Positivity, or at least more constructive comments.

I know a lot of bad stuff is going on worldwide, and I’m not upset the bad news gets mentioned, but it seems we have more tendency as a whole to revert back to the old Reddit ways. More arguing, more downvoting, more piling on to people without any comments why people are disagreeing.

Yesterday there was a discussion about homelessness and I shared stats from Census.gov, as the article from the OP was paywalled. Someone asked a question as to why certain states (basically the red ones) had less reported homeless and why it seemed they had a better handle on the issue than states like CA or NY. While I was typing up a nice response demonstrating causation vs correlation and how looking at a chart showing # of people as counted only in shelters may initially make it seem they had many less homeless when in reality, they have homeless people, but they may either be provided no shelter or they may end up in jail as opposed to being left alone.

By the time my reply was done, I saw the person that asked the question was being downvoted. They hadn’t made a statement saying the red states were better with the homeless, they asked a valid question as to why it appeared that way as they had called them the “poor states” and seemed confused how they had funding to keep homelessness down better than the other states. I had also responded to this person before on other occasions when they had questions, so I knew they weren’t trolling or spreading misinformation, but no one else, save one other person (with an accurate but snarky reply) chimed in with any type of answer, they just downvoted a legitimate question while offering no help.

I don’t feel Lemmy a year ago would have acted this way, and I see it on many threads each day. I for better or worse, have interest in politics and associated things, so I end up reading many negative threads, but I try my hardest to avoid making straight negative comments, and instead try to provide stats or more background info so people are understanding what they’re seeing and trying to clear up any confusion so they can make informed choices based on facts. I’ll even get downvoted though (not badly) for just sharing info with trustworthy sources. Heck, yesterday I got downvoted for talking about my heat pump, and almost every animal pic I share gets at least 1 or 2 downvotes. Never any comments why, so I just am constantly confused by it.

Just wish we did a bit more to foster a better vibe here. I spend less and less time in other communities and stick to my own, but that doesn’t feel like a good way to grow Lemmy. And I’m someone who currently posts and replies daily. Most people still just lurk, no matter what we try to do, and nobody is going to post if they’re going to get negged for no reason.

I’d like to see more people jumping into specific communities for whatever game they’re playing at the moment.

I know we have the right demographic here for that.

I’m not sure it has a name, but proper scaling of communities. There are lots of niche communities that get no traction because they are so small. The subscribers should be using a more general community to gain interest and branch off only once that topic reaches critical mass.

More users, and less crazy people. Sometimes it’s ridiculous either what people will argue about, or how mean they’ll be.

If a basic summary is 100% accurate you will get torn to shreds.

Some sort of built-in system for checking for reposts. As is, Lemmy’s search is a lot more limitted for that sort of thing, so I always feel anxious making a post, worried that I’m just going to repost something recent, and unintentionally spam the community.

Tom Swifty jokes and wild theorycrafting

Better search results on major search engines. Not gonna sit here and act like I know what I’m talking about but the major benefit of Reddit was being able to search a question and add “reddit” to the search and getting relevant results from years of posts.

I’d love to see lemmy reach that point as thats honestly been my only reason to open reddit recently