view the rest of the comments
Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, toxicity and dog-whistling are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !uspolitics@lemmy.world
7) No Hit-and-Run questions.
Please don't delete your post for no apparent reason. If you plan on deleting a question later, say so in the post, or if you feel that you have a good reason to remove it, message a mod beforehand. It's not fair to the ones who took their time to answer, and it's not in the spirit of the community.
8) No Bots.
Posts or comments from bots, LLM's, AIs, Neural Networks, Transformers, or Marvin the Paranoid Android are not welcome in AskLemmy. Real humans only please.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
From what I understand, unlike most corporate social media, ActivityPub based software, such as Lemmy, doesn't have an algorithm. By that I mean that it doesn't track what your interests are based on what you interact with for the purpose of farming engagement. Basically, you're seeing a lot of anime stuff because it's what people are actually posting and not because your corporate overlords are shoving it down your throat.
Lemmy has some sort of algorithm even if it isn't personalized.
Before I blocked all the Moe communities, I was getting Moe with 1 upvote at the top of lemmy.world's homepage but no 3dprinting posts. Yet if I went to the 3dprinting community, there would be a new post with a hundred upvotes. It's that way with many other communities too.
The default sort prioritises posts from within the last few minutes above posts that are hours old with far more votes. If one anime fan posts a handful of things right when another checks their feed, there'll be anime posts at the top for half an hour or so, as they've got the most votes per minute.
I see. So they game the algorithm by spreading their posts out every few minutes so that they are constantly at the top.
It's not really gaming the algorithm. There's no karma here, no one buying high-karma accounts for advertising, and no one chasing attention when the maximum attention a Lemmy post gets isn't very much because there aren't very many users, so there's no point trying to artificially boost engagement. People are just posting things when they're online and not posting things when they're offline, and there are few enough users that it doesn't take many to create a pattern, and it sounds like you just happen to check at a similar cadence to a few anime fans, so keep seeing things right after they've browsed and upvoted what they like. I just checked the All Communities Hot feed on lemmy.world with no communities blocked, and only see one anime-related post in the first five pages, so they're clearly not constantly at the top. Considering the demographics that would typically use Lemmy, that's a really low number.
There are plenty of attention whores on Lemmy. They don't do it for money. The Moe fan was doing it because they wanted as many people as possible to see their collection of suggestive anime of underage girls. What got me to start blocking everything was a drawing of a young girl with white liquid dripping on her face. Yet the uploader was angry at me for calling them out.