Yeah the “All” in particular is pretty bad for the average person. They’re not going to enjoy a Star Trek meme, followed by a Arch meme, a Self-hosted post, a grad-student Science meme, followed by a privacy post.
I’m also convinced Lemmy’s “hot” algorithm is broken; I can easily find posts with ONE UPVOTE on the all feed. Hot is supposed to be a balance between acceleration and total vote count, but it seems like it just only acceleration. Go look at the front page of reddit. The difference is night and day.
We need a normie.world that has an “all” feed that doesn’t contain 70% niche communities. We have c/humor, c/news, etc but they’re completely diluted by overpowered niche posts.
I have a potentially contentious opinion. Normies are what ruined Reddit and the crowd attracted by normie communities are why Reddit is even more toxic than it used to be.
We don’t need to attract normies, we just need to attract more people like us.
I don’t hate normies by any means, but I don’t want to hang out with them all day either.
Yeah I completely disagree. Imagine if a city/local gov wanted to use Lemmy in order to be self hosted (similar to EU govs switching to Mastodon) but the public just wonders why their local gov put their stuff on a weird circle jerk website that’s flooded with niche memes. “Why didn’t they use the normal thing (i.e. reddit)?”
We should be welcoming enough that, when someone wants to make a new subreddit, they make Lemmy community instead. And I don’t think thats the case right now.
If a person sees something they’ve never seen before, and turns around and flees, that’s a problem with them being sheltered and pathetic, not a problem with the new thing they haven’t encountered before.
Gotta appeal to advertisers that want the normie eye balls.
I hate using the word normie, because these people truthfully haven’t done anything wrong. It’s the advertisers that follow them around like vampires that are the issue.
It’s called reddit and that’s why I left. Fuck the normies. They’ll import fascism.
That sounds unnecessarily combative so let me expand my argument.
There’s a book called The Authoritarians by a man called Bob Altermyer. Altermyer is now retired but he was a professor of psychology at the University of Manitoba. During his career he did a lot of research into authoritarians, both followers and leaders. In the book he describes for laypeople the experiments and the findings. If you want to do a deep dive into his statistical analysis you can because the whole thing is fully referenced but for people who just want an easy to read description that is also easy to understand then this is the book for you.
After reading the book redditors behaviour became a lot more easy to understand. I was less upset by what was going on but I stopped engaging because I now understood that reddit wasn’t a site for me anymore. It was a site for people that enjoyed being normal and doing normal things. And that’s ok, why shouldn’t they be catered for?
I use reddit and lemmy exclusively on desktop or laptop. So when the app business came up I didn’t regard it as my fight, however I thought that if I expected people to stand up for my interests if they are challenged I should show a bit of solidarity with them. So I didn’t visit reddit at all for the days it was blacked out. I didn’t like how spez reacted. I saw that people were crossing to the fediverse and I took a look for myself. I liked it. I posted. I wasn’t attacked for having a non-normie viewpoint. I liked that a lot.
The thing about normies is they don’t read scientific studies for fun, they don’t like long winded explanations about why the world is the way it is. They think they can see something in the street and extrapolate an entire social policy from it and there are chancers that will tell them, ‘You know what? You’re right. We don’t need experts telling you that you’re wrong, what do they know?’
So your Jordan Petersons and your Nigel Farages and Alex whatever his nameis, these people and reddit’s normie audience are made for each other. I’ll even go as far as to say this extends to the people that think the Democrats or the Labour Party are going to fix their problems, Team Liberal aren’t doing themselves any favours but my point is that if your goal is a massive website that caters to the largest part of the reddit audience you’re going to end up swimming in cryptofascist and sometimes outright fascist content. Been there, seen that, got the t-shirt.
Interesting, I think I’ll take a look. You sorta skipper over what ‘normie’ or reddit behaviour was mentioned in his book specifically. Was it the lack of reading scientific articles you mentioned in another paragraph, that alone can’t be it right?
Listen, just go and read the thing; it will be time better spent than listening to me precis it from memory. but if you do read it a feel like it hasn’t given you an insight into what drives a whole host of behaviour that one sees on social media or that I’ve misunderstood the book then do come back to me and I will refresh my memory of the book to have that discussion with you.
Yeah the “All” in particular is pretty bad for the average person. They’re not going to enjoy a Star Trek meme, followed by a Arch meme, a Self-hosted post, a grad-student Science meme, followed by a privacy post.
I’m also convinced Lemmy’s “hot” algorithm is broken; I can easily find posts with ONE UPVOTE on the all feed. Hot is supposed to be a balance between acceleration and total vote count, but it seems like it just only acceleration. Go look at the front page of reddit. The difference is night and day.
We need a normie.world that has an “all” feed that doesn’t contain 70% niche communities. We have c/humor, c/news, etc but they’re completely diluted by overpowered niche posts.
I have a potentially contentious opinion. Normies are what ruined Reddit and the crowd attracted by normie communities are why Reddit is even more toxic than it used to be.
We don’t need to attract normies, we just need to attract more people like us.
I don’t hate normies by any means, but I don’t want to hang out with them all day either.
Yeah I completely disagree. Imagine if a city/local gov wanted to use Lemmy in order to be self hosted (similar to EU govs switching to Mastodon) but the public just wonders why their local gov put their stuff on a weird circle jerk website that’s flooded with niche memes. “Why didn’t they use the normal thing (i.e. reddit)?”
We should be welcoming enough that, when someone wants to make a new subreddit, they make Lemmy community instead. And I don’t think thats the case right now.
That’s fair. Hadn’t considered that
“Memes that people don’t get are unwelcoming.”
If a person sees something they’ve never seen before, and turns around and flees, that’s a problem with them being sheltered and pathetic, not a problem with the new thing they haven’t encountered before.
It’s not fleeing as much as it is being so bored that that they never really find the motivation to come back.
The worst part of trying to appeal more to normies is how they hand out bans like they’re candy.
Gotta appeal to advertisers that want the normie eye balls.
I hate using the word normie, because these people truthfully haven’t done anything wrong. It’s the advertisers that follow them around like vampires that are the issue.
It’s called reddit and that’s why I left. Fuck the normies. They’ll import fascism.
That sounds unnecessarily combative so let me expand my argument.
There’s a book called The Authoritarians by a man called Bob Altermyer. Altermyer is now retired but he was a professor of psychology at the University of Manitoba. During his career he did a lot of research into authoritarians, both followers and leaders. In the book he describes for laypeople the experiments and the findings. If you want to do a deep dive into his statistical analysis you can because the whole thing is fully referenced but for people who just want an easy to read description that is also easy to understand then this is the book for you.
After reading the book redditors behaviour became a lot more easy to understand. I was less upset by what was going on but I stopped engaging because I now understood that reddit wasn’t a site for me anymore. It was a site for people that enjoyed being normal and doing normal things. And that’s ok, why shouldn’t they be catered for?
I use reddit and lemmy exclusively on desktop or laptop. So when the app business came up I didn’t regard it as my fight, however I thought that if I expected people to stand up for my interests if they are challenged I should show a bit of solidarity with them. So I didn’t visit reddit at all for the days it was blacked out. I didn’t like how spez reacted. I saw that people were crossing to the fediverse and I took a look for myself. I liked it. I posted. I wasn’t attacked for having a non-normie viewpoint. I liked that a lot.
The thing about normies is they don’t read scientific studies for fun, they don’t like long winded explanations about why the world is the way it is. They think they can see something in the street and extrapolate an entire social policy from it and there are chancers that will tell them, ‘You know what? You’re right. We don’t need experts telling you that you’re wrong, what do they know?’
So your Jordan Petersons and your Nigel Farages and Alex whatever his nameis, these people and reddit’s normie audience are made for each other. I’ll even go as far as to say this extends to the people that think the Democrats or the Labour Party are going to fix their problems, Team Liberal aren’t doing themselves any favours but my point is that if your goal is a massive website that caters to the largest part of the reddit audience you’re going to end up swimming in cryptofascist and sometimes outright fascist content. Been there, seen that, got the t-shirt.
Interesting, I think I’ll take a look. You sorta skipper over what ‘normie’ or reddit behaviour was mentioned in his book specifically. Was it the lack of reading scientific articles you mentioned in another paragraph, that alone can’t be it right?
Listen, just go and read the thing; it will be time better spent than listening to me precis it from memory. but if you do read it a feel like it hasn’t given you an insight into what drives a whole host of behaviour that one sees on social media or that I’ve misunderstood the book then do come back to me and I will refresh my memory of the book to have that discussion with you.
Yeah, that’s fair enough, gotta do my own homework some of the time.