TL;DR:
Posting and voting is important, but with Active sort being the default across many instances, commenting is just as if not more important in helping surface various posts.
Although the instance I’m posting from hasn’t updated yet, I’ve taken a look through other instances of the new sort options, and I think they’re nice additions.
However, in doing so, and bouncing between different sorting options, I’ve noticed something pretty obvious but nonetheless worth recognizing imo. Since the default sort across many instances is Active, commenting feels like it has as much importance, if not maybe more, than voting alone.
You can find a number of posts here & there expressing some frustration at the state of content across Lemmy instances, and to a degree it’s not unfounded; yet what’s also helping surface much of the content exasperating others, and keeping it at the top, is much of the commenting to each of those posts. At least, under the Active sort setting, as that’s basically its intended purpose (that is, to display posts with active conversations, not uh…surface stuff exhausting to some people).
I realize we can get around this individually by changing the default for ourselves (I personally tend to keep mine set to New), but I think it’s worth considering from the outside looking in what kinds of posts we’re surfacing and keeping at the top with our conversations. Posting a bunch of varied stuff is one thing, but if you see a post that catches your interest, it might be worth not just upvoting and moving on, but adding a comment here and there to try and help others see it.
Well, so long as the Active sort setting remains the standard across instances anyway.
By now I imagine many may take this as a given already, but I thought it worth noting considering some of the frustrated posts, and that I haven’t really seen as much talk about the importance of commenting in relation to surfacing content under Active sort. That’s part of why I keep my sort set to New and try to chip in comments to different posts without comments in different communities that catch my interest, even if they’ve already seen several votes.
TL;DR:
Posting and voting is important, but with Active sort being the default across many instances, commenting is just as if not more important in helping surface various posts.
I should elaborate a little, while I think commenting is important under Active sort for helping surface posts, I also think it is being balanced out by the vote scores. For a post to be surfaced you’ll want it to be both valued (upvoted) and commented on, then if you’re hoping for it to remain visible for awhile, you’ll want to see fairly steady commenting (that’s part of why you can see posts from days ago lingering around under Active, I think).
I’ve not really noticed too many situations of flamebait style posts doing this, as I suspect they’re generally downvoted…Aside from the beating-a-dead-horse sort of posts that, despite receiving the usual, “Ugh this again” sort of comments, seem to otherwise be valued by some lurking voters.
What I’m more worried about are posts relating to news mainly. Where even if the immediate first level comments are fine, there are threads that get out of hand really quickly.
I agree that while posts inherently designed to be controversial may not benefit from Active considering the influences voting has (though me being on an instance that has downvotes disabled may be influencing my view here!), Active may make it significantly easier for an otherwise innocent post to devolve into a flame war.
The main excuse for this kind of algorithm seems to be around “promoting discussion”, but in my experience tech that’s intended to promote discussion does inherently promote flame wars too, as they’re extremely difficult if not impossible to distinguish without a human in the loop. I’ve attempted to write something about this on the microblogging side of the fedi, directly influenced by this post
Yeah, I can see where you’re coming from on this. Personally I’m not a fan of Active as the default, yet I also don’t know what might be preferable to others. With that being the case, I thought it might help to highlight some ways to work with it in the meantime, especially given the outside perspective.
For those here, I think it’s probably good to advise them to consider trying different sort methods till they find one that suits their preferences if they find themselves annoyed by the defaults, which has been happening for awhile already anyway.