No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
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It still falls into some of the same pitfalls that Reddit had (groupthink, reflexive commenting, power-tripping mods), but some of those problems I don't know that there's a way to get around them in this format, they're just a human nature sort of issue. I appreciate that Lemmy doesn't appear to be owned by a giant mega-corp trying to harvest our "intellectual", but we'll see how that pans out in the future. I've just gotten used to every online service I've used eventually going to shit.
I like that there's no advertising at the moment, I don't know that I would mind it so much if there was advertising, as long as it was kept minimal. I know these things don't just happen for free and if money is needed to help keep the lights on and such.
A very obvious solution to groupthink is to do away with the silly voting system. I don't know why they kept it. A very simple solution would have been to just assign votes to a topic based on how much attention it's getting. In simple terms, If opposed has 10,000 people that have viewed it, 1,000 people have left a comment, compared to a post that has 100,000 views and 15 comments, you can tell which one should have more attention score. The upvote and downvote system is too easily used as a dislike or like system. Many of us have the maturity to upvote something because we think it's a good discussion point even if we don't agree with what the person is saying. But a lot of people don't think that way mentally. They see something, they read it, immediately go into toxic hater mode and just downvote it for no reason
The problem is that you then end up with sites based on attention, leading you into the (imo even bigger) pitfall of every other social media site, where things like attention-grabbing, clickbait, and sensationalist content has a massive advantage. Look at what gets sorted to the top on platforms where that is the main metric, things like Mr. Beast's low-brow, cacophonus videos, children's content, scantily clad women and softcore porn, and gambling or otherwise particularly addictive content. Even focusing on comment count alone means a focus on topics that are both broad-appeal and controversial, more like what you get out of Twitter's trending topics: mostly politics and flamewars rather than experts sharing their research, or artists sharing their (non-pornographic) art.
Don't get me wrong, voting isn't a perfect system at all, but it correlates with quality far better than engagement does.