Sometimes I can’t tell whether a question here is genuine and the author is interested in the answers, or whether they just copy-paste something to keep people busy. How am I supposed to approach that?
Sometimes I can’t tell whether a question here is genuine and the author is interested in the answers, or whether they just copy-paste something to keep people busy. How am I supposed to approach that?
Uhm, maybe my phrasing wasn’t the best. I meant how do I deal with that?
I’ve left other places on the internet because I don’t like bots and fabricated engagement. So sometimes I struggle here a bit as well. (In various communities and for different reasons.) I’d rather have genuine conversations with people who asked a question because they’d like to read my answer. Or if I can help them or contribute something… I’m not really sure if this is what we do here or not.
even if the person who posted the starter thread isn’t interested you can be assured that others opening the thread are at least a bit interested.
Thanks. I feel that’s somehow part of the answer. But it still leaves a bad taste for me. Like I’ve been played. And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t work. I’ll take 3mins to write an answer and no one picks up on it or votes, so it feels like I wrote it for the void or a bot.
There are two main posters on this community.
@ladybutterfly@piefed.blahaj.zone usually answers in the comments, so I’m not sure why you have doubts about her being genuine
For @cm0002@lemmy.world , they usually show in the OP if the question is a repost from another ask community.
Does this help?
Love you lots like jelly tots Blaze!
I don’t want to call anyone out. I think it’s great if they make it transparent to us that it is a repost. They could have skipped that. But what’s the point? That person is never going to read the answers. And the posts are already on AskLemmy, so why duplicate random ones of them? (And some of the quoted posts I couldn’t even find. Some are there and attributed correctly.)
Hey Hendrik thanks for your comments! I like to make lemmy a nice place to hang out so I start threads. If you look at my post and comment history I do it a lot (I also have lazysoci.al and lemmyworld accounts). For this community I have a list of questions I add questions to when I think of them, the odd one I’ve got off reddit but I’ve NEVER copied one off lemmy for obvious reasons. I usually answer them, but sometimes if I’m short of time I don’t.
Yes. Sorry, I didn’t want to write down any names, so you were in the line. But I didn’t mean you. I like your content. And you respond and engage a lot in the emerging discussions underneath. You’re awesome 😊 And I can tell the questions and answers mean something to you. That’s obvious. (And my comment is an opinion piece anyway. Maybe I’m wrong with all of this, that’s why I asked.)
Thankyou for commenting on my awesomeness! And it’s an interesting question
You can have a look at this thread: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/47235271/19586923
I personally don’t mind it as even if the original OP doesn’t see the answers, it can still be an interesting discussion starter for other people.
Thanks for the link! I agree a lot with that OP’s points. Those reposts feel a lot to me like I’m a dog and someone just half-heartedly threw a slice of cheese at my feet, expecting me to eat it. But maybe I wanted ham, idk. Plus they literally just scraped it off the floor in the kitchen and now it landed on the livingroom floor.
The other perspective is that some instances are problematic, and we should try to reduce their influence on the platform as a whole. To fight the network effect that older communities use to get more activity, there needs to be some crossposting done at some point.
Both perspectives are understandable, it’s a matter of personal preference.
I get that. But I think it mainly obscures the problem. And has negative side-effects. We could do something different here… Have lower frequency but higher quality posts… Do it differently than LW. But we can’t. We somehow need to import the cross-posts from a different place. Strip them of the comments and the person who the answers would matter to, and re-upload the same ones here.
We’ve been trying to give an alternative to 3 very active communities:
While they are quite active, the .ml versions are still far more active (e.g. 6k MAU vs 3.7k MAU for !privacy@lemmy.dbzer0.com )
People just don’t care enough to make the switch, or they prefer to post to the most active community.
It’s an endless battle to try to fight network effect, and if people see that the established community with the most active users also has some content that the alternative doesn’t get, there’s just no way the alternative will ever succeed.
It’s kind of similar to what Reddit is to Lemmy/Piefed as a whole. A lot of people crossposts content from Reddit, because to make Lemmy and Piefed potential alternatives, new joiners don’t have to feel like they are missing out on content.
Yeah, maybe you’re right and I’m the wrong person / have different needs. I’d rather take (for example) my news from a tech magazine, and use this place exclusively to talk to people and have discussions about things that matter to us. I have almost no fear of missing out when there isn’t enough posts a day. Because I’m here for the comments. I rather they repost 5 posts less and write 15 comments to other people’s posts instead. That’d grow the place in my opinion.
And I really strongly dislike it. Trying to make me engage with content to grow someone’s platform or community, or use me and the users for some motivation is very close to what Reddit and other platforms do. And I’ve specifically left them for doing that. I get that this is meant to do good. But somehow it doesn’t feel genuine to me. I don’t get asked a question because someone would like to know my answer… I’m being used for another motive.