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Killing Community (www.marginalia.nu)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/technology@beehaw.org
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Great writing on the current Reddit saga. The author put down in words a lot of things in my mind I couldn't find the right words.

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[–] 0 points 3 years ago (4 children)

@honeyed_coffee For the reasons the OP mentioned. Familiar faces, being recognized in a community instead of being just today's main character.

In a single large forum most participants are silent, as they must be or it'd be a cacophony. Many are silent out of worry that they need to say something good enough to impress a hundred thousand people, not just something interesting to their local 100 friends.

On Fediverse things escape their local instances and their local forum-groups by boosts mostly.

@Zigabyte

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  • [–] 0 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    As karma mattered more you lost a whole subset of regular posters that felt kamra took a relaxing pastime and made it into a job. Karma was used as a kind of stopgap for the issue of managing the cacophony in a busy thread, which made the points matter even more and caused even more people to disengage.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Personally, I found that karma led to self-censorship of any idea that remotely deviated from the group consensus.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Can you think of alternatives to voting, though? Sorting always requires some curating system that isn't random but I can't think of any that would be robust to group consensus

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    I don’t think user voting in of itself is a problem. It’s the consequences of large negative voting that causes the real problems. In Reddit, a single unpopular comment on a popular subreddit could send a casual Redditor into negative karma which effectively shadowbans them from Reddit. As a result, you see people deleting their comments to stop the bleeding. Controversial opinions are punished severely.

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