this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2024
76 points (92.2% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35805 readers
1460 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] ContrarianTrail@lemm.ee 36 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (4 children)

I dislike that Lemmy is such a left-wing echo chamber. Reddit had a much wider variety of opinions being voiced openly; on Lemmy, there’s almost none. It doesn’t take long to figure out what’s acceptable to say here and what isn’t. It’s a kind of self-gaslighting because it can make you feel like the opinions of the average Lemmy user represent the wider population when that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Also, there are almost no blue-collar workers here, and most discussions revolve around office jobs and big city life.

EDIT: and the extreme levels of cynicism.

[–] Kyouki@lemmy.world 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Personally don't like the constant echoing of political positions or takes but that's in my experience equal on both platforms.

I cba. The thing I like more on Lemmy is slight more civilly discussions or what's being shared.

Just hate how its always have to be polarized to what side you lean on ot emphasis on.

Defaulting on the American aspect of things as well.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (3 replies)
[–] RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world 27 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

I like the way Lemmy functions, with things like an open moderator log and the way that instances can be created to prevent too much control from one singular instance from pushing people completely off the platform if they have bad moderation, for example.

I don't like the users. For every one user that is nice and wants to have a legitimate conversation, there are like 300 that just want to fight/argue or spew politics into a non-political conversation. The number of users I have blocked on Lemmy is far longer than the amount of users I ever blocked on Reddit, and my Reddit account existed for about 10 years. This Lemmy account has only been around for about 1/10th of that.

One of the biggest strengths of Lemmy is also one of its biggest curses. Due to its federated nature, anyone can create a new instance. The problem with this is that particularly nasty users can keep creating accounts on instances they keep creating in order to harass people they don't like. So even if you block them, they just switch to a new account, etc. They can also do this for vote manipulation, not like that really matters on Lemmy but Lemmy users seem to have fallen victim to the same problem Redditors had: seeing a comment with 0 or -1 score and then completely disregarding whatever it said, not reading it and downvoting it automatically.

[–] sho@ani.social 8 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

"I like the way Lemmy functions, with things like an open moderator log and the way that instances can be created to prevent too much control from one singular instance from pushing people completely off the platform if they have bad moderation, for example."

Oh yeah that seems an excellent way to keep a power balance between users and moderation. Hadn't used reddit all that much, but heard of the nightmarish moderation abuse.

"I don’t like the users. For every one user that is nice and wants to have a legitimate conversation, there are like 300 that just want to fight/argue or spew politics into a non-political conversation."

Sadly is a big issue with many platforms where politics is used for excuse to mental flex, invalidate, clout motives, and flat out bully. So i try to avoid politics or deflect and avoid people who just looking to argue for the sake of argueing to assert dominance. Too many headaches online deal with.

"The number of users I have blocked on Lemmy is far longer than the amount of users I ever blocked on Reddit, and my Reddit account existed for about 10 years."

I might do the same tbh, i can see there are quite a bit of users needing filtered out on lemmy. Can also see some get angry knowing that people would rather just block em' and not engage with them because then they can't fuel their clout driven ego 🙂

"The problem with this is that particularly nasty users can keep creating accounts on instances they keep creating in order to harass people they don’t like. So even if you block them, they just switch to a new account, etc."

Perhaps this could be resolved by implementing a user follow list and making it so users can only be interacted with if the user approves the follower who is trying to follow em'

"They can also do this for vote manipulation, not like that really matters on Lemmy but Lemmy users seem to have fallen victim to the same problem Redditors had: seeing a comment with 0 or -1 score and then completely disregarding whatever it said, not reading it and downvoting it automatically."

Imo i think lemmy could just do away with a voting system, it would reduce cognitive bias by not giving them a sense of popularity contest to determine if it's worth reading a user's post or comment. People should judge for themselves rather than having others do it for them.

You seem a a reasonably decent person btw.

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 4 points 2 weeks ago

The problem with no voting system whatsoever is that content then surfaces by recency and/or replies, so people generate a lot of noise to make stuff they agree more visible.

That said the current system is by no means perfect, and I agree with you that people should judge content by themselves.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] Tedesche@lemmy.world 21 points 2 weeks ago (9 children)

I like the relatively sane moderation compared to Reddit.

I dislike the heavy far-left/communist presence here. I’m a lefty myself, but a lot of people here are extremists in my opinion, little better than the far right.

load more comments (9 replies)
[–] i_dont_want_to@lemmy.blahaj.zone 18 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Like

Editable titles

"All" here vs other social media is much better

It's more likely that arguments are civil. There are still quite a few venomous arguments but I've noticed that it it proportionally less.

On Reddit or Facebook, if you didn't like a group you left and made your own. If you didn't like the admins, tough shit. Here, if you don't like the admins, you can use a different instance.

Likes and dislikes are separate, and are in some cases viewable who submit them. I feel like this keeps people a little more honest.

I like the modlog and transparency. It's so much easier that when someone complains about unfair mod action, to see if they are in the right or exaggerating.

There is an "end" to Lemmy. There isn't just infinite content to scroll through.

Dislike

Smaller user base means that niches that Reddit filled just aren't here.

There is an "end" to Lemmy. There isn't just infinite content to scroll through.

Neutral

The types of common negative personalities here are different from that of Reddit. Reddit has more misogyny, classism, antinatalists, and obnoxious atheists. (As opposed to the chill atheists.) Lemmy has quite a few people that are pretty shitty to those that are disabled or cannot get out of some situations. If you cannot work towards the greater good without any rest, can't escape a bad situation, or can't just extend yourself further, you are trash. There are also more fringe beliefs here. I do like it because of the different perspectives, even if I very strongly disagree. (It makes me think!) Unfortunately we still have the dumbass arguments about generations but you can't have it all.

[–] bamfic@lemmy.world 10 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Like: Long-ass posts. Mastodon has a ridiculous character limit; lemmy doesn't seem to have any. Dislike: Long-ass posts. Jesus people, the rants and drawn-out arguments.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] Randomgal@lemmy.ca 16 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

The 14 year olds with "big brain" takes.

[–] Potatisen@lemmy.world 11 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] wesker@lemmy.sdf.org 15 points 2 weeks ago

All the trolls.

[–] Lauchs@lemmy.world 14 points 2 weeks ago

The people. For both.

[–] dinckelman@lemmy.world 13 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

I genuinely cannot express how much it annoys me that I cannot have a blocklist for keywords.

Most of the things I read are from my subscribed communities, which i'm very happy about generally, however given the overall state of life today, half of the posts in completely unrelated communities end up being one of the following:

  • Twitter CEO
  • Hate speech in US politics
  • AI propaganda for some pump and dump quick money

I really just don't want to see any of those things

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] Zonetrooper@lemmy.world 13 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

Like:

  • It has that small-community feel still. I don't see (perhaps because I stay out of a lot of the more tech-ey communities?) the kind of farming, low-effort, generally mediocre content I saw on Reddit.
  • Lack of the sense of a hyper-corporatized, "You're only allowed to do things that make us money" sense that's enshittified much of the internet lately. I'm not even sure if Lemmy can be monetized.

Dislike:

  • Not yet large enough either. I don't want hundreds of millions of users, but I still miss a lot of the more niche hobby/discussion communities I used to be able to participate in. Even communities for fairly large hobbies or interests can be dead on Lemmy.
  • The awful political takes. Everything from typical dumbness up to advocating violence (but it's okay because it's my point). And it's everywhere.
load more comments (2 replies)
[–] Hawke@lemmy.world 12 points 2 weeks ago (7 children)

Like: decentralization and a renaissance of the old- school dream of what the Internet should be.

Dislike: media bias fact checker bot spamming every damn post. Power tripping mods.

[–] sho@ani.social 4 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Might i ask which mods you feel are power tripping? You don't have to answer if you don't want, no pressure.

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (6 replies)
[–] PlzGivHugs@sh.itjust.works 11 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (4 children)

Like:

  • Decentralized system that limits abuse

  • Great customizaion

  • It works (unlike much of the competition)

Dislike:

  • Lack of even remotely niche content (aside from Linux and infosec content)

  • Generally very pessimistic userbase

  • Lacks polish and features in many areas

  • Currently trends towards extremist echo chambers - the fact that .ml (an instance known for banning criticism of violent, racist, authoritarian governments) is one of the biggest instances, is a good example of this.

  • tends to be extremely hostile to any sort of monitization, regardless of the quality or cost to produce content

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] Fleppensteijn@feddit.nl 11 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

It takes some time to block out stuff to make Lemmy usable. So much anime, bots and dumb American politics.

It's nice there are a bunch of apps for Lemmy, but using it without an app is not very welcoming. It needs a lot of improvement (e.g. manually compose urls to subscribe to communities on other servers).

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 10 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

The userbase is overall more mature and can actually discuss complex topics. Different instances have completely different feels, vibes, cultures and userbases, and that's amazing. Some admin teams are spez wannabees but the federated structure limits the damage that they can cause.

Relative lack of niche communities. Witch hunting is becoming a worse problem here than in Reddit.

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] xigoi@lemmy.sdf.org 10 points 2 weeks ago

Dislike: every post inevitably has someone complaining about capitalism, Trump, police, Musk, …

[–] Noodle07@lemmy.world 10 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

I wish I could filter communities by language.

Also one thing I like is the open war we have with memes with censured bad words for fucking fuck's sake

[–] donuts@lemmy.world 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I think the problem is that people think the memes are created by the person uploading, as if they chose to censor it.

Someone is just sharing a funny they saw on Instagram, there's not much more to it.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] frostysauce@lemmy.world 9 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)
[–] sho@ani.social 4 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

Been wondering... what is a tankie?

[–] Hawke@lemmy.world 7 points 2 weeks ago

Authoritarian communists, especially those not native to such a state.

Currently it’s mainly the folks who believe China in particular can do no wrong. Historically it refers to supporters of the USSR in Britain

Specifically, it was used to distinguish [CPGB] party members who spoke out in defense of the Soviet use of tanks to suppress the Hungarian Revolution of 1956and the 1968 Prague Spring, or who more broadly adhered to pro-Soviet positions.

More recently it’s applied online especially to people who are knee-jerk anti-capitalist or anti-US, “if the US/‘west’/capitalism is wrong then anyone who opposes them must be right”

More generally, a tankie is someone who tends to support "militant opposition to capitalism", and a more modern online variation, which means "something like 'a self-proclaimed communist who indulges in conspiracy theories and whose rhetoric is largely performative.'"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] darkan15@lemmy.world 9 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Dislike: there is still no way to group communities into sub feeds, apart from subs, local, all. (and the work around some do of having multiple accounts seems silly to me)

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] Rentlar@lemmy.ca 8 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

Likes: the small community, traditional forum vibe. No ads, no oppressive corporate hand to keep things advertiser-friendly. Interests and views tend to align, but I can have a healthy disagreement on many issues with most users here. Only a few famous borderline trollish users that aren't fun to chat with, most overt trolls are quickly dealt with.

Dislikes: heavy use of downvoting simply unpopular opinions (a mild annoyance). Difficult to pick between posting in a rarely active niche community and a very active but general community (sometimes I just crosspost). The threat of centralization, with Lemmy.world and Lemmy.ml having by far the largest communities (I would like to see more active communities spread across sites, though I make an effort sometimes to comment on different servers). Some big features I'd like to see that still seem far from implementation, such as multi-communities.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] LavenderDay3544@lemmy.world 8 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Like: It's not Reddit.

Dislike: The userbase is too small and there are way too many circlejerks in some communities and you get bashed to hell if you dare to disagree with them.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Decentrilization is both a blessing and a curse.

If there's an issue you can make your own community with blackjack, and hookers.

But at the same time these communities never seem to get super big (minus a few) and if you're subscribed to both there's not a good way to deduplicate the posts. So 5 communities post the same thing (or one person posts them in 5) sometimes you see all 5 side by side.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] bpt11@sh.itjust.works 8 points 2 weeks ago

I have loved my time with Lemmy so far. I feel like people are much kinder here compared to Reddit, it feels like a genuine community of people that are willing and able to help one another out and chat and talk, without the people of Reddit that just bully and make fun of for no good reason other than just because. I think that’s the biggest reason I prefer lemmy over Reddit, along with the benefits of being decentralized and federated.

But I miss the near infinitely larger user base on Reddit and the things that come with that. On Reddit I can find a community for pretty much anything I can imagine. I’ve always loved using Reddit as a tool to help me learn, because regardless of what it is I’m learning I can find somewhere that I can ask any question I could think of, and 9/10 times someone out there out of the millions of Reddit users can give me a decent competent answer. That’s my favorite part about Reddit. That is, if they don’t just call me stupid and tell me I’m an idiot or something like that.

But I feel hopeful that Lemmy can get to a similar point some day.

[–] Mwa@lemm.ee 7 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

What I like: flexibility for clients,nice people,etc.
What I dislike: not every community is here and some of the communism here as well as finding a instance you want is not the easiest

[–] scarabic@lemmy.world 7 points 2 weeks ago

I like that Lemmy doesn’t have stupid levels of auto-moderation happening. And I like that threads don’t constantly get locked merely because people are engaging with them.

[–] spittingimage@lemmy.world 7 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Some people here take themselves way too seriously. Not every conversation needs to be an argument.

[–] original_reader@lemm.ee 7 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Well, I completely disagree! Taking things seriously is the only way to have meaningful conversations. If we don’t challenge each other’s views, how will we ever grow and learn? We need the "battleground of ideas"!

/s

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] GrymEdm@lemmy.world 7 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I like that it's moderated fairly lightly but reasonably. Often I can have an actual discussion with someone who doesn't agree with me without either of us getting banned by a mod who likes one side or the other. From what I see generally a user needs to be very obviously abusive/racist/violent before a mod steps in, even if the content is controversial.

I dislike that I've needed to heavily restrict my use for my mental health until after the election. A lot of people (not all by any means) believe it's ok to bully and abuse other users because their cause is righteous - it's already shown up in this thread. E.g. the daily posts and comments, with a lot of upvotes/support, that label anyone who disagrees with or criticizes Kamala (used to be Biden)/Democrats a bot, idiot, worse than useless, foreign agent and so on. I'm not talking about downvoting which is just expressing disagreement - I'm talking about outright insults and upvoting those. The attitude of "vote with/support me or else" has no place in a democracy founded on free voting without persecution, even if the bully is sure they're right. If I didn't mention it, perhaps even though I have, we might see a version of "but it is actually ok this time" and reasons why. It's happened before.

Guess what? Very few "policy bullies" think they are evil - they're positive it's justified. Christians demand abortion bans, Muslim deportation, religion in schools/government and so on because they truly believe they are saving eternal souls. I was raised in that environment. That a sizable amount of Lemmy users believe it's correct/admirable to insult others into "proper" behavior makes them very similar in character to those religious extremists IMO. Apparently when the issue is really important abuse is ok.

I'll end by saying Gaza/Palestine is incredibly important to me - I am legitimately very upset frequently by the stories and media. However, Bernie Sanders convinced me to support Biden and then Kamala. Bernie laid out his argument with logic and facts and did not once insult my position. I also doubt the aggressive posts/comments are winning over undecideds. "I wasn't sure if I should vote Democrat until I was called a harmful idiot and had my concerns dismissed as being in bad faith".

[–] henfredemars@infosec.pub 6 points 2 weeks ago

I think it’s the best at what it does. That problem space doesn’t have a lot of good options.

[–] nutsack@lemmy.world 6 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)
[–] Hawke@lemmy.world 6 points 2 weeks ago (5 children)

Lemmynsfw does pretty well. It’s a shame that the main instances don’t federate with the porn instances, but it does nicely prevent either from overwhelming the other.

load more comments (5 replies)
[–] NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.world 6 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

The mods: self-important, dense, and often pushing their own agendas.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] Sundial@lemm.ee 6 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

The assholes who pretend to argue in good faith but just spout stupid bullshit.

Oh, and the idiots who block everyone they don't like.

[–] adespoton@lemmy.ca 14 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)
[–] Sundial@lemm.ee 7 points 2 weeks ago

Lol, you got me for a minute.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] edgemaster72@lemmy.world 5 points 2 weeks ago

Like: pretty much everything

Dislike: wish there was more activity in the D&D comms

[–] gwen@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

like: people are nicer here!! it also still has the old forum/chatroom vibe, and if the admins suck on an instance you can just. join another. and still subscribe to communities from the old instance. modlog is also pretty cool, allows for transparency between mods and users. i also cant doomscroll because like the other person said, there's an 'end' to it.

as well as editable titles lmfao

dislike: niche communities are hard to find, and the ones that do exist are usually empty. also some of instances' ui/css is extremely fugly and i physically cannot use it (why i left the fediverse before) (also the nice css was one of my reasons for joining dbzer0). also the tankies, but at least they're contained within hexbear, .ml and lemmygrad.

[–] CurlyWurlies4All@slrpnk.net 4 points 2 weeks ago

I've got no problem with the communists. I like having a part of the internet that isn't completely commoditised and filled with ads and people trying to sell side hustles. I hate the search function.

load more comments
view more: next ›