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Addressing the Exponential Growth of Communities (lemmynsfw.com)
submitted 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) by to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world
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Over the past few days, I've witnessed a remarkable surge in the number of communities on browse.feddit.de. What started with 2k communities quickly grew to 4k, and now it has reached an astonishing 8k. While this exponential growth signifies a thriving platform, it also brings forth challenges such as increased fragmentation and the emergence of echo chambers. To tackle these issues, I propose the implementation of a Cross-Instance Automatic Multireddit feature within Lemmy. This feature aims to consolidate posts from communities with similar topics across all federated instances into a centralized location. By doing so, we can mitigate community fragmentation, counter the formation of echo chambers, and ultimately foster stronger community engagement. I welcome any insights or recommendations regarding the optimal implementation of this feature to ensure its effectiveness and success.

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[โ€“] 3 points 3 years ago (4 children)

Well, it's the nature of almost any online community. Say the 'popular' thing and you're lauded, even if a slightly less popular point is more valid / has better evidence.

There really is no good way to discourage this other than fostering a community which values the discourse over 'popular' thing. That's difficult to do even offline.

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  • [โ€“] 0 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    I'm not sure it's even possible to discourage it really. If you have any sort of user-user engagement system, whether up/downvotes or comments/shares or whatever, you're going to have particular sentiments that are popular with particular audiences and get more of that engagement. If you take those features out, you're going to lose engagement, pretty much definitionally.

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  • [โ€“] 1 point 3 years ago (2 children)

    I've always thought about creating some metric to weight users who create comments with the most engagement as higher. That leads to the most controversial or dividing comments rising though.

    Some impartial judgement via mod points and or community awards to weigh valuable users would be nice.

    The issue is any of these would be gamed, it might be possible today to use an AI model like ChatGPT but that's got its own biases.

    So for the moment I can't think of a better system than upvote downvote.

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  • [โ€“] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    Yeah, weighting 'engagement' higher is basically the youtube algorithm problem: you'd be attracting trolls most of all. You could probably devise something smarter, like weighting it to include all of most upvotes, fewest downvotes, and most comments; adding comments to it helps identify people who post positive but engaging things, but again that can lead to an echo chamber. Plus, it then under-weights new users compared to established ones, which can be unfortunate.

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