From the Beehaw sidebar: "We do want you coming here and sharing links to news articles, websites you find, starting discussions, connecting with others, and in general doing what you see on other social media websites."
What if the focus of Beehaw and/or Lemmy in general is not as a link aggregation platform but instead a community of topic discussion? People are rewarded for posting links to articles with upvotes which only gives incentive to continue posting the same not-read content that they think the respective subs will like (upvote).
Instead, we should be rewarding people who are actively engaging with the community. Not broadcast posting the way it goes on mastodon or IG, etc., but actual back and forth interaction with the community.
Maybe take away the ability to upvote a link post and reserve that for the actual discussion parts that take place?
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This is built in into Lemmy, you don't need to look at votes to decide to participate.
While submitting a link can be a way to start a conversation, you don't need to. Just write whatever you want, and click post.
Actually, why did OP put a meme image in this post? Want to ask something, then ask it. The place is what we make of it.
What if the focus of Beehaw and/or Lemmy in general is not as a link aggregation platform but instead a community of topic discussion? People are rewarded for posting links to articles with upvotes which only gives incentive to continue posting the same not-read content that they think the respective subs will like (upvote).
I think that clickbait titles are effective because they trigger an emotional response. We have more or less same brains with same biases and heuristics as users on other platforms. So I don't think that this system can work, people will continue posting and upvoting such content. Fast and strict content moderation, however, could be effective.
Maybe take away the ability to upvote a link post and reserve that for the actual discussion parts that take place?
this would probably cause its own problems as a design choice, but it's also not even possible with Lemmy without changing the underlying code (which is a whole ordeal) so that's not really on the table.
It'd be pretty trivial to hide upvotes on list pages and show a reply count instead. That doesn't seem like it would be a difficult feature for almost anyone to contribute to Lemmy and it would certainly change the incentives.
Also, it'd make it impossible to upvote from the list page which would be a good thing in my opinion.
