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!

  • Recreational Placebos@midwest.social
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Skelectus@suppo.fi
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      1 year ago

      I think would be a good to expand upon the title a bit, especially if it doesn’t reflect the contents well.

    • GhostMagician@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • Owaissa@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Umbrias@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        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.