I was Reddit earlier and viewing one of question subs. The top 5 comments were all ‘jokes’.
What’s worse is no matter how unfunny the top jokes are you’ll get hundreds of cold comments flogging the joke to death.
The 6th top comment actually answered the question.
Lemmy may not have as much content but what is here is so much better quality.
What’s also nice is that due to the lower amount of users, when you do find these people who can never take anything seriously and just spam, blocking them instantly cleans up your comment sections all over the place.
I’m all for jokes, but they get to be too much. I’m so sick of reading a long “history” of something that ends with “Source: I made it all up”. Especially when it’s in an informational community. I’ve been somewhat liberal with my block usage and it has improved things greatly.
Also consider blocking people who mass post dozens of articles all at once but don’t comment. They tend to flood communities with posts that don’t get much response and are no better than the bot reposting accounts. Especially when they post the same link to 5 different communities and it’s all that shows in your feed.
The ability to curate our individual experiences here is fantastic!
As one example: in the main niche Reddit sub I visited there is someone who continually downvotes literally every single comment in any given random thread, no matter what the content. It is extremely obvious when that occurs, especially when there is a rather pronounced demarcation indicating the time that it stopped. Ironically it seems to be just one person! Probably someone who was banned and since lack of consent only excites them further, now is out to “make them pay”, including the randos who never visited the sub before in their lives and now just wanted to ask an innocent question, having nothing whatsoever to do with the mods or common contributors. Here, you can see exactly who downvotes you, and could block someone doing that.
Similarly one person started abusing the report button on practically every comment I made, tagging my name 9 times in a message before I blocked them, so with that avenue to try to hurt me disabled they sought out other means. Here, again I think such reports are public.
Having to put your name to something rather than allowing it to be anonymous may cause someone to pause before jumping immediately to abusive behaviors. Sadly their parents never taught them how to behave, but at least we have better tools here to curate our receipt of what the platform delivers to us from these would-be abusers, making it much more enjoyable IMHO. I don’t think I’d like this place if it became more like YouTube or 4chan, even if some people seem to think the opposite (except those places already exist practically everywhere, even X nowadays, so like… go there if you enjoy it so much, but I’d like at least one place that is NOT that way, somewhere/somehow!?). And Lemmy/Kbin is that place!:-)
Wait, you can block and unblock individual posters and/or comments?
I did not know that, I must have not been fiddling with it enough!