Don’t be a vote connoisseur here please. Redefine how you think about voting and participating.

Do you miss your communities from elsewhere. Well guess what, you are that core community now. If you want it back, the only thing holding you back is you. Don’t wait on someone else to start posting. You don’t need to worry about the perfect polished quality of your content or if it has been done before elsewhere. The current bar is, umm, poorly defined. No one is judging you. Call it practice. EVERY time you see something interesting, get in the habit of posting it please. Maybe go out of your way to grab a reference or two and post them.

Along these lines, think of how unsure and uncomfortable this may seem to most of us former lurker connoisseurs. You can play hard and thick skinned all you want, but you know exactly what post or comment you posted elsewhere that got the most votes or interaction. Why? Because it matters to you. So upvote everything you can. It matters to someone else too. Don’t upvote just for the value or interest you have in the content. Do it just to say “hey, thanks for making the effort to participate and make this place a few lines longer.” Please rethink how you handle voting, at least for now, think of a down vote as FU for participating, no votes as I wish you weren’t here. We are all likely accustomed to a lot more interaction and validation in our own little niches. This is really an underpinning value of social media, we are here to engage with people, so tell people who are new and unsure about a new and different place, “hey, thanks for participating.” You may not know or really appreciate their interests, but you can help us grow a core that can evolve into your favorite niches as the community grows. You are the core community. We can all make it grow if we make it a place people want to be.

      • God@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        Maybe I’m the extreme lurker. I used to rarely even upvote. Felt like at a zoo. Don’t feed the animals. Watch from afar. Laugh at the jumping monkey.

        • sichtbar@feddit.de
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          1 year ago

          Same for me, but I wouldn’t nessecarily call it extreme. Just lurking or better only consuming. Now is the time to change that. I’m upvoting like crazy (compared to just a week ago) and the few comments I wrote since being part of lemmy is more than what I commented on reddit in years.

          • God@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            hahah, me on the other hand, i have always been a very avid commenter to the point where i was thinking i might reach 100,000 karma on reddit this year or early next year. buuut, with this happening, i might start working on building up lemmy/kbin/other stuff, idk, i’m also a programmer and i make a lot of utilities for communities… we’ll see, but it seems my hyperactivity will be transferred to this side of the digital world.

          • God@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            but yes, do be active here, because otherwise ppl will think this shit’s dead and they’ll join something else :)

    • PapaTorque@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Yeah. There’s a lot of us. I’m trying to break out of that habit. I also feel like I’ll get more out of it if I actively participate.