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Does anyone else feel the general lemmy instances are noise? (kbin.social)

submitted 1 year ago by stevecrox@kbin.social to c/kbinMeta@kbin.social

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I quite value content from targetted instances, but most of the "general" instances seem to be memes, posts on boosting lemmy, memes, reddit, memes bot posts, memes, reddit, memes, discussion on lemmy mobile applications, memes reddit, memes, and people talking about how the lemmy changed their lives oh and memes.

I would browse hot on reddit as a way to see things outside my subscribed bubble but I have given up. The signal to noise ratio is terrible.

Is anyone else experiencing this? How are you discovering magazines?

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[–] crowsby@kbin.social 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Definitely. I posted this yesterday in a similar thread about clickbait content:

This is one of the things that I'm struggling with right now as well. My reddit experience was heavily curated in favor of smaller subreddits, to the almost complete exclusion of top subreddits. The thing is, since Lemmy is so new, it hasn't had the opportunity to build up a diverse array of specialized communities the same way. So basically right now all we have are mainly versions of the "big" Reddit communities, along with ones that decided to emigrate here from Reddit.

But it turns out, content from "big" communities is often the same low-effort, lowest-common denominator stuff regardless which platform is hosting it. Memes, clickbait, and ragebait permeate the top results, because well shucks, that's what people want to see and engage with, apparently.

I'm hopeful that if/when Lemmy continues to grow, that it'll become home to more active specialized communities. In the meanwhile, I've been trying to improve the experience as much as possible by A) trying to subscribe to more communities and B) slamming that block community button like I'm playing Hungry Hungry Hippos.

I think it boils down to the fact that a smaller userbase is going to naturally gravitate towards lowest common denominator content because there isn't enough critical mass to form niche communities yet. It's low-hanging fruit to post an angry meme about Reddit, since people being angry about Reddit is why Lemmy/kbin suddenly have so many people. But of those, how many want to talk about inflatable kayaks or vintage calculators?

As far as finding new communities, maybe this page will be helpful.

[–] BeardedPip@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago

Yup. The niche restaurants and cool bookstores aren’t found in small towns. You gotta go where there are more people to find those. Online spaces are going to be similar.

There are still a ton of tiny niche message boards, but for new social media sites, the bigger, the better, sadly.

[–] MoogleMaestro@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

I'm not sure that small communities are doomed to have lower quality content, but it definitely requires more moderation to prevent spam.

People also need to be better conditioned. They treat content quantity as being more important than quality, which is essentially the opposite of what you want when it comes to high quality posting.