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[+] 34 points 10 months ago (12 children)
  • [–] 10 points 10 months ago

    The human brain is susceptible to engagement bait. There are different flavors of bait, but some of the ones that are most effective need to simultaneously avoid triggering moderation (whether automated or human) while jumping out of the containment of only people who subscribe to the person or place where it was created.

    So a post that is sexy might encounter too much resistance to sharing from people's NSFW filters (and reluctance to share nsfw content with people they actually know in real life).

    A post that is interesting or funny or fun might get spread around, but is hard to replicate and takes a lot of effort to get right.

    That leaves posts that trigger people's responses, whether they feel compelled to correct a grammatical error or angrily correct a factual error, or vociferously defend an idea that isn't being treated fairly. The comments themselves breed engagement as the commenters then interact with each other, and the commenters keep coming back to the same post to see whether new comments have been posted. Anger and pedantry are the types of bait that work best on most platforms.

    None of this is inherently corporate or profit-motivated, so it would be naive to assume that only for-profit corporate platforms would have that stuff.

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  • [–] 7 points 10 months ago (10 children)

    Don't sort by active, only use custom feed, block communities which only contain "anger inducing" content, block people who post "anger inducing" content.

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  • [–] 11 points 10 months ago (3 children)
  • [–] 20 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    What the fuck did you just say about me, you little shit-lemming, I graduated top of my class in The Art of Fediverse Debates and I have over 300 confirmed [removed by mod].

    I can win a debate in over 9000 ways, and that's only considering text, not only do I have access to the dankest arsenal of Leftist Memes, but I also have control of a massive army of bot accounts¹ ready to brigade you and downvote you into lemm-blivion.

    ¹/joke I do not have any of such thing

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  • [–] 4 points 10 months ago

    Yep, actively moderating your own content, curating your own feed... that's the solution.

    It worked on reddit for a long time, untill the powermods went totally nuts and the massive waves of paid trolls and bots invaded.

    It still works with RSS feeds, which I guess is just technology we are all supposed to forget exists, because its built for a paradigm of many people having many personal websites, as opposed to many people all being on maybe 4 big websites.

    If corpos weren't evil, they'd expose their recommendation algorithms and just allow you to tweak its parameters, for yourself, so you could do your own advanced curation.

    But that would make them about as much money as a dating app with no supscription nor signup fees, so, its a non starter.

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  • [–] 0 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    That's all fine and dandy until your block list is a mile long and you only get a handful of posts a day anymore because that's what you're left with when you filter out the furries, anime porn, ragebait, OMG LINUX, thigh high socks, etc. The OP is right, Lemmy has just as much of a content problem as any other place and the blame is largely on the users.

    At least on Reddit, despite its massive flaws, I get actual discussion that's more than a sentence or two of "I agree bad guy is bad!" The amount of low effort engagement in here is atrocious.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago (1 child)

    you only get a handful of posts a day anymore

    And that's bad why exactly?

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago*

    Well, I try to come here to keep up to date with what's going on with the world and my experience is generally this is the second or third place that news "breaks". By the time it hits Lemmy, it's basically outdated.

    So seeing a handful of posts that are out of date with barely any actual discussion going on is pretty useless. I find myself checking Lemmy once or twice a day, seeing there's nothing worth being here for, and leaving. That's not how you grow a community.

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