for your opinions that are unpopular

Eugh, I know. I don't miss scrolling past those to get to the "real" comments.

This is an artifact of having very large forums. With such a large number of people commenting on the same posts, people start making bids for attention, rather than actually commenting on the OP. Stuff that gets the most attention, rather than furthers discussion floats to the top, and people then comment on that in order to be seen.

This behaviour then filters down to smaller spaces.

If you don't want this kind of thing to happen here, participate in smaller communities. Resist the pull of community centralization.

I thought I was the only joyless curmudgeon who disliked the pun threads! I feel validated by your post and I appreciate it.

I bet, like, the very first pun thread on reddit was spontaneous and reasonably entertaining but then like anything else that got a laugh one time it got suplexed into oblivion almost immediately.

Honestly I think kbin (and lemmy) should default to sort comments by "old". I started using this for reddit some time ago and it's such a breath of fresh air. Also I think it better represents actual population of communities (of course it highlights both good and bad parts of it). Funniest thing is there are still puns - only instead of upvoted chains you see dozens (or hundreds) of the same unsuccessful attempts to start these chains by would-be "comedians", which is hilarious. This definitely helped me to understand on which subreddit comments are useless, and saved a lot of my time.

I'll admit, I haven't looked at the Lemmy side of things too much, so my perspective is skewed. I saw a couple comments relating to that joke beforehand, but so far I haven't seen it too much here.

Yep.the starting a "other side" or meta thread is somthing only really started on Reddit in last few years and just annoys and takes away real comment.

Like somome will post about their annoying neighbour....then people appear pretending* to be that neighbour or worker or even the neighbours dog....it just gets confusing as to which is the real post and is dumbfuckery of the highest order.

Came to say this. I wish i could upvote more than once.

you win the internet with this underrated comment, kind sir!!1

We could do with more discussion here at m/worldnews...

I used to play a game with myself trying to guess the top comment of Reddit posts. If it wasn't the first it my guess was at least 5-6 post down way too many times.

At least the upvote and downvote functions here are separate, so that I can make my dislike more visible.

their

Oh no

It is what it is.

If that's the case, then I hope they get nipped in the bud.

Honestly, I think other reddit alternatives could benefit from adding something like the labels from Tildes (exemplary, off-topic, joke, noise, malice) in order to create sorting algorithms for different types of users/communities.

It could, for example, allow people who are tired of the constant jokes to have comments which get labeled as jokes sorted lower, which could even be the default in communities intended for serious discussion... or you could do the opposite and sort funny comments to the top when jokes are the purpose.

I might have to look into Beehaw then, and see what I think of it. Not sure what I think of having more moderation though.