I Hope Rexxitors Tone Down the Low-Hanging Comment Chains on Lemmy.

win95@lemmy.fmhy.ml to Lemmy.World Announcements@lemmy.world – 124 points –

I loved Reddit for what it is, but nothing made me back out of a post faster than seeing the top 3 parent threads as a regurgitation of the same inside jokes, pun-chains, and so on.

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I get what you're saying, but communities that spend time together will form their inside jokes, their way of doing things, etc. If you don't like it you don't have to participate. I say this with the upmost respect, but you need to get over yourself. Nobody is forcing you into a community.

totes agree on that ish

the dumb shit is what makes it feel like a community or friends getting together. if its not that its a college message board for assignments

yeah, it's almost a bit intimidating to post here now the fun has settled. you have to think of a whole thought about a somewhat serious topic and sometimes that's just...ugh

ya that hype will die down too

im totally a filthy casual and get the dislike but if lemmy survives and thrives, it will be with the help of shitposters

not everything has to be serious

Thank god. I enjoyed using reddit because I used to shitpost irl and have had to tone it down with work so I need an outlet somewhere...

The relationship advice threads were the weirdest. Someone would post a question like "my wife is sleeping over at her male coworkers place a lot and stopped coming home, should I be worried" and all the answers would be saying they're just jealous and too controlling.

You and I must have been in opposite threads there. Because it was weird, but in the opposite way you're describing.

Once saw one where I guy's wife let her sister something close to 1% of their savings because both the sister and her partner had been laid off in one month. The guy went ballistic and move everything out of their joint accounts into ones under his name only, and gave her a strict allowance. People on reddit were telling him that's nowhere enough, he should apparently divorce her right away, and maybe sue her.

They were also convinced that because of this one short term loan the SIL and BIL were now going to think he's a sucker, and they'd move in.

It was weird. Those places often get weird though because people in healthy relationships, or single but happy about it, just don't show up. So you just gave a cycle of people unhappy with their personal relationships goading other equally unhappy people.

I'm sorry.. but the pun threads are legendary. I actually hope they at the very least, continue.

It always puts a smile on my face.

...and my axe!

am i doing this right?

I loved the joke threads. People continuing a reference or pun or joke was just a harmless, fun time.

Don't expect human nature to change just because some ceo of a different company decided to be a greedy dick, honestly

So you're saying we should encourage people to not comment and participate because you personally don't enjoy something?

I know I'm being a bit over the top with the wording there but lets really think about it for a moment. Participation is engagement. And if we want Lemmy and by extension Lemmy.World to grow its what we need.

I upvoted you. Its a valid discussion to have. I just personally don't think its something we should be worried about in general.

Let Lemmy grow. Growth and low effort pun threads is not what killed reddit. Corporate interference and shit stirring controversy spewing algorithms in the name of "user engagement" is what drove reddit down the drain.

This right here. Puns aren't what was bad, it was the endless doomscrolling habit and continuous outrage going on that was. All the Rexxitors are going to see a serious uptick in their mental health. The puns were a coping mechanism, I think here that defensive reaction will be minimized.

No the endlessly repetitive puns were bad. They weren't the only things, but they were absolutely bad.

Exactly. Like, I get that people want to have fun and all and I'm all for it even if it's not my thing, but any relevant discussion was constantly drowned out by the pun chains and copypasted shit to the point that it was fairly obviously often just bots, but as long as a few people have their fun fuck the discussion right? Right... but I/you/we gotta be less cynical, as was said above the lemmy algo is apparently better with this stuff. So I'm at least going to try to be a little hopeful.

Yea the main reason I hated it was because I had to fuckin dig through a thread if I wanted to find a serious comment about whatever was posted. It wasn't so much that low effort puns and shit were common, it was that they drowned almost everything else out in a lot of subs. Like even /r/science was turning into a memefest at the end.

I guess we'll see how things develope here

Glad to see one of the first posts I see on here is whining about how other people post. Starting to feel like home already.

Just need the people complaining about people complaining post followed by a rule baning complaining about people. Then we can get the golden meta post of complaining about the rule stopping you from complaining about people.

When do we get to complain that some people here didn't like something before, but some people now like that thing? Surely soon.

I'll give it until the end of June. By that point, anyone who was going to leave reddit will have left, and new users will come more organically. At that point, the rexxitors will do what redditors do best, which is gatekeep.

Lemmy sorts comments differently from reddit. Lemmy's documentation page about their algorithm describes reddit's algorithm as one that,

rewards comments that are repetitive and spammy.

It's an issue the developers claim to have a solution for.

I have no problem with jokes and comment chains. People should have their fun. But, I deleted my reddit account in frustration years ago. Reddit ranks the jokes higher than relevant discussion.

I'm cautiously optimistic. Lemmy is likely to be less prone to this particular problem.

Wow, that's a clever little algorithm. It feels like it could work better.

Reddit's big problem (among many) was you had to get in early on a thread to contribute. Otherwise you could be so far at the bottom you might as well have sent your reply to the bit bucket.

lemmy's algo seems in theory to work better, but we'll only know when the userbase here gets large enough.

On reddit, once a thread got past 300+ comments, the only way to get any views on your comment was to post it as a nested comment in a top-level comment.

lol, I realized the same thing and gamed that broken system more than once.

most power users realised that, i think. and that's what led to the pun chains.

I feel like there is a potential but minor problem with Lemmy's algorithm. It favors new comments but what if the post itself is asking a question with a definitive answer? The best answers might get buried by side discussion as time goes on.

I think as time goes on, I'd assume the recency boost would subside and the upvotes for the definitive answers should float back to the top.

Also, length is probably favoured as well, since so many top content isn't just 3 words.

To shreds you say, tsk tsk tsk. Well, how’s his wife holding up?

Ahh, the old lemmyroo...

Yeah those are just circle-jerky and don't add to any meaningful discussion.

I've been hoping most of those users are only here temporarily following the bandwagon/circle-jerking, and that they go back to reddit for the comments of nothing but lame puns and off-topic jokes.

I was really hoping to escape that migrating here. The comments of nearly every reddit thread just devolves into r/funny or r/adviceanimals. Distinct subreddits mean less and less, and off-topic content is upvoted in every sub just because it illicits a cheap laugh.

Reddit is less and less a place for substantive discussion and more just a dumping grounds of repetitive lame jokes. I really hope the children stay on reddit...

Thanks for the gold, kind stranger!

don'tkillmei'mjoking

Lemmy reminds me of old school BBS where actual discussion happened. I know it's been a shift for me where I actually have to think about a response and hold a discussion instead of just following the patterns. Not that I don't appreciate rote comments, it's nice to expect a joke and have that delivered on. Not every thread though.

I think it's natural to want the majority of posts to meet one's preferences but what one finds interesting/entertaining/etc. varies for each person.

I love diversity and choice and so I'm happy that each community can have their own individual rules/cultures and we can pick which communities we want to join. E.g., I wouldn't expect the same behaviour/rules/culture in a shit posting community compared to an arch linux community, but I'm glad both types of communities and content will exist.

We can collectively choose what kinds of unique cakes to bake and we can choose which cakes to eat too. :D

Sounds like a good AI feature for a Lemmy client app. "✅ I don't want to see comments that only contain a pun."

this was something I loved about slashdot moderation. When voting, people had to specify the reason for the vote. +1 funny, +1 insightful, +1 informative, -1 troll, -1 misleading, etc.

That way you can, for example, set in your user preferences to ignore positive votes for comedy, and put extra value on informative votes.

Then, to keep people from spamming up/down votes and to encourage them to think about their choices, they only gave out a limited number of moderation points to readers. So you'd have to choose which comments to spend your 5 points on.

Then finally, they had 'meta moderation' where you'd be shown a comment, and asked "would a vote of insightful be appropriate for this comment" to catch people who down-voted out of disagreement or personal vandetta. Any users who regularly mis-voted would stop receiving the ability to vote.

I don't think this is directly applicable to a federated system, but I do think it's one of the best-thought-out voting systems ever created for a discussion board.

edit: a couple other points i liked about it:

Comments were capped at (iirc) +5 and -1. Further votes wouldn't change the comment's score.

User karma wasn't shown. The user page would just say Karma: good. Or Excellent, or poor, or some other vague term.

This seems like a great system.
I really hate all the reddit awards. I didn't even know they exist until I opened the steve huffman ama in new reddit, and it had about a million awards that were all a different (moving/sparkling) emoji. Facebook has those too, all the little icons for like, haha, sad, heart etc. I find that stuff really distracting to look at and it's one of many reasons i refuse to use facebook, or reddit's official website & app.
Something like you're describing sounds like it would work really well though, especially if there were just maybe different colours or something for the upvote/downvote type, instead of space-wasting icons and images.

Yeah, their layout is dated, but the scoring system doesn't take much room (once you accept the idea that a reply can have a subject line):

That's so dreamy that I created a feature request post linking to your comment. (I also did an @ you but not sure I did that right.)

I wouldn’t expect the same behaviour/rules/culture in a shit posting community compared to an arch linux community

What's the difference?

Those were just two random examples. It would depend on whatever rules/guidelines each community owner makes.

Basically each community can have their own rules.

  • Some communities may allow swearing and some may not
  • Some may allow 18+ content and some may not
  • etc.
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the other thing to consider with low effort, duplication of memes is the server overhead. one thing to burn corporate coffers with the same people of walmart and cat tropes but this kind of stuff burns server and storage resources.

for a corporate entity looking to make billions off our data that's the cost of doing business -- but for lemmy server admins it's a truly personal cost.

imo we should be respectful of our "homes" and try not to trash them with low value content.

I think this is an excellent point (re: server overhead) and one I hadn't considered. Thanks for sharing that.

I want to echo what dialectic cake said. I had not considered this at all and it's such a good thing to keep in mind. Thanks for edifying me!

Damn, we're already gatekeeping in here? Nice.

It really is fascinating though, having a front row seat to what really is a massive tectonic shift in the history of the internet. Real curious to see how this all plays out. I've been online since the early 90's so I've seen tons come and go: AOL, yahoo, slashdot, livejournal, myspace, digg, etc, and this one feels different for some reason, but maybe its just me.

I think it feels different because it's not website B rolling in as a replacement for website A. It's an entire new system for social media, so the way you understand and use it has to shift a bit. I find it exciting, a lot more than if we just shifted to a generic centralised reddit alternative.

This is what web 3.0 is about.

Not crypto, but decentralization.

Web 1: fragmentation Web 2: centralizatiom Web 3: decentralization Web 4: quantum entanglement Web 5: ...

That's crazy, we shouldn't even allow anyone here unless they had at least 1,000 karma on Reddit.

I agree with you, the relationship subs were/are a hell of 'heh a quick way to lose that 210 pounds, dump him sweaty!'. Like why can't we just give advice without everyone trying to be a wiseass.

That's your opinion and you're welcome to it, but nothing will kill adoption rates harder than doing the whole early Mastodon thing of "you should change how you behave here"

I believe the response you’re looking for is “Well that’s, like, your opinion… man”

::: spoiler spoiler sorry, couldn’t resist :::

Should've thought of that one myself, nice

Don't worry! We'll develop our own new inside jokes to repeat and nauseum!

EDIT: I realized, 4 hours later, than auto-correct had changed "ad" to "and". I'm leaving it as it makes this comment even more obnoxious.

Agreed, it's gonna get so annoying hearing these jokes and nauseam though.

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Google en passant

holy hell

This is one of the jokes I hate the most on reddit. Someone doing a thing another person said they didn't like. It's so played out and one of the reasons I was trying to branch off from reddit.

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Lemmy will likely have its own "the narwhal bacons at midnight" phase.

It'll interesting to see what it is...and then almost immediately tiresome.

I think that stuff like that developed when the userbase was pretty young. Don't think something like that will happen again.

At least I hope not...

It’s a free society here, if Lemmy really takes off its most likely going to happen and you’re free to partake in the joke or not.

Lemmy is here to serve all, I imagine some hard boundaries around illegal content will be put in place though.

De-federation can happen for that sort of scenario

That legal/illegal thing is going to be tricky to figure out. What's illegal exactly in a global federated social network? Whose law applies?

The instance's hosting country's law applies to the instance and the communities it hosts.

Displaying illegal content from the fediverse is fine?

do you remember when they tried to make Millhouse a meme

Wasn't Millhouse was a meme before reddit was a thing? Pretty sure I saw Millhouse memes on 4chan back in the day.

I do say everything's coming up Milhouse sometimes.

For me, that was part of the charm.

I could still find the information I needed when it was a serious query, and I could still find sound and sensitive viewpoints on many topics. But, opening a horrible post just to see a horribly distasteful comment as the first response just kept reminding me not to take life so seriously.

I'm fine with a horribly distasteful comment, but for the love of God make it a unique horribly distasteful comment.

@bizzwell some subreddits did have some dedicated flairs which required everyone to be serious (at the cost of being banned) - but this required the OP to deliberately think about posting the stuff under the right flair.

Maybe this could be also easily enforced here by asking people to append [Serious Discussion] at the beginning of each relevant post, on the title or content?

@win95

Same. I like it, but it belongs in more shitposty communities IMO. I like a small percentage of my feed to be shitposts, and when I dig into it it's just people repeating twists on the same stupid jokes.

Sometimes it's actually clever, a lot of the time it's just people wanting reassurance they belong.

It's annoying when it overflows and floods everywhere with the exact same joke (like Google en passant). In r/anarchychess they were constantly workshopping new jokes, because it definitely got old

@angrylittlekitty@lemmy.one (comment link) had mentioned server costs from hosting duplicated content which was a great point.

I will also add, that people's time is also a finite resource. And so we can all help by being respectful of the rules for each community (save moderators time) and additionally in communities where you are asking for help -- avoid being a Help Vampire.

This is the way

At first I thought this is an overly pretentious post, but while writing a response I thought about some of the most upvoted yet heinously circlejerky comment threads I've had to wade through to get to a rational or different comment. Good point OP'Lem!

I used to wish there was a browser plugin that would just hide the top comment on posts somehow. Invariably, when a postvreally blows up, the top comment is some kind of joke or a pun that doesn't add anything to the discussion at hand.

with a community as big as reddit, the only way to make yourself heard is to be among the top few comments on each thread.

It gets tiring writing 10 lengthy, well thought-out replies for 10 different threads, only for 9 of them to fall off the radar and get no responses. So you get people spamming low-effort puns in order to get noticed.

So much this 1!1!1!

There's a noticeable generation gap between people who use 1!1!1! and the ones who would say sO MuCh tHiS! I'm not sure when it happened but I'm gonna guess you are about 35?

And another generation gap between people who use a double space after a period and those who just use a single space.

You can always tell when someone was trained to type on a typewriter when that happens.

Why was a double space used?

Printing-press typesetters had a rule for how much space should be between sentences. Then people started having personal typewriters that were monospace, so to make their documents look similar to traditional publications and to more easily see the punctuation marks, people would put two spaces before starting a new sentence. Personal typewriters got more sophisticated with better spacing, making double-spacing unnecessary, and then computers came on the scene with word processing software, which also had no need for the improvised double-spacing.

But people had already learned from their teachers back in high school that they should double-space on the typewriter. So they taught it to their students with advanced typewriters and computers, and some of those students to this day just won't quit.

Typewriters were/are monospaced, so putting a double space after the full-stop helped you recognise the start of a new sentence, giving it, and you, breathing space.

The PC fonts are size adjusted and double space is no longer necessary, but it doesn't hurt.

Thanks!

I still find it weird, though. I often use monospaced fonts and a double space just looks wrong to me.

Oh man... but they forgot 11!!11!1!0ne. Why does this remind me of arfenhouse? Anyway the ones and exclamations are too symmetrical. I sense a fake.

Don't mind me, I am just waiting in the wings to "Choose someone's wife"

Just wait until someone posts something containing the substring "69"!

you have my updoot

I jest. Ultimately without some sort of mechanic that disincentivizes noisy, low-effort joke comments there's not going to be some sort of magical cultural shift. I'm just arriving, but from what I'm seeing Lemmy doesn't have any sort of design that will skew comments towards actual discussion and away from jokes/noise in any meaningful way.

The way it is right now, we don't have total "karma", which I imagine helps to at least suppress the purely karma-farming spam. That said, there's no real reason to think it won't be added here eventually.

I hope it doesn’t, better without karma, it shouldn’t be competitive really

Never really got the point of Karma to begin with. All it really does is measure how well you match the tone of any particular echo chamber.

If I recall, a minimum karma was used by some mod bots as a gatekeep of sorts on more official subreddits. But even then I don't think it was more than to deter very new accounts.

Deterring very new accounts is still a useful thing to do.

A lot of posts on my country's COVID sub were removed by the bot with an account too new message, and it was only set to about one week. It doesn't really slow down new users but it cuts off a lot of spam bots.

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I am still learning Lemmy, but I agree with you from what I am seeing. There is no “karma farming” here right? So the motivation is mostly people who want to engage?

There's no total karma for a user yet, yes. So the perverse incentive to make number go up at all costs isn't quite as wild as it is in Reddit.

As I wander around Lemmy more I'm also noticing that there's a lot of opportunity for instances to have their own subcultures, which goes against the "It doesn't matter which Lemmy instance you use" advice I've seen in a couple places. It definitely seems prudent to choose an instance that has an admin team and/or a theme you like, because instance-local content is going to be the easiest to find. The instance I chose is decently small and chill, but I've seen some other instances with a big focus on memes. To each their own!

I agree with you to an extent, but I have noticed on my instance it is heavily populated with outside instances so hopefully as this grows that subculture part will not be as much of a concern and more a fun “extra bonus” if you will of your favored instance and we can still unite under our favorite “common communities."

Yeah, I was thinking of having some sort of feature that pre-builds thread topics in a post (humor, discussion, cross-searching) where users can put there comments in depending on what it is they're going for.

I'm also eyeballing Tildes as a Reddit alternative, and their dev has an interesting approach to increasing signal-to-noise ratio. They don't have downvotes, but they have labels that affect how comments are sorted, with the joke and noise labels moving comments down in the sort by a pretty significant amount.

That sounds like it could work pretty well, you could even just add it on to other comment sort styles. You don't need to necessarily remove downvotes if you really want them in specific instances.

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If the Lemmies end up like 2023 reddit, then maybe what you're looking for is tildes.net which seems to be more like r/AskHistorians meets pre-September Usenet.

Bad idea to jump from proprietary platform 1 to proprietary platform 2

I'd rather them do that than the taking up arms to demand Lemmy become Reddit I've been seeing all over the place.

I also hope nobody is going to be editing their comment and saying "wow, this blew up."

Idk. I enjoyed it when it's done well. I subbed to subs like r/redditsings because of it.

/r/inclusiveor haha i am so original haha

Hopefully you can find some social media platform that doesn't have any other people on it so that you can live in peace from the dumb shit that other people post.

That's why I'm starting my own instance! With blackjack! And hookers!

Idk, I love comment chains like that. The funny comments, references or comment interactions are often the funniest thing about a post.

and nothing makes you feel part of something as finally getting an inside joke.

this tbh 😩 edit: holy hell

For real though , idk if I see it happening. If the culture of "this" comments comes with, all we have against it is an opposing culture of trying to keep comments high-quality. It just depends on what kind of redditors take the effort to migrate

To complicate things, you may also get different behaviour in different communities by the same user.

I think it's really at the community level that culture can be formed as at the all post level, we all just have our different preferences and that's fine. Also, our preferences may changed based on what we want/need in a day, e.g., one day we may want jokes while another day we may want tech support.

And so at the community level, community owner Bob may want no low-effort posts so he can put that into the rules, the mods can enforce that (be removing low-effort posts), the community can enforce it by only upvoting high-effort posts, and then a culture is formed which will draw other people who are into that.

And likewise the same for other culture/expectations.

I'm not sure it's even possible to contain some of the tropes. I still occasionally see people posting "first" on YouTube and similar, and that's a Slashdot troll meme from more than 20 years ago.

I don't mind most of them but I downvoted every "Google en passant" comment chain.

I spent an unhealthy amount of time on reddit over nearly the last decade, and somehow this is the first time seeing that phrase. I actually had to just google “google en passant” to figure out what you’re talking about. I’m still not sure I understand the meme, and I’m certain Ive never seen it, or at least never paid attention to it if I did. Yet it must be common because at least two people bring it up in this thread. Crazy how that works.

Just a simple call-reaponse meme. AnarchyChess ended spreading everywhere. Probably because chess took off with middle and high schoolers during 2020 lockdown.

I mean, adults, too. I'm 28 and I picked up chess again when Queen's Gambit came out. I had always known how to play but I never knew how to play.

I still don't. But that's besides the point.

I still don’t

Then Google en passant xD

I'm in the same boat - I know how to play (horsey moves in an L, bishop goes diagonally etc), but i don't know how to play ("ah i see you used the classic Cyberpunk Windmill opener, most people respond with either the Frenchman's Dehumidifier or the Blue Baboon but imma take inspiration from the Smith-Wesson match and try a variation of the Cardboard Cockroach")

You could argue that knowing (almost) anything with a name to it isnt really knowing "how" to play, its literally a memorization of the best moves to a certain point in the game. When you move outside of those named movesets is when you really need to know how to play the game.

Knowing how to play is as basic as simply knowing how the pieces move, and then moving into things like undefended pieces, discovered checks, double checks, forking, threats, sacrifices, and then even higher level stuff like "gaining a tempo", endgame combo's, and yes even the rarely executed windmill haha.

Which is to say... dont get too caught up in the names of stuff if you are just playing for fun, just focus on the mechanics and tactics

C4 master race - you don't need to know how to play if your opponent has no idea how to play against you

Me too, kind of. I'd always played chess on and off my whole life, but after watching queen's gambit with my bff I found out she's actually pretty into chess, which prompted me to get more into it too.

If you haven't, you should check out Gotham Chess on YouTube. I can't recommend him enough. He is hilarious and informative, the perfect combo of teacher and entertainer. Not even just if you want to learn chess but he makes watching chess fun, his recaps of tournaments are fantastic for beginner chess players.

That's just Zoomer humor. It has nothing to do with Reddit. Memes on tiktok/insta are the same thing. The same joke over and over (that's not even "funny" in the traditional sense) repeated so much that it's funny.

That has been literally all internet humor since the dawn if the internet.

All your base are belong to us, nyancat, GGG, advice animals, roflcopter, it's a trap, badger mushroom, everything.

Internet humor literally relies on enough regurgitation to be a huge inside joke.

I mean, before that it was pretty much "I hate my wife" humor and dirty jokes for half of a century,, so even if the dead horse is being made into applesauce, it still might be a step up.

I know it's not the conversation we're having, but nothing makes me hate anti-LGBTQIA+ folk quite like the "I hate my wife" shtick.

"GAYS ARE RUINING MARRAIGE" My brother in Christ, just yesterday I heard you joke about finding your wife a pair of concrete shoes. You did perfectly well destroying the concept of marriage all on your own.

Whenever I think of these "jokes" as a Gen Z I think of an ungrateful joe who got to date and marry and hates his wife. Doing these in 2023 year of our lord without being burned is a miracle.

To go further off topic, LGBT+ folks have my full support but can y'all please stop adding to the acronym?

I thought the 'q' was supposed to be an umbrella for everyone else, then there was a plus that's definitely for that purpose, yet somehow more letters still seem to get added every few years

The next time a boomer co-worker comes up and passive-aggressively asks me, "what's this new letter I just found," with a grin like this exposes how dumb the whole community really is, I swear I'm going to throw them out a window

I don't want to go to prison, please stop adding letters so they will stop talking to me

The actual gay agenda is to rearrange the alphabet and covertly get the world to memorize it. The but sex is simply a strategy.

No it isn't. They were wearing diapers when Redditors were making "This guy X" jokes or broken arms jokes, or pun chains ad nauseam. Stop making this another example of "It's those darn kids" when every generation is guilty of being corny as fuck.

I don't think it's just zoomers. One of the most annoying things that older generations do is quote movies and old commercials for no reason. Don't forget "whassuuuuuuuuuup"

I've had countless millennials quote star wars, mean girls, napoleon dynamite, the godfather, and you don't even want to know how many shitty joker impressions i've heard.

I think it's just a human thing to do and if you weren't there, it's kinda cringe and not funny.

That being said, I always found the reddit comments annoying asf lmao

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