- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
An era of the internet is ending, and we’re watching it happen practically in real time. Twitter has been on a steep and seemingly inexorable decline for, well, years, but especially since Elon Musk bought the company last fall and made a mess of the place. Reddit has spent the last couple of months self-immolating in similar ways, alienating its developers and users and hoping it can survive by sticking its head in the sand until the battle’s over. (I thought for a while that Reddit would eventually be the last good place left, but… nope.) TikTok remains ascendent — and looks ever more likely to be banned in some meaningful way. Instagram has turned into an entertainment platform; nobody’s on Facebook anymore…
And the upvoting allowed good stuff from any topic to percolate up. I don’t know too much but the barriers between instances may mean some good content from lesser sources may not be seen or the supporters remain fragmented.
But the latter was also true of Reddit. Good information from smaller subreddits still remained unseen, because of upvoting.
Binary voting isn’t a perfect system, but so far it’s proven to work well enough.
If a better mechanism proves itself in the future I imagine Lemmy will adapt to it over time.