Collectively, Lemmy has a substantive comment issue - dmv.social

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. Now 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. Are you reading the comments from the article a week ago or this week? Turns out, the discussion wasn’t thought provoking. The comments didn’t offer much new. The entire thread could be copy-pasted between many news posts spanning any given year. Reddit became boring after picking up on this pattern and finding that it slowly became the norm on an increasing number of communities. The discussions on Reddit didn’t provoke any new or interesting thought. It served as candy for 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. Collectively, 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.