I’m curious what, if any, guidelines people self-impose to try and engage in a productive way online (both on Lemmy and elsewhere). “Netiquette” if you will.

A couple of rules that I think are good practices, but still see too often, are:

  • don’t pile onto the most downvoted comment. Kinda like don’t feed the trolls, but it’s more about not letting yourself get rage baited. Instead, downvote them and move on.
  • don’t give a non-answer to someone’s question. Ex. if someone asks how to do X, don’t answer with, “Why are you trying to do X? You shouldn’t want to do X. Do Y instead.” Instead, explain what it would take to do X, and then offer Y as a possible alternative and why it may be a better option. But assume they already know about Y, and it doesn’t fit their use-case.

For that last one, finding a thread where someone has asked the exact question you want answered, only to find a thread full of upvoted non-answers is up there with the dreaded “nvm, I figured it out - 10y ago”.

  • teawrecksOP
    2·
    18 hours ago

    Well…there was a time when that was true. Now we’ve got a mostly dead internet. But yeah, if you’re going to bother engaging because you believe they’re real, then treat them like a person.

      • teawrecksOP
        2·
        14 hours ago

        I think Lemmy has the capacity to have even more bots, because moderation is so inconsistent and underfunded. The big sites have the resources to fight bots, but ironically have an incentive to embrace them because it reflects well on DAU. IMO the only thing keeping bots off lemmy is a lack of ROI. Great, you spent how much to influence the views of a minuscule userbase in the corner of the internet no one goes to?

        Still, it does feel sometimes like our share of braindead group think is higher than it should be…