Every social network can breed problems because this is how humans are - a mega colossal mixed bag. What matters is how you perform moderation to ensure minimal conflicts, and/or what kind of community do the heads desire.
Lemmy has become infected with the Reddit illnesses already (neglect of nuanced moderation besides political addressing, Reddit style hivemind voting, posters willingly discarding morality) but certain things like trolling and harassment are somewhat decently dealt with. The problem is that Lemmy still lacks a large userbase, and yet these problems are flourishing.
Every social network can breed problems because this is how humans are - a mega colossal mixed bag.
And not just “this how humans are,” but that people are generally more unpleasant in online interactions than in face-to-face interactions. We care about each other less, since usually they’re just an anonymous person (or joker). Tone of voice and facial expressions are missing, so it’s easier to make mistakes about intent and reply in kind.
No technical solution can prevent bad human behavior… Still wish mechanisms like up-/down-voting would be avoided, though.
I’ve found that upvotes and downvotes are nice from the moderator’s perspective for a few reasons:
- They provide a level of distributed community moderation that takes load off of the official moderators.
- The rules can focus on a core set of more objective principles, while votes can be more subjective.
- Votes still leave the content in place. Moderation is usually a more extreme measure, involving removing the content in full or in part. The user may also be banned, either temporarily or permanent.
- Moderation decisions can turn into massive backlash, particularly if the user then goes to complain to a meta group about the decision. Votes are votes, there’s no individual or group of individuals to complain about.
Good points! I have to admit, I rarely consider the “inner workings” of a platform like lemmy from a moderator point of view, but this is an important aspect to be thought of.
I would still disagree on subjective votes as a good thing on a social network. All the “echo chamber” effects, that already have been discussed to death, come to mind and I am personally not a big fan of metrics that, in a worst case, stem from pure ideological or current-trend driven opinions of people. People may also never really fathom why they are being down voted, because of the features anonymous nature.
Your argument that “Votes still leave the content in place”, also sounds questionable, considering how often posts on big platforms get “down voted to oblivion” and completely disappear from the first few pages (Not saying this happens here, but the example of the mechanism applies, imho). Sure the content is technically still existing, but will the information reach the people that request it?
I personally think, old timey internet forums and even certain imageboards feel much more objective content-wise, even if they are more chaotic moderation-wise.
The value of subjective votes is that in the ideal situation they act as a way to judge whether or not a comment is adding to a conversation. It’s nearly impossible to put that into a set of rules that can be enforced without being arbitrary. Of course, downvotes all too often turn into the “I disagree” button, filtering out comments that are high quality but express a point of view that is merely unpopular in the community.
To apologetically paraphrase The Police:
There is no technical solution
to a troubled evolution
As others have stated here, this is a human nature thing. I still believe that social media, at least for me, has been more good than bad. I’ve built real world relationships that started as online relationships.
