Say for example a /c/anarchism gets added to a "politics" feed. And suddenly you have a bunch of people that have no clue (or even a pretty false idea) commenting on posts in the anarchism community because they think it is just another politics posts. Then others that are actual members of that community start getting into largely off-topic arguments with these commenters and when moderators step in you shortly after get complaints from people about being "censored for their totally valid opinion about politics" and so on.

[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 1 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (1 children)

That's a valid concern. And I think to solve that in a clean way and altogether, they need some options to restrict commenting or voting to subscribers only. Meddling with other features and how communities can be found, so people can keep hiding in Lemmy's noise... is a very indirect approach and doesn't go all the way.

I've seen a bit of that issue in connection with the All-feed. Back when AI was still largely hated on, we regularly had some amount of downvotes creep into the few dedicated AI communities. And while I support people downvoting the flood of AI related stuff in general news and technology communities, I don't see any reason to drive-by downvote an AI post in an AI community. But that has stopped since. And I don't think I've seen anyone come in and pick fights or something. It was just some minor but noticeable and constant stream of downvotes. So I can definitely see how these things would be annoying to some people. On the other hand I think people wanting to subscribe to things and having curated feeds, might also be a valid request.

[–] Martineski@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

restrict commenting or voting to subscribers only.

Feeds subscribe you to those communities. Maybe if the feature didn't do that it would make more sense but with the current way things work it would require a different solution. Personally I strongly believe in granular control over to which feeds the community gets added with default opt-in where mods can react if something unwanted starts happening.

[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 1 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (1 children)

Feeds subscribe you to those communities

I mean if you click on subscribe, to subscribe to all the communities within, that's kind of intended behaviour?! If you just view it, it shouldn't really be an issue. I guess there is some way to figure this out in an acceptable way.

But yeah, we can scrap my idea if it's used this way. Maybe just don't offer one big subscribe button for all of the group, so users need to make a deliberate choice and click on all the communities seperately?

[–] Martineski@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (1 children)

How'd you follow a feed to regularly visit if not without subscribing to it? The person you responded to complained that communities may get unwanted traffic if they were included in bad feeds. So while you suggested subscribers only comments and it would work for 'all' feed to filter out low effort trolls it wouldn't work with feeds where they are already subscribed to it.

Just like with communities where you don't look them up each time you want to see their content and you subscribe to them to have them easily accessible on you subscribed list or in subscribed feed the same would go for feeds.

I may have missed your subtle suggestion somewhere about changing the behavior of feeds in which case the feature would check out although that would cause some friction still when it comes to ease of interaction.

I mean if you click on subscribe, to subscribe to all the communities within, that’s kind of intended behaviour?!

The conversation isn't about fair users anyway. If someone comes in without care about community talking bs then it wouldn't matter if you gave them option to avoid it because they would do it anyway. Just like people don't bother with block feature which there always was.

[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 2 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

Hmmh. And I've missed another point. If you want to do things like add communities later on, and this somehow propagates to existing subscribers, this can't work together with anything but one subscription per whole feed.

I haven't made complete sense of the feature and the consequences yet. I thought I'd just open the feed from the top bar and use it to categorize stuff for myself. And I'll open it every time i specifically want to see just Linux stuff or wholesome stuff. But yeah, that's not the main point of it. And I've never used multi-reddits or starter packs or similar features... I'm probably just very tired, I'll stop talking for today because what I say doesn't make a lot of sense anymore. Wish you all a nice day or night or whatever it is.