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!
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.
Instead I’ll start pedantic arguments based only on the title of the posts.
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.
Ideally yes, but we know that behavior probably won’t change :)
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.
While I agree, lemmy seems to generate a short description of the linked URL by itself which is already very useful.
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’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
The risk is that the TLDR could be editorialized. The summary that Lemmy automatically inserts from the website should be enough for this purpose.
