With a fresh new start we have the power to enforce some unspoken etiquettes on the site in the hopes of a better platform than Reddit.
One great feature I see no one talking about is that we can write our own text when posting links, which is extremely useful for communities that mostly link articles. A lot of the political and tech related articles are mostly fluff, filled with jargon and clickbait only to have a one line news at the end of it all.
We should try to make it a habit to write the main point(s) that the article is making to avoid misinformation and ragebait titles. Ideally, a post without any text backing the article would become a red flag that it’s posted by some bot or mass spammer, and would not be floated to the front page.
Interested to hear what the rest of the Lemmy community thinks!
Based on some other link posts I’ve seen on Beehaw, I’d thought this was already the expectation. 🤭
Good thing to point out and intentionally encourage, regardless.
I think that instead, quotes from the article itself should be posted as the text. Leave any further editorializing to a comment.
This will encourage engaging with the actual content of the article, rather than just making some extremely biased, misinformed, or otherwise improper, tldr, and gives a better opportunity for interacting with the editorializing directly via comments.
Yep, I believe there was a bot for reddit that used to do something similar. If we could put that on a website or something so you could just paste the url and get the relevant quotes that would be perfect and make it easier for the poster (and they can always custom pick quotes if they want).
I really think we should push for people to read the actual article themselves, rather than encouraging or enabling the intellectual laziness that plagues social media. We’re better than that.
I think would be a good to expand upon the title a bit, especially if it doesn’t reflect the contents well.
Ideally yes, but we know that behavior probably won’t change :)
Realistically, no.
I would agree that encouraging reading is better but too many articles are behind paywalls and/or poorly written without substance. I find tldr helps me to assess whether there is likely to be anything behind the fluff and am grateful to those who post them.
The article text itself should be quoted, rather than a tldr. Leaving that to the comments means there’s a better separation of editorializing and people can choose to interact with the article in different ways.
Trends will point to people not being better when it comes to actually having to open external links, so next best thing is copy pasting the article or a screen shot to try and find alternatives as opposed to hoping they’ll be better. They won’t haha.
Instead I’ll start pedantic arguments based only on the title of the posts.
The risk is that the TLDR could be editorialized. The summary that Lemmy automatically inserts from the website should be enough for this purpose.
Nice point, I’ll update my recent post in this community to include a tldr
That’s great to hear!
While I agree, lemmy seems to generate a short description of the linked URL by itself which is already very useful.
This would work especially well for sites that choose to use clickbaity headlines like “Is this the year of Linux on the desktop?”. On reddit that would inevitably end up with lots of “No” posts from people who hadn’t even thought of clicking on the link.
It’s nice to see you worrying about how to combat the spammers already too 😀
It’d be great to stop clickbait in it’s tracks here. I love the auto title, a great feature would be an “Auto description”, similar to the autotldr bot we had on Reddit. Would automatically fill out the description based on the relevant points
I’m failing to see how this is really any different from either Twitter or Reddit, where you would be expected to post some relevant information along with a URL
One great feature I see no one talking about is that we can write our own text when posting links
Since I’m new here (fleeing from reddit), I’m not sure what precisely you mean in technical terms. How to use that feature? Or is it just that we can add text along the link, unrelated to any syntax?
We should try to make it a habit to write the main point(s) that the article is making to avoid misinformation and ragebait titles. Ideally, a post without any text backing the article would become a red flag that it’s posted by some bot or mass spammer, and would not be floated to the front page.
Yes, I consider this best practice.
I always liked Metafilter’s “Front Page Post” where the text body included many more links and information about the subject. (I have linked here to what I consider a particularly well done example)
I think there’s some quality writers out there and some people doing really good research (and I’m not just talking about DD in /r/Superstonk), and having additional information is of great service to deeper discussion. Otherwise half of the discussion can be unknowingly a retread of very well-worn ideas. That’s less likely to happen the more information is added.
I like the idea of a TL;DR at the beginning of a post, but I also like the idea of additional links and information “below the jump” as the beanplaters at MeFi say. This allows the best of both worlds, a quick rundown as well as more information for those who wish to view it.
MetaFilter is the best of the best, I adore that website.
This might be really useful for communities that require submission statements with linked articles. It would be harder to forget to add one as a comment, and moderating the requirement should be easier with submission statements in the post itself, as well as making it easier for readers to see it (in plenty of subreddits the submission statement gets pushed down so if they don’t have an automod comment pinned with a copy of the comment you have to go searching for it)
