Due to the large number of reports we’ve received about recent posts, we’ve added Rule 7 stating “No low-effort posts. This is subjective and will largely be determined by the community member reports.”
In general, we allow a post’s fate to be determined by the amount of downvotes it receives. Sometimes, a post is so offensive to the community that removal seems appropriate. This new rule now allows such action to be taken.
We expect to fine-tune this approach as time goes on. Your patience is appreciated.
I’ve seen slightly offtopic posts deleted here, even after some interesting conversation in the comments. I think Lemmy is small, and it could help the platform if conversations and posts are preserved even if they are not 100% on topic. But I respect the work of mods, it’s their decision how they run a community, even if I don’t agree with them all time.
But just as a backup, if things take an unexpected turn, here are some similar, but much less active communities:
This is also to the “low effort” posters, if you disagree with your post’s removal you can post it to other similar communities.
Would you agree that a post written by a LLM is “low effort”?
This is fine if the post is something insanely low effort.
But I do worry if this ends up being too aggressive.
One of the things that made reddit so awful is how over moderated it was.
I don’t really take issue with dozens of posts by newbies asking the same basic question over and over. I used to be one and am occasionally back there again if I start a new hobby. Hopefully newcomers don’t get pushed off by overly sensitive moderation.
It would be helpful if you could provide a hypothetical example of what is considered a “low effort” post.
I couldn’t agree more, I join selfhosting communities all over and not just because I need more stuff to host, because of the community. I love getting to read through the questions and answers, even when they are questions that could be answered by just reading the man page… Maybe it just reminds me of the good old days as I’m getting older and remember asking a lot of similar questions.
Lemmy started off over moderated and has only gotten worse. Moderation here is honestly worse than Reddit already, since we can see the ridiculous comment removals and bans and their reasons.
The tension here is real: you want community members to self-moderate through votes, but voting only works if enough people see a post. Low-effort posts can gain traction through novelty before the quality-conscious members even notice.
The “subjective” part is honest, at least. That beats pretending there’s an objective standard. Good moderation is: here’s what we’re optimizing for (substantive technical discussion), here’s when we’ll step in (when the voting isn’t working), here’s how we’ll explain decisions.
One thing that helps: if mods explain why a post is being removed, it teaches the community what you’re optimizing for. Just removing things silently trains people to be resentful, not better-behaved.
This is a tough one. “Low effort” is where engagement metrics start dictating what kind of discourse we get. I think the real metric should be whether someone read what came before and actually responded to it.
We built a project trying to measure public opinion through thoughtful email replies instead of hot takes and quick reactions. The pattern I see is that most “engagement” is people pasting headlines, quoting selectively, or dropping one-liners. The good stuff happens when people actually wrestle with an idea.
Moderation works best when it focuses on whether a contribution adds new information or perspective. A short comment can be high effort if it synthesizes well. A long ramble is low effort if it adds nothing.
I think redundancy is an important factor here as well. That was an issue I saw frequently on subreddits and a primary reason for me disengaging from those communities.
You would see the same low effort question posed with other users responding with high effort/detail (albeit redundant) answers. Regardless how well constructed the feedback might be, that response is dragged down by the lack of effort inherent overall to the post.
If nothing else except for the sake of space saving, a large percentage of those posts could have been nuked with no real impact to how readily the subjects/solutions could be found.
Why? Why would you remove a post that some people deem “low effort”? People can just ignore the posts if they think it’s low effort.
More censorship and gate keeping has never been an good option.
Because it’s clutter and annoying to see “Heyyy, is jellyfin a good video app?” ad nauseam, when a simple search would answer their question faster and without wasting everyone’s time and energy.
Modlogs are visible, if there’s truly a censorship issue then we’re free to upsticks and move to another community. That’s the advantage of the Fediverse.
Does this include Youtube videos? Or at least Youtube videos without a clear description and summary?
Those constant ad money farming posts really lower the quality of this sub.
If the quality of the video is good, I like to see it here.
