There are a significant amount of questions here that do not follow the criteria in the sidebar, especially “1. Open-ended question” and “5. An actual topic of discussion”. It seems some folks want others to do research for them, or to troubleshoot some random issue.
This bugs me. Of course, I can ignore and/or downvote those posts, and I do. However, I’m wondering if anyone else feels the same way. I’m don’t want to stifle content and discussion on such a burgeoning platform, but could we do something about this?
Perhaps we could “tag” posts in some way (I know tags aren’t officially supported yet) or maybe we could redirect folks to a sister community for non-discussion questions. Or something else?
Just throwin’ it out there. If I’m alone in this, I’ll take my lumps and quietly sit back down.
EDIT: Already seeing good points in the replies! makes sense- probably a bit too early to be sticklers about topics.
EDIT 2: Really appreciate the responses and discussion! I appreciate the discourse and also not being downvoted to oblivion 😄
FINAL EDIT: Thanks to all who commented. It’s nice to know I’m not alone, but I do accept what most (including mods) have said- cracking down on the types of questions is not a priority when the community is still growing.
The way I see it is the rules exist to improve the experience of the community. They set guidelines to help us achieve that. The rules aren’t the final source of truth though, the quality of the community is.
So, if you see something that breaks the rules and is pulling the community down in doing so, use the report function, and highlight it.
If it’s breaking a rule, but not harming the community, then just let it fly.
I have no interest in enforcing rules for the sake of rules. I see them more as guidelines for fostering a better community, and that’s the lens through which I moderate.
That is my opinion as well, though I think we could be a bit less lenient on “lazy” posts further down the road, when the community is bigger. I’m talking about not having a question in the title at all (like the recent vaping post) or just asking technical stuff that doesn’t spark discussion (like the recent FLOSS PDF reader post).
What are your thoughts on that?
I’ll generally remove posts without questions if someone reports them, but if they aren’t bothering anyone enough to report it and I don’t notice that they’re in this community, then IMO, they’re not doing much harm.
But if and when the community gets bigger, signal to noise ratio becomes a lot more important when it’s harder to keep up with everything. But we can cross that bridge if and when we get to it IMO
Sounds right to to me!
Thank God for that.
could we do something about this?
Downvote posts that don’t generate good discussion.
Report posts that are flagrant rule breakers. (I report posts here that aren’t actually questions, or bad faith statements that are only barely questions)
But more importantly…
UPVOTE the good posts!
And even more importantly…
POST the kind of content you want to see! Be the change you want to see. If you’re just a commenter, you can’t complain that there’s no posts! Haha
Lemmy needs the ability for mods to move posts between communities. There’s plenty of posts that would make for great discussions but that are not where they should be. Moving them would make more sense than shutting them down altogether.
Cross posting will do that. Mods can cross-post
Good question; it’s not my place to answer. @ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone, @tmpod@lemmy.pt, @Cloak@lemmy.ml?
I feel the same way. Most of the conversations here are pointless and don’t prompt any interesting discussion. They are just an opportunity for the OP to air their dumb questions and opinions. Particularly any question that begins “Does Anyone Else” should just be banned from this muni. If people want such dumb questions in their feeds, they should join a separate muni for that.
Yes, someone does care.
You do.
Next question.
If I’m honest I have no idea what would be a open ended question. I asked yesterday how people learned a new language because I’m struggling with it and wanted to see how other people do it. But that doesn’t seem like a open ended question and would not be allowed?
The difference is whether or not there’s one objective answer to a question, or if a question could have any number of answers.
For instance, look at “How do you replace the starter on a 2006 Ford Taurus?”, which is rather closed-ended, as the only acceptable answer is “With the wrath of a perturbed god, as you’ve already replaced the starter three times in just as many years.”
Whereas, “What advice would you give someone starting their first job as a car mechanic?” is open-ended and could have a million answers, ranging from “Get comfortable replacing Ford starters, because those sombitches burn out once a year” all the way to “Buy a good set of wrenches, and also a ouija board so you can tell the ghost of Henry Ford to go fuck himself”.
I think questions with “how”, " why", “where” etc. tend to be open. An example for a closed question would be: “Do you use apps to learn a new language?”
Maybe you could argue about “what” and “who” questions, but I prefer uninteresting questions to be filtered out by votes instead of rules, anyway, so I don’t care.
Also, even a “bad” question can be saved by a good answer, e.g. a report on language learning apps.
I don’t care.
I help moderate a community that tries to mirror how things were done on Reddit, and over time we decided “this isn’t Reddit, we don’t have nearly as many users as Reddit, so there’s no need to run this place like Reddit”.
Eventually this community and others will reach a tipping point where there’s a need to cull posts and have stricter content guidelines, but for now I think it’s ok to be a bit lax.
i think it’s required to be lax. the laid-back nature of Lemmy is essential to its soul
Yeah there’s only so many actually open-ended questions you can ask without being repetitive, while also on relatively limited users.
Yeah there’s only so many actually open-ended questions you can ask without being repetitive
lmao. I’m curious what you think this number is. How many open ended questions are there? Just ballpark.
Asking open ended questions that generate discussion is a good policy regardless of hating reddit
Personally I think it’s fine-ish given the actual number of topics being created - it seems to be easily low enough to not cause questions adhereing to the rules to be pushed down the list and buried with easier or more sensational questions. I think the danger of being a stickler to the rules is that you just drive people away or make them too intimidated to ask. Yeah it is annoying but I think it is fine to just downvote and move on as you say. Splitting the community I think would potentially do even more damage.
Now if there were significantly more topics being created per day then my answer would be different and I would absolutely encourage more active moderation and adherence to the rules.
Eh, yeah but we don’t have the numbers to remove content left and right. Better to have mediocre content right now than 1 really good post every 2 weeks
Better to have mediocre content right now than 1 really good post every 2 weeks
Is it, though? To the best of my knowledge, Lemmy’s algorithm doesn’t penalize communities for low activity; it’s a pretty rudimentary algo based on votes over the last X hours. There isn’t risk of this community becoming de-ranked or anything along those lines. The good content will be just as visible as the bad content (for users browsing their all/sub feeds), so do we really need the bad content in the first place?
Yes.
Why?
people having a stick up their ass about the letter of the rules as opposed to the spirit of a community was one of the worst things about reddit. if you want mods who act like cops, stay with reddit
I don’t mind questions being somewhat focused or topical. But the ones I don’t like are “Here is my long-winded opinion on x, what do you think?” or “Here’s a random article or other thing I found on the internet, thoughts?”
If it’s a post asking opinions on a recent event, that’s one thing. But I think the soapboxing should be limited. There’s more that a post should need to actually qualify as a discussion-fueling question than just the fact they ended a sentence with a question mark somewhere in their post.
Thoughts?
I agree regarding soapboxing. I think the posts that barely hide the fact they’re looking for reactions or agreement rather than discussion are probably the most grating and least constructive use of this community.
However, I think it remains to be seen if the community believes it’s something that needs to be addressed, and if so, if the mods are even conducive to changes. I do see the sidebar states “loosely moderated”. I am open to the possibility that I’m just being uptight and may just need to move on 😆
I like it how it is. I dislike active moderation and arbitrary rules. The community makes the rules, good mods enforce what the community pushes through, and not just one or two vocal people. If the community engages, and it hurts no one, why interfere. At best you discourage participation.
All questions are multiple choice to an extent. There’s no such thing as truly infinite answers to a question.
