First, I want to say how great it is to see success in a social media platform not owned by some giant cooperation. That said, right now we are at a turning point where we can still change the platform in major ways and I think we all have a shared interested in Lemmy becoming the best it could be.
Let’s face it, Reddit had many problems even before the API changes. The toxic herd mentality, over and under moderation at the same time, small posts getting drowned out by already big ones and so much more. As you probably are already aware of, social media can quickly end in filter bubbles, extremization and bringing out the worst of the human psyche. These are not problems simply fixed by better moderation. Rather, these are problems resulting from the engagement driven design of most platforms (Post controversial statement -> many comments -> Post gets delivered to more people -> even more engagement -> …) I want Lemmy to be a place that brings people together instead of dividing us apart.
Therefore, I wanna start a conversation on what design changes Lemmy should implement in the future to make sure the platform remains humane and everyone can engage in respectful conversations.
I think a good starting point are the recourses of the Center for Humane Technology, like their course on Foundations of Humane Technology
I’m looking forward to hearing your opinions and ideas on this :)
I think Lemmy being decentralized and not having user karma by design already gets a pretty good base. With the concerns of censorship, admin drama, and protecting marginalized groups, the rest has to come from your instance admins and moderators of communities you follow. With the nature of the platform, you can create toxic places but those are easily defederated and/or blocked.
We are definitely off to a good start :D Still there are starting to show problematic signs
In some news communities people are obviously upvoting news article based on nothing more than the headline. This creates an environment where only articles with polarizing headlines succeed, and a real discussion becomes impossible
How do you prevent that? I think that might simply be inherent of unrestricted news communities, not necessarily the platform itself. You can have a more restricted news community that disallows click bait or polarizing titles or only allow posts by approved users (or go further and lock to instance like beehaw).
I don’t have the perfect plan yet, but the way you show posts to users (ranking and interface) can have a huge impact on how users interact (think of “allow all cookies” but in a way that incentives the good in people)
One quite intrusive solution would be a popup asking you if you really read (or skimmed) the article before up/downvoting if you haven’t clicked the link yet. Something like:
Do you really wanna vote based on the heading alone? Take me to the article Yes, let me vote
I’m not really sure if that’ll work, but maybe the OP can post a description/summary of the keypoints in the news as an alt-text?
That’s a good idea that I’d really like that to be a norm in news communities.
We are definitely off to a good start :D Still there are starting to show problematic signs
In some news communities people are obviously upvoting news article based on nothing more than the headline. This creates an environment where only articles with polarizing headlines succeed, and a real discussion becomes impossible