A bit too often taking part in discussions on Reddit was just mentally draining. Initially the topic looks so promising and I would love to discuss it. But too often people were not interested in sharing ideas beyond their own opinion, and many people were obsessed with “winning” the discussion.
Trying so discuss the finer points back and forth in a satisfying way was a rare occasion. Even In not so big subreddits you would think were filled with like minded people this was difficult. and comments were trying to end the discussion instead of coming with an idea and trying to further it.
How can we all promote good discussion on this site or the wider fediverse?
My personal take on it is that such behavior comes from the large-site mentality. Smaller subs initially do have higher levels of discourse, but each posting account is still sharing a karma score across the entire site. Eventually it shifts to discussion-ending posts with high upvotes.
I have high hopes that the decentralized nature of things like Lemmy will help preserve quality topic discussion. Lemmy.ml being overloaded pushed me to find a server instance more in line with my individual topics and ending up joining a very nice science community. Shout-out to Mander.xyz
I think you make a good point with the persistent karma score. Basically, Reddit is a site that has gamified popularity to the point where everyone is trying to make the quick, easy joke or reference as quickly as possible to score the highest number of points. The existence of sites to track the highest karma accounts only served to reinforce that behavior, which wound up having a bunch of knock-on effects like gimmick accounts that jammed themselves anywhere no matter how appropriate (which led to groupies that would try catching collateral karma), bots copying higher-scoring comments to try building a “trusted” account to then flip and sell to advertisers, and likely a bunch of other stuff that I’m not considering. In the end, there was a lot of shouting into the void and not much actual conversation. That’s how it felt to me outside of smaller subreddit, at least.
Yes this reflects many of my observations as well. I mostly lurked on the lager subs, and if I did post it would be on niche hobby, or the sub for my local area.