I tried out a couple of other Reddit replacements a few years ago before Lemmy took off, and I really enjoyed the few that had separate votes for “funny” and “insightful/contributes to discussion/whatev”.
Yeah it made voting a bit clunkier, but it did a good job of differentiating between two very different ways of positively contributing to a discussion.
It also got people thinking in a different direction than “I agree with this” and “I disagree with this” as the main meaning of the vote.
At this point, I think most mainstream social media is corrupted enough by the dopamine loop that it’s fairly predictable that most of the comments would be taken over by it as well. Reddit comments used to be more informative than the article a lot of the time.
I tried out a couple of other Reddit replacements a few years ago before Lemmy took off, and I really enjoyed the few that had separate votes for “funny” and “insightful/contributes to discussion/whatev”.
Yeah it made voting a bit clunkier, but it did a good job of differentiating between two very different ways of positively contributing to a discussion.
It also got people thinking in a different direction than “I agree with this” and “I disagree with this” as the main meaning of the vote.
At this point, I think most mainstream social media is corrupted enough by the dopamine loop that it’s fairly predictable that most of the comments would be taken over by it as well. Reddit comments used to be more informative than the article a lot of the time.