yeah call me lemmy poster. its semantics who cares . only reddit agents taht want to waste time

Then again, this entire posts makes it quite clear you don’t seem to have any ability to read the room.

Assuming they even read their own post.

“Read the room” is exactly the mentality I’m questioning.

The room is 35k MAU and stagnant. Maybe optimizing everything around the preferences of the people already in the room is part of why nobody new is walking through the door.

And “everything is worse because of AI” isn’t an argument. It’s an opinion. I’m using AI as a tool for filtering, moderation, and automation. Judge the results.

If Lemmy only welcomes people who already agree with the existing culture on AI, content, reposting, and what the Fediverse is supposed to be, don’t be surprised when it remains a tiny echo chamber. and at the moment - its exactly what it is - a tiny 35k MAU stagnant echo chamber

im running out of time. genuinely tried to make this work but I Think lemmy is just going to stay tiny reddit controlled app

I’ll clarify a bit because I think I didn’t do a good job before. The meat of places like Reddit or Lemmy isn’t the posts. If posts were all we care about everyone would be using RSS instead. The meat is in the comment section, the discussion the post generates. That’s where most of the new content lives, unless you want to argue that you have no original thoughts and the comment you made is some remixed content from somewhere else. So OP is correct that posts are usually people remixing content found elsewhere, but posts themselves are not how sites like this live. The post is just the bone for the meat to stick to, something to focus discussion. He is wrong in the sense that he’s putting the focus on posts and essentially saying “If posts exists, discussions will happen”. But the focus should on the discussions and posts serve the purpose of focusing discussion.

And that’s where the quality vs quantity point comes in because there are two ways to create these sources of discussion. The first the quantity approach, which is what sanitation is doing it, by slinging shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. Eventually 1 in a 100 posts becomes a point of discussion. The other is the quality approach. Instead of automating away posting shit you do it manually. You find something you want to share and then you take the time to make a post. The manual labor does something that automation can’t, it puts a human element into the post. It puts intentionality into it because you are choosing to post it in the place you think best suits for that post and you’re personally invested in that post which means you’re open to engage with the discussions that might happen because of this post. Automation gets rid of both of those things and actually makes it worse because it fills feeds with posts that have no human element to it. It drowns out actually interesting posts. That’s actually part of my criticism of Reddit comment section because at some point Reddit comment section became flooded with low effort one-liner comments designed to get as many upvotes as possible and those low effort comments drowned out interesting threads so your ability to have meaningful conversations actually dwindled even though the overall amount of “conversations” increased. The same thing happens with posts which is why we both agree that sanitation is doing is spam. It drowns out interesting posts by filling the feed with uninteresting posts and nobody wants to shift through shit to find something interesting.

they re my posts - because im the one posting them onto lemmy. this is valid name. another thing reddit agents would do is argue pointless semantics and waste everyone time.

is not compatible with the current demand here

there is a demand. that demand just goes back to reddit.

“I am thirsty” and you respond by pointing a firehose directly at their faces

thats what reddit agents want you to belive. just limit posting bro, we dont need so much content bro. And then people just go back to reddit.

Please don’t engage with the AI commentors.

You’re doing exactly what you’re accusing me of doing: taking your own preference and declaring that it’s what “people” want.

You say people don’t care about the medium, they just want to connect. Great. Then why are Reddit, Facebook, TikTok, Discord, forums, and the Fediverse radically different products with different communities and usage patterns? The medium obviously affects how people connect.

And yes, I specifically want a Reddit-style link aggregation and discussion platform without Reddit controlling it. I’m clearly not alone, because that’s basically the niche Lemmy itself occupies. Otherwise, why build communities, posts, comments, voting, ranking, and subscriptions in this format at all?

The funny thing is I actually agree with your last paragraph.

Removing the corporate overlord doesn’t automatically remove arbitrary power. It distributes that power among hundreds of independent admins and moderators. That’s precisely what my post is criticizing.

Federation solves centralized control, but it introduces a different problem: fragmented moderation where multiple independent people can exercise power over the same user’s participation.

That’s not an argument for going back to Reddit. It’s an argument for recognizing the weakness in the federated model and figuring out how to make it better.

OP has a point though. We do need more people, more original content…

Issue is… (and I’m explaining this to OP:) It can’t be low quality content. Reposts also kinda make it look like a dead place with mostly bot activity… You’re not the first person to come up with the idea to spam this place and it’ll attract users. We already tried this strategy and it does not attract new users. You can look up a bit of history of this place and you’ll see you have to come up with a better idea and not continue to make the same mistake other people already made.

You’re arguing against something I didn’t say. I didn’t say people only join platforms that already have a fuckton of users. I said people leave or don’t stick around when there’s not enough content they’re interested in.

Those are completely different things.

You can have a smaller community and still have an active, interesting feed. But if someone opens Lemmy, searches for their interests, finds communities with a handful of posts from weeks ago, and goes back to Reddit where those same interests have fresh discussions every day - that’s a content problem, not a “must have millions of users” problem.

And yes, I understand federation. Saying “the Fediverse isn’t just Lemmy” doesn’t change the argument. Federation doesn’t magically create posts in an inactive Lemmy community.

People need something to read before most of them will have something to comment on. That’s the entire point.

I think it should be done per community. if community wants to credit reddit with a link - I will absolutely comply.

This is literally the first time anyone has raised the OC labeling issue with me. And yes, that’s easy to fix. I can add a check for OC labels and either reject those posts or correctly mark them as reposts.

This is exactly the kind of feedback I’d rather get: identify a concrete problem and I’ll fix the tooling, instead of jumping straight to “ban the account.”

I understand the distinction. We disagree on what counts as “good content.”

You’re assuming that because something came from Reddit and was submitted automatically, it’s inherently lower value. I’m not.

And again, this isn’t a copy-paste script blindly mirroring Reddit. There are multiple layers of curation: score thresholds, freshness limits, duplicate detection, community-specific rules, content filtering, and AI evaluation. Relevance to the specific community is literally one of the things being evaluated.

Could that filtering make mistakes? Absolutely. So can a human moderator or someone manually choosing posts. If particular posts are bad, downvote them, remove them, or tell me the filtering needs adjustment. That’s useful feedback.

But there’s also a chicken-and-egg problem with “I prefer conversations that are already happening.” Someone has to start those conversations. If most users prefer commenting rather than submitting, where are all those conversations supposed to come from?

That’s the 90-9-1 problem I’ve been talking about. Most people consume, fewer comment, and very few actually submit content.

And the results matter. Lemmy has hundreds of thousands of registered accounts, yet only tens of thousands are monthly active, and many communities remain nearly empty. We can’t simultaneously say “people prefer joining existing conversations” and then treat supplying things for them to discuss as inherently harmful.

I’m completely open to arguing about quality, volume, thresholds, or relevance. Those can all be improved.

What I reject is the idea that automated = spam and manually submitted = good. Quality should be judged by the content, not by how many mouse clicks it took to submit it.

you dont have a standing. contribute then you can say something