Great writing on the current Reddit saga. The author put down in words a lot of things in my mind I couldn’t find the right words.

  • pre@fedia.io
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    1 year ago

    Yeah, I keep saying this to people when they worry about fragmentation. Like it’s important to have all the Baseball fans in the same Baseball forum under one big banner.

    No, that’s not better, that’s worse. What you want is a thousand interconnected forums with 100 people each, not a forum with 100,000 people.

    • Honeyed Coffee@sopuli.xyz
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      1 year ago

      How is community engagement better in a interconnected forum compared to a single forum consisting of all the participants? I’m asking out of ignorance

      How would cross community discussions take place?

      • pre@fedia.io
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        @honeyed_coffee For the reasons the OP mentioned. Familiar faces, being recognized in a community instead of being just today’s main character.

        In a single large forum most participants are silent, as they must be or it’d be a cacophony. Many are silent out of worry that they need to say something good enough to impress a hundred thousand people, not just something interesting to their local 100 friends.

        On Fediverse things escape their local instances and their local forum-groups by boosts mostly.

        @Zigabyte

        • manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          1 year ago

          As karma mattered more you lost a whole subset of regular posters that felt kamra took a relaxing pastime and made it into a job. Karma was used as a kind of stopgap for the issue of managing the cacophony in a busy thread, which made the points matter even more and caused even more people to disengage.

          • RandomBit@sh.itjust.works
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            1 year ago

            Personally, I found that karma led to self-censorship of any idea that remotely deviated from the group consensus.

            • Honeyed Coffee@sopuli.xyz
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              0
              ·
              1 year ago

              Can you think of alternatives to voting, though? Sorting always requires some curating system that isn’t random but I can’t think of any that would be robust to group consensus

              • RandomBit@sh.itjust.works
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                2
                ·
                1 year ago

                I don’t think user voting in of itself is a problem. It’s the consequences of large negative voting that causes the real problems. In Reddit, a single unpopular comment on a popular subreddit could send a casual Redditor into negative karma which effectively shadowbans them from Reddit. As a result, you see people deleting their comments to stop the bleeding. Controversial opinions are punished severely.

      • manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        to start with, ive had more vibrant, long and interesting conversations more often on a site of 300-3,000 as opposed to a sub with millions.

          • manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            i think its just another UX issues, reddit also had the concept of topics but it was rather weak and not leveraged. With a federation setup topical sorts should get more prevalence. Even getting some small communities togher might be a challenge, even some small comms dont post because reddit culture rather than the sub being small. “back in the day” you could easily find active communities of 10 users on a phpbb forum. Part of the trick? IMO, no internet points.

          • displaced_city_mouse@midwest.social
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            1 year ago

            There’s the problem of filtering as well – if I jump into a thread that’s a few hours old on Reddit, there may already be hundreds of replies. How do I filter this? How many discussions have you been in where there were several different people all with the same response, simply because someone else had the same opinion 30 minutes earlier?

            On the flip side, if you’re in a small local sub, how do you get new ideas injected? It’s the “joke #243” problem, where everyone’s heard everything already. Until more people arrive with fresh insights and ideas, the community can become insular.

        • Honeyed Coffee@sopuli.xyz
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          1 year ago

          I can imagine small communities spread across. By virtue of its size, there are high chances of topics staying relevant too.

          I am concerned about small bubbles though. Discussions in single instances that never bounce across to similar communities in other instances but I suppose that’s putting the cart before the horse

          • manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            1 year ago

            realistically the same thing happens on reddit, any sub not big enough is very unlikely to ever be featured on the home page, and this is not always a bad thing, some communities are not interested in being featured, some are brigaded as a prize.

      • PierreKanazawa@fedia.io
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        The way I see it, it’s like a small world model with layers and emerging hierarchies, instead of being flat.

    • MightyMjolnir@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      1 year ago

      I can see pros and cons. More people all at once gives greater odds of some unique perspective to take hold that would otherwise only be seen in a single smaller sub community. But there’s also a more vested interest in the health of “your” community if it’s smaller.

      Baseball is a fun example because I’m really sad the biggest group so far has only like 80 subscribers. I NEEEEEED my fix of baseball chatter so I really want that one to grow, lol.

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        1 year ago

        IDK, it seems that once a community gets big enough, it devolves into an echo chamber so the unique perspectives get drowned out. Sometimes the unique perspectives wins and slowly propagates through the community, and sometimes the unique perspective gets buried, but uniqueness is rarely highlighted.

        For example, I used to be active in /r/personalfinance (kind of a cesspool imo), and there have been times when my perspective won out and I saw it get parroted (often incorrectly), and I was later corrected by yet another perspective and that one got buried and to this day people are parotting my incomplete perspective instead of the more correct perspective. I tried correcting it, but ended up giving up.

        So a community needs to be big enough to have diversity, but not so big that the hive mind takes over. I think that magic number is somewhere around 10-100k people.