Ask

Btw, I wanted to say sorry for my (now edited to be mainly crossed out) sibling comment here about you. That was a bit harsh and after paying some more attention to where you pop up, I've changed my opinion. Not 100% but enough to say that was really far from being the complete picture. And not amongst my best comments here.

It's a quite different situation from Reddit. Nobody here is making any profit from interactions.

I know. Still it's engagement farming and posting under false pretenses. And that's my parallel to Reddit. A platform could be about the users and let them talk to each other in genuine conversations. Or there is some manipulation going on. Mixed with the users are other people who post for ulterior motives. And they even act differently than regular users. You usually won't get an answer from them in the comments. And they don't post a tech article because they read it and it seemed interesting to them, but because they pick more or less 10 things each day that seem about right and just post those. Obviously lowering the quality of the feed, since other people had been posting things which were somehow connected to them.

You need someone to post the article or ask the first question, and you need other people to comment. As you said, you are here for the comments, but someone needs to create the post in the first place.

I don't think that's my experience any more. My feed now has more things than I can read in a day. And I've even started unsubscribing from noisy communities. In reality I'm in desparate need for comments. I sometimes post 6 comments or so a day and sometimes I don't get a single reply. And then those places feel kind of empty. (empty of human conversation.) Yet what we do isn't adding more comments, but mainly dumping more of those posts, and that's somehow supposed to help.

And I don't think it does, really. Prime example is lemmit.online which pulls in lots of Reddit content. All with zero upvotes, zero comments. If you fall prey to that and comment, you just waste your time. No one is going to interact with you. Then we have the high frequency posters in the tech communities and it's mixed with them. Some articles are noise, get low engagement, have been posted 6h earlier, some are good. They're almost constantly lower quality though, than what other people post with a summary attached and it somehow has some soul and is not just random uninteresting news like in 500 other places.

And then we have places like this. the piefed.social communities have kind of all started strong. LadyButterfly's posts have long and nuanced threads under them with genuine conversation. And I'd love to do away with all the noise and read just that kind of thing. And I get nuanced answers on other piefed.social communities as well. But... now people say "Here, you need more content", come here with their garbage truck full of ideas and posts they picked up at other places and dump them over my head. Turning it effectively into the same thing as the other place.

And frankly speaking, I thing that drags it down. I've subscribed to all new communities because they were kind of higher quality. It wasn't as much posts, but good ones. Now they're augmented and I can tell the added ones have less interesting titles, less and shorter comments underneath. I think all the garbage truck approach does is even things out and adapt it to the same questionable quality as all the other communities.

And it changes the ratio and now I'm even more unlikely to get a reply once I comment underneath a news article. (It's a bit different with AskLemmy type stuff.)

(Please take what I say with a grain of salt, it's an opinion piece focused on negative things, so my words have an overly negative tone.)

But I really wish there were some communities that were less "enhanced" for growth, had low frequency but just high quality content, and lots of conversation. This is working against that in my opinion.