Sounds amazing. Could you provide a link or at least enough names that I can google it?

Allow me to introduce: Firefox vim keybindings extensions. So many more shortcuts if you don’t need to worry about typing characters in normal mode.

A friend of mine just used it to write a script for an Amazing Race application video. It was quite good.

How the heck did it access enough source material to be able to imitate something that specific and do it well? Are we humans that predictable?

Fair enough, but that still doesn’t address the problem for people who do want to be on a large server—full of many people who share their cat meme interests—and see mostly high quality content.

Wanting to be in a forum with thousands or millions of other enthusiasts is a legitimate use case for this kind of social media platform. In that use case, I don’t know of any other way but voting to efficiently filter low quality content. “Just leave” avoids the problem rather than solving it, by denying people the opportunity to do the thing that most people go to Reddit for: to be part of huge communities and just see the good threads and comments.

Interesting perspective. Thanks for genuinely engaging, by the way.

I worry that the mechanisms you describe might not work as the number of users gets large. Check out “Eternal September” if you don’t know about it already. Niche forums might be able to run like that just because they will never have too many members. For forums which many people are interested in (e.g., cat memes), this might not be possible. They may need a mechanism for high-grading content.

Are you willing to accept the assumption that bad content (e.g., spam, advertising, trolling, low effort posts) is far more common than good content (I.e…, high effort posts)?

If you are, then it seems to me that your system would involve a lot more people interacting with a lot more bad content than they do good content. Down votes are a mechanism that let’s one person’s time wasted interacting with bad content reduce the probability that everyone else will have to waste their time on that content.

How do you sort the content without votes? How do you pick out the good stuff from the spam?

I have been thinking about this problem recently and believe the solution may be a new fediverse protocol/service that provides:

• Federated Emergent Topic Taxonomies

That is, a model of the relationships (e.g., is the same as, is a type of, is related to, etc) between different communities (/groups/services/instances, etc.) that emerges from the way that users/servers interact with them, that different servers can maintain independently and merge or split by consensus if they choose. Then other services (like Lemmy instances or clients) can tap into this information to provide solutions to problems like the one you describe (e.g., a feed of all the photography communities, regardless of which instance they’re on).

I think there are several big conceptual and technical challenges to implementing this. I’m keen to discuss them.

Does anyone know where I would go to discuss this with the people who care, have struggled with developing new fediverse protocols and/or are best positioned to spot the flaws and possiblities in the idea? So far I see mostly w3c working groups taking behind closed doors.

“New lab rule: no Ph.D. defences in poetry form.”

Still passed and had a grand old time.