tl;dr: let’s stop the generic and almost-irrelevant-doom-and-gloom karma-harvesting one-liners that can be copy-pasted between any two articles written in the last century
Background
Anyone who has used Reddit for any decent period of time is probably aware of the drill – when you create an account, unsubscribe from the defaults and find the smaller communities. It will end up in a better experience.
Why were people told to dodge the defaults? They were the largest subreddits. But because they were large, the quality was often regarded as “meh” due to post and comment quality.
How bad was it? You’d find news posted about something, then you’d click into the comments, find they’re something to read, then move on.
A week passes and an article on a similar subject comes up. You click into the comments and a sense of “Is this deja-vu?” is felt. Is this comment thread for the article this week, or the article from last week?
Turns out, the discussion was too generic. It wasn’t uniquely thought provoking to the article posted. The comments didn’t offer much and could be copy-pasted between many news posts spanning any given year.
Reddit became boring after picking up on this pattern, especially as this became the norm on so many communities. The comments served as candy for feeding a doom-scrolling habit. At times I’d joke to myself that I could predict what the upvoted comments would be.
Why do I bring this up?
I’ve noticed that commentary in the most popular communities have been flooded with unsubstantial commentary as of late – the type of commentary that could be copy-pasted between almost any two articles in a given month. It feels like cheap karma acquisition, even though Lemmy doesn’t really incentivize karma.
The Lemmy community has a lot of energy and a lot of people who want to see it succeed. I do too.
So what should we do?
I am advocating that we collectively try to put in more thought in our discussions. I think Hackernews (sans the occasional edgy political take) and Tildes might be worth learning from. Let’s make it a goal to contribute content that others may learn from and do away with the copy-paste doom-and-gloom comments.
Just unsubscri-
Yes, the popular refrain to a lot of concerns about Lemmy is “just unsubscribe from those and join another community”. I disagree that is the right solution. This isn’t limited to just one or two communities of a given type and what habits are created in one community easily spread to others due to the very large overlap in users.
I agree with the OP, but I do somewhat agree with you, too. A lot of the news articles we get now feel like “micro-updates” to the same story: Elon Musk does bad thing that is bad for Twitter, Russia says shitty thing and attacks Ukraine some more, the American right-wing tries to do something else to take away abortion rights, etc. They can sometimes be interesting developments, and I don’t want to minimise the importance of any of them because they are important (well, not most of the Musk spam, but the others, certainly), but most of the commentary on topics like those has been played out over the last 12+ months and there’s not necessarily much new content to analyse or discuss.
However, OP is right that comment sections here are often disappointing. I find myself commenting here a lot less often than I did on Reddit simply because there are fewer interesting comments to reply to, and because my own comments get fewer interesting replies. Part of that is just the nature of having a smaller userbase, but it doesn’t stop it being a little demotivating when it feels like you’re commenting into the void, or when no-one really wants to engage in an in-depth discussion.
The for-profit news media needs to constantly push their product, thus they say what they believe will give them the maximum reward for least effort. And they are often right.
Filters for that - to only push worthwhile content through - would themselves have a cost, and someone needs to bear it even if using donated efforts of common people (otherwise those also being for-profit just continues the same cycle, e.g. Google News serves up what it wants to give you, not what you would like to receive).
e.g. someone could create a magazine to post only the most noteworthy content. One example of that is https://kbin.social/m/BestOf, but look at how many, or rather how few, bother to post to it?
So whoever created the “News” magazine is doing what they feel is appropriate, and if someone/we want something else, like a “Only Relevant News” magazine, we would need to make it happen.
That description of online news is good, applies not just to news on Lemmy. I check out some news portals irregularly, and I frequently wonder if I’m out of the loop because I might be missing some context for the given article that I finally clicked on. A lot of news content should ideally be turned into a weekly digest, that filters out what’s relevant, gives context and wider considerations, etc. (e.g. instead of immediately informing us that the Ukrainian army has just captured a street in a village, just let me know when they’ve captured the whole village several weeks later, and explain if that village is strategically relevant). But that’s contrary to how both news portals and sites like reddit and Lemmy work, with the demand for a constant stream of small excitements.