downvotes.

And for other Reddit behaviours that people often call toxic (I call them SNOO - stupid, noisy, obnoxious, obtuse), I think that it's cultural. The Reddit admins bred that behaviour into the users; and users are likely to carry it with them elsewhere, including Lemmy. I think that most of those individuals will get better over time here, and the ones who don't will end leaving.

[–] MiloSquirrel@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I feel like the issue with forced feedback when you downvote is you'll get a lot of comments where its just 1-2 words, doesn't say much, just a "No" or "Bad". And if you require a min characters like the bneg forums you'll just get "No. 10chars"

Requiring comments will cause people to half ass it at best, I think. Which, sure then people can downvote them, but are people going to write a well thought out comment for every "No"?

Is having 40 "I disagree" comments really better for discussion than just 40 downvotes?

[–] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

By "forced feedback" I was thinking more like having multiple types of downvote ("off-topic", "rude", "incorrect", "I disagree", "unfunny"...), so users need to pick one when downvoting something. It gives people a better clue on why a certain piece of content is being downvoted than just letting them assume, and it's way less noise than 40 "I disagree" comments.

[–] MiloSquirrel@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I could see that then, kinda like how you can react with different emoji on facebook.

Idk if I'd prefer it, but I think it could work

[–] Joe_0237@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

Thats pretty much what i was thinking. Also SNOO seems like a useful thing to have in the brain