this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2026
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Unpopular Opinion

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Welcome to the Unpopular Opinion community!


How voting works:

Vote the opposite of the norm.


If you agree that the opinion is unpopular give it an arrow up. If it's something that's widely accepted, give it an arrow down.



Guidelines:

Tag your post, if possible (not required)


  • If your post is a "General" unpopular opinion, start the subject with [GENERAL].
  • If it is a Lemmy-specific unpopular opinion, start it with [LEMMY].


Rules:

1. NO POLITICS


Politics is everywhere. Let's make this about [general] and [lemmy] - specific topics, and keep politics out of it.


2. Be civil.


Disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally attack others. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Please also refrain from gatekeeping others' opinions.


3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.


Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.


4. Shitposts and memes are allowed but...


Only until they prove to be a problem. They can and will be removed at moderator discretion.


5. No trolling.


This shouldn't need an explanation. If your post or comment is made just to get a rise with no real value, it will be removed. You do this too often, you will get a vacation to touch grass, away from this community for 1 or more days. Repeat offenses will result in a perma-ban.


6. Defend your opinion


This is a bit of a mix of rules 4 and 5 to help foster higher quality posts. You are expected to defend your unpopular opinion in the post body. We don't expect a whole manifesto (please, no manifestos), but you should at least provide some details as to why you hold the position you do.



Instance-wide rules always apply. https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/

founded 3 years ago
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Not a large fee. Just something like the local equivalent of $10 USD.

The deposit sits in escrow during a probationary period while the new account holder has to prove they're here with good intentions. If the account starts spamming, advertising, trolling, or plugging their slop-coded garbage, they get banned and forfeit the deposit to the instance they signed up with. If they interact in good faith for the "probationary" period without showing signs of being an LLM bot / gaming the system / "karma farming", the deposit gets refunded in full and they exit the probationary period.

If they don't interact enough to prove their intentions here a good, the deposit still gets refunded in full but the account gets banned.

This would virtually eliminate drive-by spam and trolls while also funding instances and encouraging positive engagement.

Is it feasible? Probably not. Is this an idea likely to be popular? Nope, otherwise I wouldn't be posting it here. Do I think this is a good idea? Yep.

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[–] IcedRaktajino@startrek.website 0 points 2 days ago (1 children)

They can browse for free to see what it's about. That's how ArsTechnica works, and I've been a subscriber there for 10+ years.

Sometimes a little bit of friction and slight gatekeeping is a good thing. As my massive block list can attest, not everyone who signs up here makes the fediverse a better place.

[–] 9point6@lemmy.world 8 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Ars technica would have the same amount of content even if there were 99% fewer users, user comments aren't why people visit. At least I don't think I've ever read them and I've been reading it for around 2 decades, the users are irrelevant to the main purpose of the site.

The same is not remotely true of the fediverse. The quantity and quality of the content is directly related to the volume of users

[–] idiomaddict@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago

I agree with all of this.

I don’t think I even realized that ars technica had a comments section until now.

On here, I comment pretty frequently, but rarely if I would be the first commenter on a post. I will often read an article I’m not that interested in here if there’s an active discussion in the comments, and I regularly seek out ask_[blank]_ type communities to read through posts with a lot of comments.