• 2 posts
  • 11 comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: December 14th, 2023
  • The more engaging and interesting posts will naturally float to the top

    This is not true. We have a decade of evidence showing that what floats to the top is the easiest to digest content - meme images.

    I’m sure you’re noticing, you don’t have many people who agree with you.

    Yep. Most people are unintelligent and thus love their low-quality content. Thankfully, the Lemmy devs decided to build a filter that’s coming with the next update.

  • Reposts, not articles themselves. Reposting someone else’s writings from the web as a link is objectively low-effort work that could be handled by a dozen-line script.

    I don’t know what you’re referring to. Copy-pasting content instead of linking directly to the source is frowned on for numerous reasons.

    a general-purpose forum. I go to Lemmy/Reddit to ask a question (e.g. how to repair a thing), voice an opinion, start a debate, talk about stuff, read comics, etc.

    Sure, that’s a secondary and perfectly valid use. The OP of this thread posted an image promoting memes. That is what I criticized.

  • discussion posts, memes, photos

    These are not remotely equal. Low-quality, mindless meme content rots your brain. You should stop consuming it and start downvoting it.

    Calling articles “lazy content” is extremely unintelligent. I’m disgusted that you should say that.

    The “original content” you refer to is often screenshots of social media posts and reposted memes.

    Do you want lemmy to become a parasitic platform depending on content from elsewhere to sustain itself?

    This is such a bizarre thing to say. Reddit and Lemmy are link/news aggregators. Their whole benefit is being a single site where people can share & discuss news, instead of having to visit a dozen different websites every day. Reddit started to promote low-quality meme content, which massively degraded the quality of the platform. It’s extremely disappointing to see people on Lemmy promoting it as well.

What it looks like:

Here’s an example of such a post: https://sh.itjust.works/post/58082125

They uploaded an image and then included a URL as the body/text.

On Lemmy, it looks like an image post, with a small expando to the right of the title that you can click to show the body:

Why you should stop doing it:

  1. It makes high-quality posts look the same as low-quality ones.

I automatically downvote most image/meme submissions and posts with bad/non-descriptive titles for quality control. Linking directly to a source is how you make a high-quality submission. You can include screenshots or quotes in the body of the post.

  1. I could start clicking the expando next to the title to check if a source was provided, but there’s going to be a user option to block image posts in the next lemmy update (v0.20), so that format is not good since lots of people will start to automatically block them.

  2. You can put images in the body of the posts.

Why should anyone care?

Low-quality, easy-to-digest content will dominate and drown out everything else if no one does anything to limit it. It degrades the internet and our brains.

A blog that elaborates:

The Cargo Cult of The Ennui Engine https://medium.com/@max.p.schlienger/the-cargo-cult-of-the-ennui-engine-890c541cebcb

I was homeschooled previously with a small group of other children and we fart in class all the time.

Now I’m in public school for high school and no one is farting. I was very sheltered and public school is like a whole new world for me, so I don’t know what the norms are. I’ve been holding it in but my stomach hurts and it leaks out anyway.

I don’t understand how there are so many more people in high school and yet zero farts…