this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2025
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Asklemmy
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It is ultimately the same format which does not yield constructive conversation. The conversation is as though OP were speaking on a stage making their statement/announcement and then the audience yells back to them. It functions for some things, most notably sharing popular news - not necessarily journalism, just a glimpse through the eyes of the zeitgeist; dank memes are a form of good news by this definition. It does not function for discussion oriented conversation, since most people don't read the whole thread. The implementation of up and down votes manipulate conversational integrity in weird ways Though that will occur with any type of rating system, I believe the simplicity of the reddit style system yields conversational benefits that are less valuable than how cheap it is to implement. A cheap hack of a system will yield a cheap shoddy output. This leads me to believe a better method exists, we just haven't found it yet.
The emphasis on user control and instance freedom is novel and appreciated, but it has come with a reckless disregard for the dangers of the nowadays well understood echo chamber effect of current social media. There are zero safeguards to prevent Lemmy from shattering itself under any amount of external stress or internal corruption. Organized attacks are a major threat, and there is a nonzero chance of that happening.
Again, all of these are just like long term weaknesses in the structure itself. It doesn't mean it IS going to fail, it doesn't mean things can't be mitigated, I just don't trust that it will stand for a very long time nor will it reach the significance of reddit. Could be wrong, but it looks like Lemmy is capable only of moving around the problems with Reddit instead of being able to actively quell them.
Those are valid critiques, i am just having a hard time figuring out the solution.