this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.
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Oddly enough, people are pretty adamant about demanding that we add a lot of addictive features into lemmy, just because they exist on reddit and on other big tech platforms. I usually push back, but I'm always downvoted to oblivion. I conciously wanted to avoid putting these addictive, psychologically harmful things into lemmy-ui.
So its great to see posts like this one. Social media doesn't have to be a negative experience, or addictive. The time we spend here should be short, and positive.
Short positive social media is my dream
What would be an example of an addictive feature that could be added to Lemmy?
Infinite scrolling, karma, targeted content.
Karma we can definitely do without. I don't know of anyone who actually took it seriously anyway.
Bots took Reddit karma very seriously.
The lack of karma is one of the reasons why I prefer lemmy over kbin.
Infinite scrolling is a big one. I need to get out. Help.
I hate to be the one to do this to you, but old.lemmy.world has infinite scrolling... and is designed to look exactly like old reddit
Yeah but it's not a feature that is enabled by default.
In some sense, Lemmy has targeted content since you can subscribe to communities. It's just less aggressive.
I'm really thankful for it, so thank you for pushing back. One of the biggest reasons I chose Lemmy over Kbin was the lack of overall user score. I'm fine with posts and comments having a score — it sort of helps one determine what is and isn't good content for a community, or what might not be good advice — but summing those up on your user profile only leads to weird score measuring contests and a sort of "number go up" addictive cycle. Thank you also for giving us the ability to hide scores if we don't want to see them.
Thank you for that
o7
Does Lemmy even need any more features? Can we please avoid feature bloat and don't break what doesn't need fixing?
I think that depends on what you would call a "feature". Most everything I can think of that could be "added" would be front end stuff, and third party devs can do those if they want.
Mostly just better connection with other Fediverse apps (Mastodon, Peertube, etc)
yeah social media should be more functional and easily put away when not needed. I love the fact that I just don't get attention consuming notifications. I love the fact that there isn't an algorithm that promotes the most inflammatory point of view for "eNgAgEmEnT".
I just don't feel like a product here, it feels real compared to any platform.
I feel similarly. To add to that, I don't even like the fact that people have been pushing so hard for Lemmy apps. I get that people want something to entertain themselves with on the train or in class or wherever they might be, but phone based social media apps seem to encourage superficial engagement and doomscrolling by design. I much prefer a rich desktop experience as it encourages depth of discussion and debate. One thing I really liked on reddit, though, was something I saw a long time ago on r/TrueFilm. Comments had a hard minimum for characters. If your comment was below 250 characters, or something like that, it was automatically removed on the basis that if you had anything to say, you should have thought about it enough to warrant more than 250 character submissions. It also functionally murdered smartphone or tablet based commenting. I kinda wish you could do similar on certain lemmy communities.
That's an interesting idea, but it would completely butcher conversations.
Or restrict them to people who have something meaningful to contribute. Low effort vs. high effort. You'd have to be explicit that that's the purpose of the community and that's how it works. I remember some great posts on r/TrueFilm back in the day. A lot of it was by people who were either film students or who had degrees in film studies and had the kind of academic background needed to speak at length about a topic without it becoming trite. I have to say, I do miss it. The internet has gotten way dumber and way lazier over the years, in a lot of ways.
I suppose there could be communities focused away from conversations. Like an auditorium you rent for your class of 200 to watch a movie that isn't in print anymore and then discuss it afterwards. I imagine someone would stand up in said auditorium when they have a well formed idea or rebuttal to an idea, but refrain from standing just to add some conversational space filler like "I agree" and then sitting back down (which is kind of comical now that I think about it). Port over this idea into the internet and you get the communities you're talking about, correct?
Hmmm, not really. Rather, the community is specifically focused around conversation. But a different type of conversation. Typical internet conversations on reddit (and a lot of other places), especially over the last several years, seem to mainly occur in short bursts and at a fairly superficial level. The kind of community I'm envisioning is one in which there's a central topic or theme (such as film), but it focuses on fairly deep or complex conversations. If someone wants to respond to a comment made by another user, it'd typically be point by point with supporting evidence and argumentation. Or at least a well reasoned perspective. An okay, if not spectacular, example would be this post on reddit from a couple of years ago on r/TrueFilm (https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueFilm/comments/khlrnv/a_brief_rant_about_my_cinema_students_and/). The post itself is a few hundred words and focuses on a central concept or observation made by the OP. Most top level comments are a paragraph or two. There are brief responses in the individual comment threads, but the actual discussion is fairly robust and provides new ideas and perspectives beyond just people saying "lmao same" or similarly useless comments.
That makes sense; maybe require a wordcount for the base level comments and a much lesser word count requirement for the replies?
That would be reasonable, I think. As you drill down into reply threads comments tend to become more focused on particular topics of conversation, in my experience, and so the size of any given reply might reasonably diminish.
Lemmy for me feels like the early days of social media. Think early 4chan and reddit. I do miss the days of simple forums though.
I'm curious, would you tell me about some of the anti-features being requested? I wonder what kind of things are flying entirely under my radar.
Well here's some upvotes for you, brother/sister man/lady
I mean those features are addictive, so it isn't that odd that people want their fix.