Don’t be a vote connoisseur here please. Redefine how you think about voting and participating.

Do you miss your communities from elsewhere. Well guess what, you are that core community now. If you want it back, the only thing holding you back is you. Don’t wait on someone else to start posting. You don’t need to worry about the perfect polished quality of your content or if it has been done before elsewhere. The current bar is, umm, poorly defined. No one is judging you. Call it practice. EVERY time you see something interesting, get in the habit of posting it please. Maybe go out of your way to grab a reference or two and post them.

Along these lines, think of how unsure and uncomfortable this may seem to most of us former lurker connoisseurs. You can play hard and thick skinned all you want, but you know exactly what post or comment you posted elsewhere that got the most votes or interaction. Why? Because it matters to you. So upvote everything you can. It matters to someone else too. Don’t upvote just for the value or interest you have in the content. Do it just to say “hey, thanks for making the effort to participate and make this place a few lines longer.” Please rethink how you handle voting, at least for now, think of a down vote as FU for participating, no votes as I wish you weren’t here. We are all likely accustomed to a lot more interaction and validation in our own little niches. This is really an underpinning value of social media, we are here to engage with people, so tell people who are new and unsure about a new and different place, “hey, thanks for participating.” You may not know or really appreciate their interests, but you can help us grow a core that can evolve into your favorite niches as the community grows. You are the core community. We can all make it grow if we make it a place people want to be.

  • Bp#9@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    32
    ·
    1 year ago

    Its funny: in my case a few weeks before the current reddit enshittification drive I started feeling like /r/all was turning into facebook or twitter from a ‘create engagement by pissing people off’ perspective and started checking in on mastodon more regularly and reddit less. I do participate in a bunch of subreddits too, but it seems like the writing is on the wall with reddit.

    I don’t love the twitter model where you’re searching for a hashtag of the day or following some entity yelling stuff. I grew up on usenet news, forums, and bbs’es before Facebook came along and really like threaded discussions, with self/auto moderation for interest and community ‘adults’ moderating for big stuff.

    Today is my first day on a Lemmy instance and so far it seems to be exactly the right model for me: distributed, forum moderated and user moderated, and threaded discussion based. Its awesome the underlying protocols fit many models (this one and the Mastodon one) so you can choose your style.

    • Rentlar@beehaw.org
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      I was noticing it too over on Reddit. Last couple months I found myself almost unconciously in the comments of threads where there was a misspelling in the title. It happened often enough that I was starting to think they were doing it intentionally.

      • vinnymac@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        11
        ·
        1 year ago

        Y’all, I’ve been on Reddit for 14 years. It has been lowest common denominator garbage aside from the niche communities for over 4 years now. If it wasn’t for RES, RiF, and Apollo I would’ve stopped using it years ago.

        The average redditor has been lowering the quality of posts and comments for quite some time. Around a year ago, I noticed people I personally know, using Reddit, whom I assumed never would do so. These individuals spent most of their time on apps such as Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and TikTok. I believe this is Reddits intention, and they want to stabilize to compete with some of the larger social media communities, rather than remain as they were.

        I’m glad to see it rot over time, and will recommend no one uses it going forward.