It struck me recently that as the quality of content on the internet has arguably gone to shit, in the form of increasingly frequent ads plastered everywhere, paywalls or superficial/dumb blog posts or mainstream media articles, the basic idea of a link aggregator platform can naturally lose its quality, or struggle to maintain a level of quality, and so lose its appeal.

I think I can see this on lemmy (which is my favourite fediverse platform) to some extent and have probably noticed it on somewhere like hackernews to an extent too. I see a link that has an interesting/important sounding title on an interesting/important topic, then click the link and see an article or web page that maybe is just not worth my time.

I’d be curious how many people upvote a link here without reading the cited article/page?

All of which is sad and speaks to general problems with media today, with AI garbage, of course, probably about to make it worse. But regarding the fediverse and lemmy, I think it maybe raises interesting questions.

Obviously the idea of a link aggregator is to seek out and share “the good stuff”. But maybe talking about where that generally comes from needs to be a more prominent and open question? Or maybe I need to subscribe to fewer news communities? More ambitiously though, maybe, at least over time, it will get more important or valuable to lean into the forum-like or even blog-like aspect of lemmy where it’s increasingly all about the “OC” here, especially as engaging with actual humans with actual personal thoughts gets more and more valuable over time? Could private, maybe even invite-only communities even be of value here?

Thoughts?

    • Izzy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      1 year ago

      I’ve never really heard of this concept as I come skipped straight here from forums 15 years ago. People wrote posts about things they were interested in and people discussed it. Very rarely did someone simply post a link to another website with no comments of their own. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

      • maegul (he/they)OPEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Very rarely did someone simply post a link to another website with no comments of their own. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

        Yea I’m with you on that. I can imagine a community/instance setting that prevents.

    • maegul (he/they)OPEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      I think that’s a superficial take. For instance, elsewhere in the documentation it says Lemmy can also function as a blogging platform. ... (see here). Moreover, at the beginning of the documentation it says Lemmy is a selfhosted, federated social link aggregation and **discussion forum**. (see here).

      Not that the documentation defines what is possible on the platform … its features do.

      Beyond that “link aggregator” is a generic term for reddit-like platform, and can often implicitly include all of the interactions that don’t include linking to external sources.

      • SheeEttin@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        Sure, but it’s inspired by reddit, where link posts are first-class features. You could always create an instance that doesn’t allow link posts. I don’t think you can create a community and disable them like you could on reddit.

    • kopper [they/them]@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      To be fair join-lemmy also advertises the software as “blazing fast” with “powerful mod tools” and if there are two phrases I’d associate with Lemmy those aren’t it.

      (OK compared to Mastodon Lemmy is blazing fast, but that’s cheating considering of how slow Mastodon is)

      • SheeEttin@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        It can be fast, on small instances. I’m on lemmy.world where it is often slow, or even complete unresponsive, due to its size (both in terms of data and as a target for attacks).

        But the mod tools definitely suck.