Dave was bragging to his boss one day, “You know, I know everyone there is to know. Just name someone, anyone, and I know them.”
Tired of his boasting, his boss called his bluff, “OK, Dave, how about Tom Cruise?”
“No dramas boss, Tom and I are old friends, and I can prove it.” So Dave and his boss fly out to Hollywood and knock on Tom Cruise’s door, and Tom Cruise shouts,
“Dave! What’s happening? Great to see you! Come on in for a beer!”
Although impressed, Dave’s boss is still skeptical. After they leave Cruise’s house, he tells Dave that he thinks him knowing Cruise was just lucky.
“No, no, just name anyone else,” Dave says.
“President Obama,” his boss quickly retorts.
“Yup,” Dave says, “Old buddies, let’s fly out to Washington,” and off they go.
At the White House, Obama spots Dave on the tour and motions him and his boss over, saying, “Dave, what a surprise, I was just on my way to a meeting, but you and your friend come on in and let’s have a beer first and catch up.”
Well, the boss is very shaken by now but still not totally convinced. After they leave the White House grounds he expresses his doubts to Dave, who again implores him to name anyone else.
“Pope Francis,” his boss replies.
“Sure!” says Dave. “I’ve known the Pope for years.” So off they fly to Rome.
Dave and his boss are assembled with the masses at the Vatican’s St. Peter’s Square when Dave says, “This will never work. I can’t catch the Pope’s eye among all these people. Tell you what, I know all the guards so let me just go upstairs and I’ll come out on the balcony with the Pope.” He disappears into the crowd headed towards the Vatican.
Sure enough, half an hour later Dave emerges with the Pope on the balcony, but by the time Dave returns, he finds that his boss has had a heart attack and is surrounded by paramedics.
Making his way to his boss’ side, Dave asks him, “What happened?”
His boss looks up and says, “It was the final straw… you and the Pope came out on to the balcony and the man next to me said, who the fuck is that on the balcony with Dave?”
There is an interesting, and almost universal phenomenon on reddit that every time a subreddit gets past about 40,000 subscribers, the discussion quality immediately drops off a cliff, unless extremely harsh moderation policies are implemented to explicitly weed out low effort content which brings its own set of problems.
My theory on why this occurs is the scaling power of moderation. I think you computer people are probably very familiar with the concept of scalability, and that size is its own challenge at the hyperscale. So for a centralized system like Twitter or Instagram or Facebook, moderation can only scale vertically, so a huge moderation team is needed to contend with the scale of these platforms alone, which also forces the need of personalized recommendation algorithms to promote this that are actually interesting to individual users.
Reddit was able to partially avoid this phenomenon with the subreddit system, which means everyone was able to effectively manage their own, smaller subgroups who shares common interest without intervention from the site admin/mods to achieve a form of pseudo-horizontal scaling. You can also see the success of that with Facebook Groups, which are one of the few reasons why people still use Facebook for social media even though they do not want to interact with the current Facebook audience.
Lemmy, and the rest of the fediverse platforms would suffer the problems even less, as now every group admin can now be completely independent from one another, which means that real horizontal scaling can be achieved and hopefully preserving the discussion quality to a degree as it grows.
IMHO, the other part of the problem is that spicy hot-takes quickly get engagement from other users and bubble up to the top. And a lot of those spicy comments are trash, but not in violation of rules, so mods leave them up.
You can see that clearly with both Twitter and reddit. There is no worse feeling than spending time to write something with thought only to not have anyone interact with these posts at all, while tired one-liner and ragebait gets a ton of likes and comments.
However, Lemmy’s algorithm doesn’t really punish writing long form contents the same way reddit does from my experience, so I feel more free to take a little bit longer to write out my thoughts here compared to elsewhere.
One way I thought of to encourage long form content and high quality, is to limit the number of short form content from users.
I imagined every week users would be granted 14 comments that are limited to 250 characters and unlimited long form content. You could also grant more short form comments with every long form comment or with every new oc post.
The only issue would be that long form does not mean high quality and with chatgpt it’ll be easy to create long form posts. Maybe an AI system that evaluates the quality of the post could work but then gaming the system would happen.
Just a thought I had, the numbers about the length and amount of posts could be optimized or use an AI
Just saw a meme the other day about how the old mantra “Don’t feed the troll” seems to have fallen by the wayside and about 90% of the issues on the internet right now are caused by that.
This is a big thing killing my interaction with Lemmy as well. I want to like it, but I drop into a discussion thread and the top-engaged/boosted comments are spicy and almost designed to promote maximum anger. And I feel like, “Do I really, really want to spend significant time writing out a deeper comment to engage with this community…?”
I wonder how long it’ll take before we finally collectively reject the SV ethos that size is the only metric that matters and success is only achieved via monopoly…
There was a time when Usenet and BBBses and IRC was tiny and yet people still found value through community in those places.
Maybe, and I know this is a wild idea, platforms don’t have to include every human on the planet to be meaningful, relevant, or valuable.
FidoNet does still exist, but it's commonly called "fight-o-net" for a reason, as there are... some characters there.
If you do resurrect your node, I'd suggest also picking up FSXnet, as it's the second largest network, is better maintained, and has a no-politics-or-religion rule that makes it way more pleasant to be on.
Or, you know, you could call one of the BBSs out there, and make a sysop's day by being a user, as non-sysop users are not super common, at this point. You can try my BBS at http://bbs.stormbbs.com or telnet://telnet.stormbbs.com, if you'd like to see FSXnet and FidoNet in their current lives.
But there are plenty of other BBSs out there, too, and my BBS is really only special because I have an ANSI calendar with a different graphic every day that I made 370-ish graphics for. It celebrates a holiday every day.
And if you're wondering about BBS networks in general, I recently found out about https://clrghouz.bbs.dege.au/domain/list , which has way more info than I was expecting about what the available FTN networks look like.
I hear this one loud and clear. I was on the internet in 95, and worked in SV for 20 years, and when I saw the small number for Lemmy in this graphic it made me happy.
I was an avid Reddit user but dropped it like a stone in the kerfuffle - it took a while but Lemmy has now replaced that 90%
I’d love to see a content propagation analysis.
My sense is that a ton of new memes are first shared on Lemmy then shared across to other social media.
…Ok, so the niche forums don’t have critical mass yet, and you’d have to post to some general thread to get any response - but all the cool and thoughtful people are here, so the level of general discourse is higher, I love it.
Didn’t Facebook build infrastructure and give out free phones in India and other developing nations to get them online? I’m sure it was more to harvest their data, but I’m sure that counts pretty solidly for them
They got a service provider to let its users browse Facebook for free, but that was banned a year later for being unfair. It’s still a thing in other developing counties I guess.
She’s a very family oriented person and she’s gonna be wherever they are.
She’s the kind of person who wakes up and calls her mom, then her grandma, then her sisters every single day. Hell, she even talks to her nephews every day and they’re toddlers.
There really isn’t anything that compares as far as that goes.
Me, tbh I don’t like meta but the groups in facebooks is probably what keeps me there, for example there is a group about an anime and the guys there literally translate the new volumes of the novel months faster than other piracy sites, almost in the moment, there is also the memes and other posts that only appear around those groups. Not even reddit has that content, so what keeps me attached to facebook is mainly anime groups
Me? I know it’s the current hotness to not be on there, but I don’t get sites like Instagram / TickTock / Snapchat where its just reacting to photos and images. I want words dammit.
Damn! I didn’t know so many people still use Facebook. But it still doesn’t sound right. I definitely don’t feel like 37.5% of Earth’s population uses Facebook.
yeah, there are quite a number of people who have multiple accounts. almost everyone I know does. same goes for whatsapp and instagram. it’s still a massive number nonetheless
I was reading the Wikipedia page linked just an hour ago.
and I was surprised to see over a billion daily users on Facebook. I used to think at best that’d be in millions.
I understand now that what do people mean when they day social media’s amplification of a certain message can have great impact. I used to take it lightly, partly because I an totally detached to any of these big platforms.
and being on Lemmy is a wholly different experience.
Add comment