Psychology

Posts with heated arguments (detected as having more than a certain number of comments/replies per minute), get shown to fewer people.

we had healthy social media once upon a time, they all died because people prioritize their addictions over utility.

I guess the answer depends on the social media format, right? I think the old school PhpBB forums were peak for interacting with random people online (at least for me). An issue I've always had with things like Reddit and things similar to that is that there's no Avatar and signature to identify people in a conversation. And the forums that I was a part of, a moderator would always pop in to tell people to take it to PMs if there was too much back and forth conversation (or arguments) between 2 people if it got too heated, too personal, and started diverging too much from the main topic.

So, as far as "healthy" goes, I think my opinion is that communities should be more personal and much smaller. Lemmy definitely feels better to reddit and that's likely just due to the size difference and the fact that more of a percentage of us are real people and aren't part of some marketing campaign or karma farming bots. That way, there's more of a sense of community and people can remember your name from past posts/comments. If your "home" on the internet is slow and small, you won't feel the need to scroll endlessly since you can catch up to content.

As far as format goes, I like the idea of a feed (no text limit) where you can see generally what people are up to recently, but there's also topics people can follow that function more like forums. So then the question becomes should communities have artificially limited user counts and see everything (like Path was)? Or should there be a friends list so you only see things your friends are saying and the comments to those posts like facebook? I'm leaning towards artificially limited user counts since it guarantees a small and slow internet "home". And it's gotta be web based, unlike Discord communities.

So let me preface this by saying I understand all of the privacy and other reasons why the below would be a very bad idea, but I think it might help:

Make everyone use their real names. I already pretend that everyone knows who I am online and sees all my comments, I strive to treat all of my online interactions as if I was talking to someone in real life. If it’s something rude or something I don’t have the guts to say to a person’s face, or something I don’t want shared to everyone I know, then I don’t post it.

Edit to add after theotherben’s comment below: I definitely understand how this could be dangerous to many people and I don’t think it’s feasible. My main idea is just try to ask yourself whether you would say what you want to post or comment, to someone in person. But you guys are right, too many people ARE jerks in real life so that wouldn’t change. Idk, I mask a ton in real life and don’t use social media outside of Lemmy so I’m probably the wrong person to even think about this.