Honestly I’d rather have the 10 comment threads than the ones with the Hexbear crowd in them. Those threads are always a train wreck of shit takes, sealioning, and bad faith arguments.

It depends on your instance, personally I defederated from the fascists, but I know your admin is a fan. There are enough other threads with many comments, this one for example is already at 30.

Haha right? Same. Thankfully threads like this are pointless because the nice thing about decentralization is that anyone can do it their own way and it doesn’t matter what others think.

Without examples its hard to know what your post is about

I think some of them are bots tbh, they sure seem like bots. It’s inevitable that we’re going to see bot action but I think it’s by some people who just want lemmy to seem more active, but that’s just a theory.

This. I asked “Why are people mining coal again lately?” on AskLemmy.

It was something I easily could’ve spent time googling, but it was interesting to see peoples different explanations and the discussions that it led to.

And if someone Google’s the same question later, who knows, that thread might show up in the results

Good suggestions. On the one hand you’re right, but on the other hand I don’t want to totally discourage people from posting a silly/low effort comment if that’s all they have to say.

Although it’s true that Lemmy comments are not always substantive, there is an associated problem whereby a lot of posts barely get any comments or discussion at all. So I think we also need to recognize that even a low effort joke can help stimulate further discussion and maybe result in a more substantive comment in the form of a reply.

Except it can be constant, following you everywhere you go, and affecting you even when you block the person, e.g. they weaponize the “report” function in subs, and some mods simply can’t keep up so end up removing your comments almost automatically.

And that is still fairly low level for Reddit, not even beginning to get deeper e.g. doxing. Sadly, bullying works, and all the more so in a place without effective moderation.:-(

Not that I’ve seen any of that here - it really does seem related to the “culture” of a place, like Discord or Slack or Reddit or… here, where others may call out a bully, or just ignore them entirely but instead provide positive feedback to replace it and reinforce community standards of decency.

As you just did, kudos for being awesome yourself!:-D

Re the TLDR: you can tell I have gotten used to a Reddit-style audience indeed:-). But also I enjoy “unpacking” myself here much more:-D. (e.g., can you tell that I also have switched now in this comment to a keyboard? :-P)

You are very welcome and thank you very much for the thanks!:-)

I put that in emphasis b/c I want to keep coming back to it, by adding some new points relating to it:

(4) There really is a “social” side to this place too. That is not a bug but really truly is a feature. We like it even? At least when it is short and easy to pass over - it provides a short-term value, and probably a longer-term one as well, in keeping communities civil & dare I say welcoming?

Sites featuring blogs and articles also exist, if we want to seek those out. The Fediverse would serve as a great way to collect them together, making them more discoverable, but the primary purpose of the Fediverse seems to me to be a “social media” site, so focusing more on the social than on the exact content - and that I seriously doubt will ever change, so any thinking must keep that foremost in mind, the practicality side.

(5) I actually disagree about the mobile issue - or rather I think a much MORE foundational issue is that Reddit was for-profit. That caused them to enshittify their product, regardless of which means you used to consumed it. But then yes, I do see how the device used further compounded that and even here in the Fediverse is going to affect things moving forward, like the overall UI/UX needing to work for both mobile and desktop, putting constraints on what can / will be implemented compared to what would be most optimal for just the latter alone.

(6) Highly relevant to this discussion, it also seems to me that it is a problem of the class of “finding information”, such as how you would handle your email. There, putting things in folders has its set of pros and cons - needing effort up-front, especially if a message concerns multiple topics, plus as the set of folders itself grows larger the problem meta-escalates (one email account for home, another for work, each with its own set of folders, so now which account, which folder, in which other sub-folder, is the thing I want? again, especially crossing multiple boundaries like a non-work meeting, but with your work friends, but during non-work time - is that “personal” now or…? in any case it may need to go onto your “personal” calendar if you do not have access to your “work” machine at that time, but anyway the division lines are not always so clear-cut). Conversely, leaving all messages in one huge pile has its pros as well - you’d need to design a “query” to find it later anyway, but how often do you really “search” for emails to begin with, compared to simply read them and move on? - although it is much easier to “miss” messages this way. Which style we use probably says more about our emotional preferences than which is “best”:-D.

And relating back to the “social” messages such as emphasized above - those legitimately add information too? They indicate receipt of the message for one, as well as friendliness of the recipient. But is that primarily short-term information, so should those simply be “deleted” after being read, or instead stored along with the rest, especially if they are quick to glance at and pass over while looking for something else? Or should the sender not have even bothered to send them, if they were to be considered a waste of the recipient’s time?

Applying the former thought to the Fediverse, how do we “find” the content that we want to see, other than ofc creating it ourselves?

(A) we can create a new sort algorithm, adjusting the “Feed” to suit our preferences, the benefit here is that it affects everyone across the entire Fediverse, who can elect to use the new algorithm or not. But it would take coding, creating consensus, and could take months to more than a year. Google got its whole start as a company this way even, as did the predecessor to Reddit iirc, so the solutions could range from simple to very very complex.

(B) we subscribe to existing magazines, which takes mere seconds and gets us most of the way there insofar as threads at least though not comments.

Oops, it says this is too long.

Sorry, I could have put more thought into my comment.

I’m not telling anyone to go to Hackernews. I’m citing an example of another community where there is a higher bar for substantive content, much like how I cited Reddit as an example of what we shouldn’t strive for.

Then start a community like “high quality news discussions” or “true news” and moderate it how you would like.

My comment offers just as little substance as the post themselves.

Stop the Elon spam posts and my comments bashing elon fan boys stops too.

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.

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.