Dialectic Cake

Better to create your own instance then.

It’s about reducing risk not eradicating it and there’s a huge difference in risk in being targeted for legal action due to hosting c/piracy (via caching/mirroring) than from a single piracy post in c/hellokitty.

That’s so dreamy that I created a feature request post linking to your comment. (I also did an @ you but not sure I did that right.)

Those were just two random examples. It would depend on whatever rules/guidelines each community owner makes.

Basically each community can have their own rules.

• Some communities may allow swearing and some may not
• Some may allow 18+ content and some may not
• etc.

To complicate things, you may also get different behaviour in different communities by the same user.

I think it’s really at the community level that culture can be formed as at the all post level, we all just have our different preferences and that’s fine. Also, our preferences may changed based on what we want/need in a day, e.g., one day we may want jokes while another day we may want tech support.

And so at the community level, community owner Bob may want no low-effort posts so he can put that into the rules, the mods can enforce that (be removing low-effort posts), the community can enforce it by only upvoting high-effort posts, and then a culture is formed which will draw other people who are into that.

And likewise the same for other culture/expectations.

@[email protected] (comment link) had mentioned server costs from hosting duplicated content which was a great point.

I will also add, that people’s time is also a finite resource. And so we can all help by being respectful of the rules for each community (save moderators time) and additionally in communities where you are asking for help – avoid being a Help Vampire.

I think this is an excellent point (re: server overhead) and one I hadn’t considered. Thanks for sharing that.

I think it’s natural to want the majority of posts to meet one’s preferences but what one finds interesting/entertaining/etc. varies for each person.

I love diversity and choice and so I’m happy that each community can have their own individual rules/cultures and we can pick which communities we want to join. E.g., I wouldn’t expect the same behaviour/rules/culture in a shit posting community compared to an arch linux community, but I’m glad both types of communities and content will exist.

We can collectively choose what kinds of unique cakes to bake and we can choose which cakes to eat too. :D

Agreed, being positive shouldn’t be a rare thing for sure. However what people view as being positively impactful is different.

To me it is not helpful or desired to essentially lie to people by patting them all on the head with an upvote which is the equivalent of saying ‘good post’ even if the post added no value or worse sucked. While upvotes may provide a burst of dopamine to each user, it won’t do them any favours in the long run. And once they realise everyone is getting upvoted regardless of content, the upvotes will come to be viewed as meaningless anyway.

Furthermore, upvoting is the lowest effort and lowest impact option – If one wants to be more positively impactful and take more effort than just blindly upvoting every post, they could reply or PM to welcome new members to the community, direct them to helpful FAQs/resources, etc.

Furthermore there will be many communities which will all have their own values and expectations so if I’m in a community where mods put a rule to upvote every post, then sure if I want to participate in that community then I will do that. And if on the other end of the spectrum, if I’m in a community where mods have a rule for no low effort/value posts, if I want to stay in that community I will certainly only upvote posts that meet that rule. And of course those are both extreme cases and most communities will fall somewhere in the middle.

Anyway regardless of everything I’ve said, in the end how we add value to this platform is based on our unique values and preferences. It sounds like you are more connection-focused and I am more education/knowledge-focused. There is nothing wrong with either as there is nothing wrong with you upvoting all posts and inspiring others to join you. While I may have a different philosophy, I am also a huge fan of the need and benefit of diversity of thought and so I am quite glad you are a part of the community and that you want to make Lemmy a welcoming place – your kindness and care will help make the community better.

While I can appreciate wanting to help others feel good about posting, here are my concerns (and some solutions at the end to consider):

1. If most posts were upvoted blindly, it would make post ratings meaningless as well as the Hot feature. I prefer “good” posts to rise to the top.

2. If we upvote low quality/low effort posts, then that is what we are encouraging users to produce.

3. Low quality posts especially from Help Vampires can be a huge drain on the community and moderators. E.g., No one wants to see the same question asked every few posts.

4. New users may at first be drawn to seeing the number of posts…but if the first x number of posts are all garbage, we may lose potential users.

Personally, I will not upvote posts just to make new people more confident. However, here are some alternative solutions:

1. People can learn to feel comfortable posting in certain communities that are either smaller or where quality is less expected. E.g., if the future Arch Linux community is like their forum, they are very strict and you’ll get worse than a down vote if you don’t follow the guidelines in How To Ask Questions The Smart Way and had first RTFM (read the manual) and STFW (searched the web) and have put in great effort and be truly stuck before posting.

2. Before downvoting, we could look at the user’s profile and some of their posts and if they seem very new, we could cut them some slack and/or send them a PM instead of downvoting.

I already saw one user who posted great content including citations – adding user tags is what I miss.