Modified from what I’ve posted on our partners at No Stupid Questions:
I’ve felt that /r/eli5 was some of the best content in the Old Country, but somewhere along the way, it lost the fun aspect it once had. Everything there is so sanitized that it no longer has the feeling of community anymore.
In the age of large language models, getting a simplified summary of a complex idea is pretty much just a copypaste away, and I don’t really see the need of having a place for what ELI5 currently is when it can be automated away, but I’m willing to admit that I may be wrong.
Now, the specific issues I have with ELI5 on reddit is that the mods there seem to make and enforce the rules arbitrarily and without any rationale, which just led to serious mod abuse. For example:
- Your answer can’t be too short, that’s too low effort.
- Your answer can’t be too long, that’s too specific.
- Your answer can’t be for something someone asked before.
- Your answer can’t be how you literally explain things to a real 5-year-old, despite that being the very name of the subreddit.
Just ridiculous. And I think we can all do better than that.
My ultimate goal would be having a place for people to explain things that would not be possible for machines, it should be entertaining to read as you learn, instead of making your eyes glaze over, because first and foremost, on Lemmy, we are rebuilding a place specifically for people to get engaged and inspired by each other, because that’s what a community is.
(Hatefulness would NOT be tolerated, of course.)
There’s overlap between our partners at “No Stupid Question” and “Now Lemmy Explain”, of course, but I think the best way to explain it (or, Now Lemmy Explain: ) is that NSQ focuses on getting any answer to simple questions, while NLE focuses on getting simple answers to any question.
I’m mostly expecting that if this works out, NLE will probably be the more casual counterpart to NSQ on lemmy.world, which would be the reverse of the situation on reddit.
So, if you have any topic you’d like to have explained, please make a post there, and we’ll all try our best to explain.
That’s not really how this kind of community works though. I think you are in the minority as far as your engagement style cuz I personally never subbed to ELI5/etc despite commenting regularly.
The way I engaged ELI5/NSQ/OOL/ETC was via all/rising. If a question came up that interested me or I knew the answer to than I’d engage. From there if there wasn’t already lots of comments or a top answer I might give my 2 cents.
Communities like this function more like a staple in that people know they’re the correct place to ask certain types of questions. In the short term what we need is people to upvote questions (and for lemmy.world to successfully update so we get some proper sorting options) so they get visibility and as answers flow in people will ask more questions.