Comment on Science Journalism
dharmacurious@slrpnk.net 1 month agoI’ll be honest, I hope Lemmy doesn’t reach a mainstream audience. It’s nice having a smaller site away from all the bullshit that will inevitably come with mainstream attention. We can say “just defederate! Join another instance” but when we get to a point where giant corpos are running instances that host 95% of users and 99% of content, we’ll be in the same boat as now if we defed, except that Lemmy will then have a mainstream (and thus mostly right of center) image. If this, or a little more, is all we’re ever really going to get on an open source platform that feels open source, I’m okay with that. I like seeing the same usernames around, and feeling like I found the internet equivalent of Stars Hollow, CT
OpenStars@discuss.online 1 month ago
It’s a double edged sword, that.
On the one hand, we’re kinda awesome the way we are.:-) Perhaps a bit more content would be good though?
On the other, there’s like 50 people that generate virtually all the content, and they won’t necessarily be able to keep up that pace forever. If we aren’t sustainable, this project will die off. And I don’t mean like cease working, but rather lose our uniqueness, like what happened to Reddit, which technically remember still exists:-).
I hear you about “fully mainstream”, but I think we could stand to grow a bit more. What’s going on with mander.xyz and scientists/academics is awesome:-).
dharmacurious@slrpnk.net 1 month ago
I’m not familiar with what’s going on with that. Care to enlighten me?
And I totally get what you mean. More content would be great. I specifically miss my philosophical and spiritual communities from Reddit. I love learning about mythos and different religions, especially the more esoteric stuff, as well as political philosophy. That content just isn’t here in the same way (or sometimes, at all). It would be amazing to have that here. But I’d also rather go without certain things if it means not feeling like I’m being sold a story. Reddit felt like it wasn’t social media in the same way as Twitter and Facebook, but the moment I left it for Lemmy it was this scales-from-my-eyes kind of moment. It was crazy how toxic reddit was for me, and going back a few times, and looking at my old profile, I do not like the person I was there. Always on the defense, always on edge, always prepared to argue a point because I knew some asshole was going to attack me for no reason, and make me defend myself. It’s like it activates the caveman part of the brain and put me in fight or flight. I’d love for Lemmy to get big enough to have awesome content, but not so big as to devolve into that. But I’m not smart enough to know what that balance is, or if it’s even an issue of size, or just culture.
OpenStars@discuss.online 1 month ago
Just that they are actively recruiting people from STEM.
Most of what made Reddit great was not Huffman’s software but the people that were worth chatting with. Most of those people did not come here, hence the huge lack of niche subjects here by comparison.
Though indeed, even before the whole fuck spez fiasco Reddit was becoming enshittified, as it encouraged people to talk rather than listen - e.g. to make a new post rather than be able to find an existing one. And yes, it also encouraged us to become pedantic assholes, making every one of us defensive - me too.
A fantastic article somewhat related btw: medium.com/…/the-cargo-cult-of-the-ennui-engine-8…, highlighting that social media becomes what the vision of the developers makes it to be. From the size and position and coloration of the buttons - and which ones, like are downvotes even turned on? - and every little thing, Reddit was doomed to become what it was purely bc of its choice to encourage its own profits at the expense of all else.
A favorite example of mine is that since ads go in-between posts but not comments, Reddit encouraged “more posts”, far more so than “more comments”, and not at all searching for existing posts, e.g. they only allowed 2 pinned posts, not 5 or 10 or 20 or something, just 2. So in places like r/Android they would have weekly mega threads where people could ask things e.g. “what phone should I buy?”, but rather than help connect people to those mega threads specifically offered for that, the developers forced mods to do the work to try to stem the absolute tsunami of posts all saying “which phone should I buy?” - almost invariably with no other details, each just a child (of whatever mental age) wanting
personalized recommendationsattention, but thereby halting the ability of people to discuss things related to Android phones, bc how could you get a word mixed in among all that noise?Even nonprofit social media is still damaging to us, but to a radically lesser degree it would seem, compared to a for-profit one attempting to predate upon e.g. our anxieties.
Gloomy@mander.xyz 1 month ago
Not only that, we have a couple of social science people around too :-)
dharmacurious@slrpnk.net 1 month ago
That’s really cool. I love the idea of Lemmy instances being their own specific cultures, and the idea of an industry/field specific instance is honestly one of the coolest aspects of Lemmy. I’d love to see, like, artist based instances really take off, for example, or even like an instance specifically for fast food workers. Might help get some kind of union action going eventually if it really took off
nikaaa@lemmy.world 1 month ago
If you speak german, that is what the community !philosophie@feddit.org is all about.
dharmacurious@slrpnk.net 1 month ago
Sadly I do not :(