this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2024
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Asklemmy
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Lemmy seems to have quite a lot of people to be fair. Apparently Lemmy.world has nearly 7,000 users a day, which is quite a lot when you think about it.
One thing I think about is that maybe there are drawbacks to the Reddit-style format of Lemmy. A cool thing about old internet forums is that posts were show in chronological order with no upvotes, which is more similar to a real world conversation. You'd read the most recent posts, rather than the most upvoted posts. This means somebody new to the conversation can have their opinion seen.
The upvoting system means that a small number of posts get nearly all the upvotes and attention, and people who post later have their posts largely ignored.
Maybe I'm wrong but it's just something I thought about.
"New comments" allows to see the latest comments in conversations. Which is why I'm replying to you, while there are already 97 other comments here.
Sure that is true. Thank you for looking at my post and replying to it by the way. But I was just thinking how some people might just look at the top comments and nothing else. Maybe the upvote system does have some benefits though, like making bad posts less visible.
I imagine it's something of a difference in expected audience behavior. I would think that, for most people, looking at a few of the top comments and their replies is all the engagement with a post they want to have. So, a voting system facilitates that process by highlighting a few items the hive mind likes, and leaving the rest in relative obscurity. Whereas forum style posting sort of assumes that everyone present in a thread is in conversation with one another, hence chronological organization.
Fair point, different people like different things. It's interesting that forums are less popular now though. I signed up for Ars Technica's forum the other day, maybe I should try it out more.
The problem with chronological forum, is that it was a used tactic to post massively new topics to "hide" some controversial topic on the "second page". Not to say that voting doesn't have its own problem.
Fair point, but maybe you could restrict an account to only make one thread every 10 minutes or something. And require a CAPTCHA and email or phone verification for new accounts. I guess organising and moderating social media style sites is not a simple task though.
Lemmy's frontend default sort (Hot) is weighted heavily by time. Your comment is currently at the top, being the most recent. The second most recent is the second to top comment.