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2 yr. ago

  • The reason reddit had so many is that it would rapidly homogenise into giant echo chambers with minimal community. Minority perspectives were supressed or drowned out by lurker voting.

    New subs were being made to recapture giant subs' original intentions, or specialise, yo put minority perspectives of the Hot page and curate a community as a result.

    Lemmy isn't big enough to homogenise like that, at least not yet.

  • Either it doesn't get engaged with, or the people who engage with it have the reading comprehension of a carrot.

    I noticed you didn't explicitly say in your post that you don't kick puppies, so let me assume that you believe that is acceptable and then vividly describe what a horrible person you are. Also,

    Time to start over

    ...now that I've pulled a tiny portion of comment out of context to make it easier to attack, how dare you.

  • Go out of the house and go... where?

    In sociology, the third place refers to the social surroundings that are separate from the two usual social environments of home ("first place") and the workplace ("second place"). [x]

    There aren't places to go anymore. There just aren't. Libraries, but they're underfunded and aren't well-suited for socialisation. Parks, if you live in an area that has a planned/maintained one. There aren't any nice pedestrian-focused city centres for people to visit just for the sake of visiting, to sit outside drinking tea while listening to the birds - just miles of thoroughfare and parking spaces, covered in smog and traffic noise. Who would ever?

    Many countries (especially US and Canada) are so car-centric that they might not even have sidewalks at all in huge areas. Housing is sprawled in low-density suburbia. It's hard to go over to a friend's house and play a board game with them or host a party if it's an hour and half driving commute to get there, so we're not even visiting each other's homes.

    The only thing that exists anymore is the place you earn money, the soulless big box stores you spend money (if you have any), and home.

    So, yeah. We're all fucking home, because home is free, comfortable, and has a short commute.

  • Sounds like an interesting read; thanks for putting it on my radar.

  • One of many examples of how profit-driven platforms care about engagement quantity over product quality. A lack of stopping points feeds FOMO and keeps people trapped longer, but I doubt many people actively enjoy it.

    I disable it on any platform that lets me - besides, pagination can be cached to return to later. Doomscrolling can be binged but not suspended.

  • That's a great point; the echo chambers. Supported by the lack of the downvote button, it's one of the most impactful things Beehaw can do in fostering its goal of community.

    Any platform that measures success by engagement (eg: for ad traffic) tends to evolve into either of two extremes: content that makes you feel good, or contact that makes you feel afraid/angry. Usually both: something to get angry about and degrade each other, and then share to your echo chamber to yes-man each other. Very little constructive discussion takes place.

    Echo chambers deny people the growth opportunity that being exposed to diversity of experience and opinion brings. It entrenches people into ideas, including [self-]harming ones. Even good/benign ideas at their core can rapidly become steeped in tribalism, supremacy and animosity, particularly in conjunction with content that is engaging because it sparks anger or fear.

    The most powerful things humans create are the things they create together. The most progressive decisions we make are the ones we make for the collective other. The easier it is for humans to form into competing cliques (especially as encouraged by algorithms), the more divided we become. People with similarities will draw arbitrary lines over their differences, enforced by algorithms and divisive moderator principles.

    A community doesn't require that we all agree to thrive - only that whenever we disagree, we know we all still belong.