I quite value content from targetted instances, but most of the “general” instances seem to be memes, posts on boosting lemmy, memes, reddit, memes bot posts, memes, reddit, memes, discussion on lemmy mobile applications, memes reddit, memes, and people talking about how the lemmy changed their lives oh and memes.

I would browse hot on reddit as a way to see things outside my subscribed bubble but I have given up. The signal to noise ratio is terrible.

Is anyone else experiencing this? How are you discovering magazines?

  • Definitely. I posted this yesterday in a similar thread about clickbait content:

    This is one of the things that I’m struggling with right now as well. My reddit experience was heavily curated in favor of smaller subreddits, to the almost complete exclusion of top subreddits. The thing is, since Lemmy is so new, it hasn’t had the opportunity to build up a diverse array of specialized communities the same way. So basically right now all we have are mainly versions of the “big” Reddit communities, along with ones that decided to emigrate here from Reddit.

    But it turns out, content from “big” communities is often the same low-effort, lowest-common denominator stuff regardless which platform is hosting it. Memes, clickbait, and ragebait permeate the top results, because well shucks, that’s what people want to see and engage with, apparently.

    I’m hopeful that if/when Lemmy continues to grow, that it’ll become home to more active specialized communities. In the meanwhile, I’ve been trying to improve the experience as much as possible by A) trying to subscribe to more communities and B) slamming that block community button like I’m playing Hungry Hungry Hippos.

    I think it boils down to the fact that a smaller userbase is going to naturally gravitate towards lowest common denominator content because there isn’t enough critical mass to form niche communities yet. It’s low-hanging fruit to post an angry meme about Reddit, since people being angry about Reddit is why Lemmy/kbin suddenly have so many people. But of those, how many want to talk about inflatable kayaks or vintage calculators?

    As far as finding new communities, maybe this page will be helpful.

    • Yup. The niche restaurants and cool bookstores aren’t found in small towns. You gotta go where there are more people to find those. Online spaces are going to be similar.

      There are still a ton of tiny niche message boards, but for new social media sites, the bigger, the better, sadly.

    • I’m not sure that small communities are doomed to have lower quality content, but it definitely requires more moderation to prevent spam.

      People also need to be better conditioned. They treat content quantity as being more important than quality, which is essentially the opposite of what you want when it comes to high quality posting.

  •  amio   ( @amio@kbin.social ) 
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    I feel it’s mostly politics, which I really was not looking forward to - getting away from the fever pitch, very angry American politics constantly flooding Reddit was a welcome break for like five whole minutes, there.

    I try to block most obvious political shit, it just doesn’t help because there’s dozens and dozens of subs shovelling it out on the “front page”.

  • It’s the same for me. I’ve seen a few mentions of the feeds containing too much porn but I’ve not seen a single porn community/magazine or post, personally. I even checked my settings last time I saw it mentioned and I’ve not got anything set that should disable it (and I’ve seen one or two posts marked as “+18” so I know they can show in my feed).

    It’s not like I’m desperate to have porn in my feed - I’d rather keep my general browsing and porn separate, in fact - but I do find it odd that it doesn’t show for me at all while other people are complaining about how common it is.

    • I also noticed that and assumed it would be an issue but the only thing I’ve seen with “+18” that actually deserved it was some drone footage of some Russian soldiers in a trench who appeared to be giving/receiving a blowjob with cartoon Prigohzin pointing at it.

  • I would guess users who really want to participate, but having nothing to say. Memes are the easiest form of participation and everyone is unloading several years’ worth from their folder like nobody’s business.

    Same with the proliferation of news articles, though those at least have a much higher likelihood of engagement. I’m not a very tech-literate person, so I’m really stuck scrolling by a lot of those.

    The comments section can be depressing, and I sense I’m typically the only person responding to a lot of them at all. For a notably smaller userbase that should in theory carry more visibility, there’s some neat stuff that inevitably dies in new.

  • I’d love to block lemmy.world but keep communities am subbed to (whitelist|unblock)ed . Not just i don’t care much for memes , but there’s lot of shitty peops on there (racists|reply guys|.*)

  • Honestly, I just blocked all the big lemmy meme communities from All. Instant improvement.

    To find new communities I:

    • sort all by new

    • do searches of my interests

    • click on the profiles of people who make interesting comments and see where they post or mod

    • join communities like @MagHub

  • In the end it will be all about federating with the right communities and not about federating everyone anymore.

    A lot of people who are defending “federate everyone” do it in the name of “fear of missing” and want the numbers at all cost. They are borderline addict to infinite content, but they are a danger to quality posting. You cannot mass post AND care about the quality of what you post. It takes time to find a good article to post.

    Even here we will soon read about what Elon Musk had for breakfast and will post it in “tech”. Some people want content, whatever the quality of what they read, even the title is enough for them. And sadly the current vote system works in their favor.

    My guess is many of us will leave kbin for a more tight, content focused community. Also better tools will come up anyway.