How many days ago did this guy join this web site and I am already getting the reddit treatment.
I don’t even know why… I just tried to make a comment just now and it wouldn’t let me.
I think it illustrates the point I’ve been making for over a decade that the problem with reddit started when they introduced subs and mods. Any new “reddit” that does the same will never be a true space for free speech like the original was in the beginning. The model depends on self moderation using the voting and hiding system.
Unfortunately lemmy will suffer just like the rest have and that apparently includes wolfballs.
If someone comes and fills your community with spam, you can’t realistically expect potential new users to manually block every spammer. They’ll just leave. And you’re effectively silenced. Spam may not be the correct term, since disruptors don’t necessary act in bad faith. But they shouldn’t have the ability to silence you regardless of their intentions.
Circlejerks? Well, if a person doesn’t care about the truth and only wants to feel social approval, what can you do? Discussing new ideas would endanger their goal, so they won’t participate in a discussion no matter what. You could try to provide some free approval to sate their hunger, but it’s harder than it seems.
That is how it worked for the first few years. If you didn’t like what you read/saw then you down voted it and it disappeared and for everyone that had their “view comments/post” set at that rate or higher didn’t see that comment/post as well if it was below that number. That is how it worked. And yes, it indeed did work quite well. The only down side was it kept the moderators of the web site and other nazi’s from controlling what you saw. Obviously not a downside for most users at the time, but it turned out that most users that came later wanted someone else to dictate what they saw/read.
Bots got better, they spam faster than you vote. They vote faster too.
Also brigading, but I can’t know how harmful it would be in a botless world.
That is a reasonable argument… however the old system was abolished by subreddit mods long before that ever became an issue. So it is hard to know if that would have ever been a serious problem in that model or if there wouldn’t have been easier decentralized solutions developed.
Reddit has that delay feature, like speedbumps that seem effective at adding a cost to being unpopular. I would have thought that that would be a sufficient fix.