The majority of OC posters on reddit also only post a few posts. I think our proportions are similar to theirs. I don’t see this instance or the fediverse as less empathetic than reddit or any other large social network users.
I think the doom and gloom is overstated.
Of course we should always strive for improving mod tools and banning bad actors.
I think that if you aren’t beating reddit on the empathy metric then you’re not doing at all well. I was struck forcefully by the opinion of the OC poster on the downvotes debate who said:
When I started posting here our content was heavily downvoted, even in communities appropriate for it. This was very discouraging. It made us feel bad about doing something we should be doing for fun.
And then you’ve got various other people talking about things like the lack of downvotes devaluing upvotes, which to my mind is just childish nonsense in the same vein as the existence of trans people devaluing masculinity and femininity.
The sheer glaring entitlement of people that are not sharing anything wanting the right to make people feel a bit shit about themselves…
I’d agree that the overall trend for posters is probably similar and you have a fair point there. I wouldn’t say empathy is any different, but it’s important to keep in mind that different styles of social networks will absolutely attract certain types of peoples. I’m not making an assertion that this is good or bad, or who may be present in this community because of this, but it’s something to keep in mind as your average Instagram user and Fediverse user will likely have vastly different opinions, priorities, goals, and use-case for the platform.
I don’t think it’s fair to say that the doom and gloom is overstated. When you have a smaller platform and community, small issues are far more recognizable and have a greater overall impact if left unchecked.
Reddit has hundreds of millions of users and the platform is highly active, making it suitable for pros to submit work for profit. Or as a means for amateurs to break in and see if they can build an audience.
Reddit is a business plan for many creators. The large audience there gives submitters incentive to put up with the horrible abuse they face from poor moderation and terrible users. And still, as you note, OC creators flee. Comparing our relative numbers of fleeing contributors per capita as being similar to Reddit isn’t the win you seem to be arguing for.
Look, when some of the largest communities don’t see posts for weeks, that’s a sign something is wrong. We have disincentivized contribution to the point where stagnation has set in. That’s a clear sign some change is in order. What that change should be, I don’t know. But simply refusing to accept these clear signs as doom and gloom leads to refusing to recognize a problem. And if you don’t see a problem, you can’t act to fix it.
We saw a decrease in users when there were mass downvotes, we changed how downvotes worked and since then we’ve seen and increase in activity.
We’re talking about implementing automod features, not sure how soon that’ll happen, but it will definitely happen.
Another thing that disincentives some people is the lack of filtering of rude comments, if a comment is rude or downvoted on reddit it is automatically hidden, so maybe that is something we can look into for when we implement automod
Just know that we’re not just sitting on our laurels doing nothing, the mods and admins are constantly talking about how to improve this community
The majority of OC posters on reddit also only post a few posts. I think our proportions are similar to theirs. I don’t see this instance or the fediverse as less empathetic than reddit or any other large social network users.
I think the doom and gloom is overstated.
Of course we should always strive for improving mod tools and banning bad actors.
I think that if you aren’t beating reddit on the empathy metric then you’re not doing at all well. I was struck forcefully by the opinion of the OC poster on the downvotes debate who said:
And then you’ve got various other people talking about things like the lack of downvotes devaluing upvotes, which to my mind is just childish nonsense in the same vein as the existence of trans people devaluing masculinity and femininity.
The sheer glaring entitlement of people that are not sharing anything wanting the right to make people feel a bit shit about themselves…
I’d agree that the overall trend for posters is probably similar and you have a fair point there. I wouldn’t say empathy is any different, but it’s important to keep in mind that different styles of social networks will absolutely attract certain types of peoples. I’m not making an assertion that this is good or bad, or who may be present in this community because of this, but it’s something to keep in mind as your average Instagram user and Fediverse user will likely have vastly different opinions, priorities, goals, and use-case for the platform.
I don’t think it’s fair to say that the doom and gloom is overstated. When you have a smaller platform and community, small issues are far more recognizable and have a greater overall impact if left unchecked.
Reddit has hundreds of millions of users and the platform is highly active, making it suitable for pros to submit work for profit. Or as a means for amateurs to break in and see if they can build an audience.
Reddit is a business plan for many creators. The large audience there gives submitters incentive to put up with the horrible abuse they face from poor moderation and terrible users. And still, as you note, OC creators flee. Comparing our relative numbers of fleeing contributors per capita as being similar to Reddit isn’t the win you seem to be arguing for.
Look, when some of the largest communities don’t see posts for weeks, that’s a sign something is wrong. We have disincentivized contribution to the point where stagnation has set in. That’s a clear sign some change is in order. What that change should be, I don’t know. But simply refusing to accept these clear signs as doom and gloom leads to refusing to recognize a problem. And if you don’t see a problem, you can’t act to fix it.
We saw a decrease in users when there were mass downvotes, we changed how downvotes worked and since then we’ve seen and increase in activity.
We’re talking about implementing automod features, not sure how soon that’ll happen, but it will definitely happen.
Another thing that disincentives some people is the lack of filtering of rude comments, if a comment is rude or downvoted on reddit it is automatically hidden, so maybe that is something we can look into for when we implement automod
Just know that we’re not just sitting on our laurels doing nothing, the mods and admins are constantly talking about how to improve this community
That all sounds like progress.Thank you and the team for your hard work!