The other problem with this, content aside, is the classification of a post as “successful” or “unsuccessful”, implying that how much interaction your post receives is a scoreboard and you should be using the platform solely with the goal of scoring higher in mind. Which is basically exactly what happens in most big Reddit subs, and is a large contributor to the platform growing increasingly shitty.
People used to post on internet forums because they were interested in the discussion, or had something novel to share, and now it’s just to make an imaginary number go up.
If I have a problem I can’t solve, and I make a post, and get 1 upvote and 1 reply that solves my problem, I’d call that post far more successful than a repost of a repost of a cat video that gets 100 replies and 10,000 upvotes.
My most successful reddit post was when Peter Mayhew responded to me in a random post many, many years ago. I haven’t been back since June, but that is my most successful post regardless of reddit standards.
It’s a bit off-topic, but that’s the main reason why I don’t think that “aggregate scores” (karma) should be ever a thing in Lemmy. Not even optional - because even if you don’t care about karma, the other people around you do it, and they’ll still shit on the same common environment because of karma.
I understand this but at the same time…assigning a “worth” to posts and comments is helpful when it comes to finding useful information. If I am looking to solve a specific issue on an HP Xx.bb.x laptop or how to overcome tennis elbow…there might be 10 Reddit threads asking the same question. 9 of them have a few comments and zero useful information. One comment has a complete fix and is even referred to as the correct answer on other posts.
In a time when Google delivers pages of useless results…designating a post or comment as the “best” is valuable. Highly upvoted comments and posts typically hold good information, or a funny story or something people agree with.
Is it possible for us to have the benefits of voting without the nonsense that comes with it?
KoboldCoterie already said what I would. I’m also OK with individual scores for posts/comments, it’s just that scores for your overall contribution instil the wrong mindset in the platform.
But even for posts/comments, there are some problems, it’s just that the benefits outweigh them. People upvote stupid shit that they tend to agree on, or that they find passable, without taking into account if it’s actually contributive.
Is it possible for us to have the benefits of voting without the nonsense that comes with it?
Isn’t that essentially what Lemmy has? You can vote on comments, you can see the score of an individual comment, but there’s no aggregate score on user profiles, so the incentive to karma farm just isn’t there. Sure, there’ll be people who just really want to get high-scoring posts, and operate with that mindset, but I think it’s far, far less than on Reddit.
This is by design. All reddit wants is engagement, they don’t care about discussions, quality, etc as long as people are scrolling away on their app (emphasis on their app, considering what they did to 3rd party apps). They’re obviously going to say “look at how big the number got on this post! You should be super proud of yourself!” They want people to feel that slight dopamine hit so they can chase the next hit by creating even more inane content to keep even more people on the app to maximize the amount of eyeballs looking at ads. Everything they do is about the IPO.
Personally I love when Google Photos pulls together a cute album of my dog who had to be put down a few months back and hits me with that shit on a Monday morning.
How nobody ever thought that this feature should work only on a few whitelisted communities where the possibility of a sad post is small, like pics or funny?
How nobody ever thought that this feature should work only on a few whitelisted communities where the possibility of a sad post is small, like pics or funny?
Because the administration of Reddit never thinks on the consequences of the half-baked features that they implement. They do it, then wait to see if the users rage. If the users rage, they change something and gaslight the users to cover their own arses.
It was the same with the chat feature, 3y ago. Excerpt from that thread: the admins added a “start chatting” button to /r/rape, then accused the moderators of /r/rape of doctoring a screenshot that showed it. And then edited their comments to remove said accusation.
Wow that’s awful. My highest rated comments on Reddit all seemed to be about a personal tragedy, so I quit going to look at my comment scores. Glad I’m not there to experience this.
And on /r/exjw. There’s a good likelihood that person was kicked out of their family, and their last conversation with their grandmother was not a happy one.
So…this is very difficult for us and I don’t understand why you felt it was necessary to say that. It would be great if you could mind your own business or just say nice things when someone talks about a family member passing away. 😊
Sounds like you need some parasocial engagement. Let your friends at Facebook and Reddit remind you of all the good times you’ve had on their site. You have given yourself no other option.
Please, back off. You’re being obnoxious (rule #4) and rude (rule #1), by insisting on uncalled advice even after another user told you to “mind your own business”.
Yes, you get it. Speaking as a software engineer, users need to adapt their behavior to accommodate the product, not the other way around.
It’s impossible to account for every fanciful scenario or ethical edge case - remember, software exists in a vacuum of pure logic. So if a braindead algorithm dredges up a painful memory of yours every year and tactlessly features it alongside a lighthearted quip from the marketing team, it’s nobody’s fault.
Well, it’s your fault for not avoiding Facebook on that day. What I mean is, it’s not my fault and it’s not Facebook’s fault, whatever that means. It’s just the computer doing its thing.
Just kidding!!! I am using sarcasm to express my contempt for this mentality! It is correct to criticize tech companies for catastrophic UX failures! I believe it is in very poor taste to offer workarounds in reply to an anecdote like this!
remember, software exists in a vacuum of pure logic
You got me fooled until that line. Then I read the “just kidding”.
I think that you’re being spot on; that’s a lot like plenty software developers handle ethical and moral matters, by not doing it at all, pretending that “its just maths lol” without acknowledging that, ultimately, software is made for people, not the opposite.
Starting it a decade after Facebook is actually worse - it means that they had a whole decade to see what goes wrong with it, but still implemented it. This shows that they either 1) don’t really care about the users, or 2) are completely clueless on what they’re doing. (Spoilers: it’s both.)
The frustrating thing is that pretty much anyone who has interacted with these systems has encountered that. Whether it’s photos or social media posts, there are some “memories” that make it worse for people, and in extreme cases could trigger depression or worse.
And ot could be fixed (or at least mitigated) fairly easily. First, obviously, remove from the candidate set any references to something that’s obviously triggering - death, SA, violence, abuse, and so on. Those items wil still be there for the person to look back through at whatever time of their own choosing. They don’t want to wake up to this kind of thing. It’s not a boost to user experience. Photos would need a bit more work, but things like image and facial recognition are good enough that you could come up with a heuristic along the lines of “If there’s a lot of photos of a specific person or animal and then photos of them just stop, remove it from the data set.” You could do something similar for car accidents, burning buildings, scenes containing injury or violence, and so on. On the other hand, you can boost scores for things like pictures of parties and concerts. And I’m just talking about simple heuristics, not invoking an ML model or anything at this point. There would be a lot of false positives, perhaps, but hopefully few false negatives. It’s better to skip a potentially “good” photo when you have a thousand other good photos than it is to show a “bad” one, so we’d bias our error function like that.
Fair point. I meant you could avoid having to do any specific development and training. The facial/object recognition is an off the shelf function these days.
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