> and instead favors trying to get new members who are just marginally interested, or worse, just like endlessly scrolling through a timeline
You can literally see communities go to shit because of this. Actual content is pushed away as low effort content, easy-to-view-in-a-timeline content, claims the frontpage, because of what you said. It infuriates me to no end when communities I've frequented for years literally get supplanted by faceless non-contributing vagrants who never contribute, comment, or post. They just see funny picture, blow air out their nose, and upvote, not knowing that they're incentivizing behaviour that's killing the community that built the space in the first place.
I liked the proposal that I saw here a while back, that members only see votes of members who joined before they did. So when you join a community, the voting behavior gets "frozen in time".
You can literally see communities go to shit because of this. Actual content is pushed away as low effort content, easy-to-view-in-a-timeline content, claims the frontpage, because of what you said. It infuriates me to no end when communities I've frequented for years literally get supplanted by faceless non-contributing vagrants who never contribute, comment, or post. They just see funny picture, blow air out their nose, and upvote, not knowing that they're incentivizing behaviour that's killing the community that built the space in the first place.