TL;DR: I wonder why we always have the same 2 posts as top posts of the day.
They appear a bit unnecessary and mildly annoying to me.
Do you think the same? Or do you like them, and can explain me why, so I can change my view?
Please don’t just blindly downvote, writing this post took a lot of time. And if you feel the need to do it anyway, tell me why first.
Maybe I am the only person who thinks that.
I probably am, at least according to numbers.
Basically, I’ve got the feeling that every top post of the day for the last weeks is something like “I’ve freed myself from evil Windows’ shackles and finally switched to Linux.”, or “What distro do you recommend?”.
Don’t get me wrong.
I feel super happy for every newcomer discovering the wonderful world of Linux and FOSS.
I, just like most others here, always try to help them in finding their right distro and guiding them in their first steps.
We all have been there.
And I’m super proud of us all, as a community, that we happily embrace every new member. We definitely have to keep that behaviour, it’s what connects us and makes us strong.
I just think we should redirect them a bit onto the specific communities.
Not by banning or censoring, just as friendly reminder, e.g. by a sticky post, comments like “Hey, check out [email protected]” or something else.
It doesn’t help much if there are the same threads every day, with people circlejerking on hating Windows and recommending Mint a hundred times, just like 100 people before did on the same thread.
I hate Windows too, but it feels like we’re identifying and comparing ourselves with the bitter ex-partner we had a while ago. No, not being Windows shouldn’t be the main reason Linux is great.
There are so many great posts and discussions, that are all going missing in this swamp of “Winblows bad, hehe”.
We should focus on what makes our software great, and not what the “bad ex-partner” did wrong.
Same with newcomer posts.
I think if the posters get redirected to the correct sub, they will receive more help, since the people partaking in the community are there because they wanna see exactly that.
At the same time, I’m afraid this would undermine our openness and friendliness of this community, and result in being as shitty as Reddits’ sub.
!Just as an anecdote, when I was a noob, I posted a question there, and, like 5 minutes later, I got a dozen of non-constructive, offensive comments. 10 minutes later, my post got removed. This was my first contact to the Linux world btw. Guess who switched back to Windows for another half year because of that?
We have to prevent this at any costs.
Anyway… !<
I really enjoy this community here and wanna keep it this great.
I just wanted to ask you, what you think about those everyday-top-posts.
If you like them, please try to change my mind and explain me why :)
Edit/ Additional stuff/ Learnings:
- I don’t hate those “I switched to Linux”-posts, just to clarify. They’re fine for me, they just feel like white noise. But I’ve read many times in this thread that a lot of people enjoy those posts. If that’s the case, I’m totally fine! :)
- I think putting those posts in a weekly sticky thread could be worth an idea? Then everyone could describe their experience of this week of switching from one distro to another, e.g. “My first week of Gentoo” or something like this. Would be an interesting read for everyone.
- I also believe those “Fuck Windows”-posts can be kind of therapeutic for some people, since Windows became really shitty and annoying in the last years. And when you feel the relieve from finally getting rid of it, you tell that everyone. Understandable.
- Splitting the community isn’t the best idea too. We can always learn from each other and I like the diversity of this community.
- Thank you for your kind and constructive answers! ✌️
I don’t really mind either way whether these posts are allowed to remain or should be culled.
If you keep them around, they will just keep shitting up the feed. The overall browsing quality of the community goes down, hindering the user experience. I don’t think it’s uncontroversial to say these posts have next to no value; they’re essentially equivalent to birthday notifications or “I voted” stickers. Like… congrats! You and everyone else! Now what? Where’s the discussion here?
On the other hand, I do want to think thrice about controlling this with moderation. All too often on Reddit I’ve see the trope of a sub that appears to be crawling, and you get the idea to join in with an enthusiastic post, only to get removedsmacked by automod because you posted this on the wrong day of the week, or this post type is outright banned because the community is sick of seeing it. It’s sensible, yes. But ugh, what a demoralizing filter for newcomers. Overly curated subs/communities are not public forums, they are increasingly impenetrable cliques. That may not necessarily be a bad thing if we think the tradeoff is worth it. But we have to keep in mind what we become when we make that trade.
The one thing I will say willl absolutely not help anything at all is making a designated containment community for this specific kind of post. The whole complaint here is rooted in there being no discussion value for these types of posts. You think a community comprised entirely of those would be a community anyone would want to post in? It’d largely be the Lemmy equivalent of a donotreply@ email address. A dumping ground where unwanted posts go to die. And I don’t know about anyone else, but somehow I find being directed to a designated dead-end forum by mods is an even bigger slap to the face than simply having my post removed.