this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
111 points (95.1% liked)
Asklemmy
42502 readers
1394 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The "front page" of lemmy, either the local of the instance you're on or the "all", is pretty bad. Low quality, uninteresting, obscure, sometimes vaguely rude. News about small video games, hyper specific gripes, obscure memes, uninteresting articles with no comments. Compare that to reddit when it was good, which reliably emphasized the biggest world news stories, genuinely interesting user anecdotes or personal stories, academic knowledge (especially AskHistorians), videos or images that grip you, etc. I'm not sure what the issue is with lemmy's front page. Is it an algorithm problem? Something to do with federation? Is the user base merely too small for now and this will improve on its own with more engagement?
It's too bad because the "front page" is the user's first taste of lemmy. Most users will browse without making an account for a while before finally making an account and subscribing to specific communities.
In general, I think lemmy is already great. There are starting to be lots of cool communities, and even if the quantity is lower, the quality seems to be higher.
Lemmy has no algorithm.
Something has to choose what shows up on hot.
That's not really what I was referring to. Sure it selects posts automatically but it's not like it picks what it thinks a specific user is going to click on.
I think the original commenter was referring to how Reddit was able to balance popular communities and smaller ones instead of the fire hose of memes and tech news Lemmy is.
but it is just a simple vote count/time decay, no consideration given to what you have interacted with in the past, ie the "algorithm" on other platforms
That's why the content isn't sorted as well as it could be. There's no one-size-fits-all for social media as people have different things they like.
Yes there is, and it's not that different from reddit. The sorting algorithm is what they refer to. Eg, hot is some balance of time vs votes, which greatly favours newer posts (too new, IMO -- posts it shows will typically no comments or maybe just one or two). Active favours high commenting rates and based on my observations, it seems to drop off around 2 days (too old, IMO -- a considerable number of posts shown by this algorithm seem to be around the 2 day mark). The top and new algorithms are straightforward enough.
All the algorithms favour big communities. There's a "best" algorithm in development, which would try to look at the top for each community and thus give smaller communities a chance. I can't wait for that, because right now, you'll rarely if ever see a small community hit the front page and it sucks bad.