Human Web CollectiveWhy you should stop unnecessarily making image posts on the fediverse
cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/58189605
What it looks like:
Here’s an example of such a post: https://sh.itjust.works/post/58082125
They uploaded an image and then included a URL as the body/text.
On Lemmy, it looks like an image post, with a small expando to the right of the title that you can click to show the body:
Why you should stop doing it:
- It makes high-quality posts look the same as low-quality ones.
I automatically downvote most image/meme submissions and posts with bad/non-descriptive titles for quality control. Linking directly to a source is how you make a high-quality submission. You can include screenshots or quotes in the body of the post.
I could start clicking the expando next to the title to check if a source was provided, but there’s going to be a user option to block image posts in the next lemmy update (v0.20), so that format is not good since lots of people will start to automatically block them.
You can put images in the body of the posts.
Why should anyone care?
Low-quality, easy-to-digest content will dominate and drown out everything else if no one does anything to limit it. It degrades the internet and our brains.
A blog that elaborates:
The Cargo Cult of The Ennui Engine https://medium.com/@max.p.schlienger/the-cargo-cult-of-the-ennui-engine-890c541cebcb
This reads more as preference to me than a pressing need for everyone to submit posts the exact same way. If it’s truly an issue for some communities they can implement link-only post rules, no image posts.
It reflects very poorly on the user base that this comment is the most upvoted one. It ignores the history of low-quality meme content and nearly all the arguments in the OP.
I don’t think you have the only, objective assessment of what a quality post is 🤷♂️
I didn’t address the arguments in the OP because they boil down to ‘this is my preference and you should do it because it’s my preference.’
If a bunch of lemmy users start blocking image posts (frankly a confusing decision on a platform that is image heavy, but whatever) and don’t see my posts, that’s their problem.
I never said I did. That’s a strawman.
Then it’s a little silly to keep harping on about how this will make sure there are more ‘quality posts’ if you don’t even define what that is or acknowledge that other people have different assessments, isn’t it?
You’re consistently making nonsensical or erroneous comments, so I think the issue is on your end.
Nobody else seemed to have trouble with it. What part didn’t make sense to you?
sounds like you’re just mad. try touching grass
Hello,
Can you edit your post and remove this part “unintelligent reponse” ? That’s a bit rude.
Thank you :)
I couldn’t think of a way to rephrase it so I asked a chatbot and they couldn’t come up with a valid alternative either.
Are you saying that no one participating on this sub is capable of making unintelligent remarks? Or that people can make as many unintelligent remarks as they like and no one is ever allowed to point it out?
Anyway, I tried really hard and rephrased it.
Well, the problem is that you attack people with this sentence and they told you a valid point that you may not agree.
i think you should take it slow, reread them. You may not agree with us, but you shouldn’t attack them by : “unintelligent, low..”
Take a point in our argumentation for example :
They didn’t. That’s the primary reason I criticized them. They didn’t address a single point in the OP. If someone lays out a bunch of arguments for something, and someone comes along and posts a simplistic dismissal without addressing any of the arguments, that’s unintelligent.
This seems completely nonsensical, and like it was written by someone illiterate, or at best by someone who speaks English very poorly. I looked to see if you were pharaphrasing something in another comment, I only see one thing similar, which I’ll reply to.
“Moderators should moderate their communities for quality” is a valid solution to the problem you outlined, and a valid line of discussion even if you disagree.
I consider instance level and user level image tools as secondary to good community moderation, for things that the mods miss, and I only follow communities that seem well run.
Not everyone are fluent to english, however we do our best. We come from various background. I don’t write well in english, i do lot typos and correct them over time.
So you shouldn’t judge us.
Let’s imagine you go to !forumlibre@jlai.lu. You want to share your amazing experience in the french city Strasbourg and write a beautiful post in french.
It is so badly written that there is this guy that tell you :
And that’s your behaviour.
I was paraphrasing the whole posts & comments you made because you didn’t develop your arguments and dismissed them all.
Let’s sum up how you answer to people :
Do you think you know better than us ?
Imo, you should stop and developp your thoughts. Your new reply is better because you tell me what i didn’t understand.
Not really, that’s just another normal reply as you shared your point of view. It may not be the reply you wanted to read but that’s a valid point of view.
In your example, it’s not a meme. For me, it’s screenshot of a newpaper article. There are pro and cons:
As for myself, i prefer text over pic/video because:
But i also like when there is a picture along text. The second example is a screenshot of a new browser for the fediverse. It showcases the browser’s ui.
This comment does not address any of the core arguments and thus seems largely unrelated/irrelevant.
I replied to the examples you chose in your arguments…
No, i disagree, picture can showcase different kind of informations that text aren’t able to explain.
futhermore, I explained that the screenshoot showcased a browser UI and the other one is, maybe a trick to escape copyrighted content detection. So…for me it doesn’t lower their qualities.
That’s not necessary true. It depends on the pics, and the text. There are some badly written text that could achieve the same result. It depends on lot factors.
That’s bad English, and thus difficult to decipher, so I have to assume what you’re trying to say.
The OP is referring to memes and other screenshots of text (often social media posts). Nearly all of these are low-quality content. The “solution” offered by the Lemmy devs to block that stuff is blocking image submissions. I noted in other comments that it’s a flawed solution, but it’s the option we have. Of course it’s correct that text submissions can be poor quality too, but overwhelmingly, it’s images that are the problem.
Images (and text) were included in the body of the post. It didn’t need to be submitted as an image post. I noted the future consequences of continuing to do that.
Yes, there are instances where images are useful. I agreed that blocking all images is not a perfect solution, but I haven’t seen anyone present a better one.
This seems to display a lack of understanding of what the OP discussed. Did you read the link at the end that expounds?
There’s a long history of low-quality meme content ruining reddit subs. It’s become the norm on reddit; turning it from it’s former higher-quality content to just another low-quality facebook-like site. And it’s extremely common on Lemmy too.
This is a personal opinion, and the reasonings are a bit ridiculous.
Disagree. For those using the browser, with link posts you have to click the link to see anything more than the thumbnail which navigates away from the page. The ability to expand in-place, and to see the full picture with the comments when visiting the post, is a better experience for the viewer if the whole purpose of the post is to share an image. And that’s before you consider that it might be an original image made by the poster.
That’s a really specific example that’s not really relevant at all.
But yes, blocking images is not a perfect solution to remove low-quality meme content, since there are some quality image submissions that will get caught in the net.
Content creators want people to visit the original. That’s more important.
I tend to feel the reverse. IME, high-quality links and original posts routinely underperform without the hook of a good image, and there’s no reason why you can’t provide a good title, as well.
An image can help sell / explain the concept, so I usually put some care in to choosing and sharing an appropriate image. That doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with low-effort, low-quality images and posts, which seem kind of self-explanatory.
Ok, keep doing that, but your posts are going to start getting blocked by people who don’t want to see low-quality content.
That sounds like you didn’t even read the OP.
I don’t think so, and I don’t do low-effort posts.
Most posts I make are handmade mini-articles about subjects I find interesting, and want to share about. Feel free to catch my post history if you’re confused about that.
That’s not what I said. You seem to be having some trouble understanding what’s being discussed.
You’re catering to people scrolling through Lemmy, looking at images. If you keep doing that, your posts are going to get automatically blocked by people who want to avoid meme content.
That’s not at all what I’m doing or saying, but you seem to have a fixation upon all that, so good luck to you.
If you browse the fediverse with inline images disabled, you will be unaffected by the addition of an image to a post.
That’s not correct. You seem to have not read the OP.
I have actually implemented this on my personal instance, I don’t know exactly how this will look on lemmy, but you can see what I’ve done here:
https://scrapetacular.ydns.eu/latest
What do you think of it? A post of the type that JohnnyEnzyme describes would look like a text post, with an image url in the list of links at the top.
I have also replaced inline images in comments with a link plus the alt text.
They do, you’re right. But I think that is something we should try to resist. We should encourage people to put back some values into ‘mere’ words. Not suggesting images are bad, bu they’re only one leg, the other being words. And it’s not just a personal feeling that words are being… neglected, for images.
The same with YT and TikTok: I see a lot of people that won’t read a book when asked to, they will watch someone talk about the book, making a summary and some comment about it. One can replace ‘book’ with any other type of content that require some reading. That video maybe excellent and fascinating in itself it still is not the actual book. Reading matters. Or it should.
The problem for me is woulda-coulda-shoulda. I’d love for human habits and human behavior to be tweaked and improved in certain ways, but reality is reality, sadly or not.
I always lead with a good image as a hook, then usually include a mini-article in the post. That is what typically gets the most votes and engagement. I say that as someone who’s created well over 300 posts across 2.5yrs on the Fediverse, and then a bunch of earlier ones on Reddit.
meaning there is no way trying? That’s not what I want to think. Because if that was so, there would be no way to try to correct what is not going fine, ever.
I don’t care much about votes. And I say that as someone who doesn’t post much put comment a lot more ;)
Meaning experimentation upon that kinda thing is what I’ve already done across many years and hundreds of posts. After awhile, I more or less settled in to what works best. YMMV, of course.
I care about them as a rough counter upon what various audiences like and don’t like, which has helped me a lot over the years.
Don’t tell me what to do.
People who do it won’t stop because that’s the way to get most upvotes. You’d have to stop people from upvoting them which isn’t feasible because they’re dumb. The only way to solve this is through moderation.
The defaults can make a difference. I implemented this feature on my personal instance, and now that image posts are hidden by default, I no longer interact with them consciously or subconsciously. The most engaging looking things on my front page are high effort posts that promote discussion like the OP. A LOT of people don’t change defaults, so it might change what gets engagement if Lemmy does it.
I also implemented this for comments, so if you drop a pepe.jpg as a response, you’ll have to use some words to get me to click on it.
I’m not sure that’s what OP wants.
The problem with images with text snippets is that they will dominate communities that allow mixed content, pushing quality stuff out of most commonly used views based on popularity metrics. At the moment I simply avoid places where that’s happening as I still like things like c/eurographicsnovels.
But yes, text content is much more likely to be unique and interesting.
So instances can set user defaults? If so, it would be nice if some instances started to set the defaults to block images. It should help with quality.
It’s a personal project, and a single user instance, so I can view the data however I want, here’s what the front page looks like with all inline images changed to links.
https://scrapetacular.ydns.eu/latest
I also ignore upvotes and downvotes on my instance as I don’t think they’re a good measure of quality.
The instance owner can change what is shown by default in the web UI for their users, but I think a lot of people use apps like Blorp, which will not be affected by this.
Blorp dev here. I’m not saying I will add this, but I would be open to investigating respecting the instance hide image setting within Blorp.
There’s a good chance of upsetting everybody here :)
Do you go with, the instance setting, the community setting, the user instance preference, the Blorp default or the user app setting.
If any PieFed users want to hide image and video posts from their feed, add this CSS to your ‘Additional CSS’ field in your settings: https://piefed.social/c/piefed_css/p/1973407/hide-image-and-video-posts-from-home-page