Yes the All feed has the same problem, but posts need to be significantly more popular for them to even register in the All feed. Thus most small communities currently fly under the radar of the All feed, and if they do get a popular post it nearly always becomes a moderation nightmare.
Hashtags on Mastodon have a similar problem, having given rise to the universally dreaded “reply guy” issue.
I think most people on Lemmy haven’t really thought this through and what the implications of such a feature are once it becomes widely used.
And no, the one that is doing the opt-in is the person creating the feed without asking the community that is being forcefully opted-in. Giving them the option to veto that is better than having them realize that they have been opted into something they don’t agree with by being flooded with trolls and off-topic comments.
I appreciate your words of caution. Remember this feature is very new and will no doubt get a lot more finesse added in future. There’s no point building some baroque all singing-all-dancing perfect thing unless we’re sure people will use it and by releasing earlier we get valuable feedback which determines whether we continue building that feature at all, etc. It’s very bare-bones at the moment.
Have you considered a UX similar to old reddit for this? where you hover over the join button with the mouse and it gives you the option to create a feed or add and remove to a feed?
I actually checked multiple times and could not find it (but admittedly maybe that is my mistake and not a real problem with discoverability).
No, the problem is that people that have no relation to the community start commenting and getting into arguments.
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.
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.
Yes the All feed has the same problem, but posts need to be significantly more popular for them to even register in the All feed. Thus most small communities currently fly under the radar of the All feed, and if they do get a popular post it nearly always becomes a moderation nightmare.
Hashtags on Mastodon have a similar problem, having given rise to the universally dreaded “reply guy” issue.
I think most people on Lemmy haven’t really thought this through and what the implications of such a feature are once it becomes widely used.
And no, the one that is doing the opt-in is the person creating the feed without asking the community that is being forcefully opted-in. Giving them the option to veto that is better than having them realize that they have been opted into something they don’t agree with by being flooded with trolls and off-topic comments.
I appreciate your words of caution. Remember this feature is very new and will no doubt get a lot more finesse added in future. There’s no point building some baroque all singing-all-dancing perfect thing unless we’re sure people will use it and by releasing earlier we get valuable feedback which determines whether we continue building that feature at all, etc. It’s very bare-bones at the moment.
Have you considered a UX similar to old reddit for this? where you hover over the join button with the mouse and it gives you the option to create a feed or add and remove to a feed?
I actually checked multiple times and could not find it (but admittedly maybe that is my mistake and not a real problem with discoverability).
Interesting, thanks!
Im still confused on what your worry is? That people will reply to a post without reading the comments?
No, the problem is that people that have no relation to the community start commenting and getting into arguments.
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.
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.