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When community members are not contributing?

A lot of times when I'm here at IH, I see quality, well written, transparent posts and more. Many times I read the post, I read the comments and I get something to say. I will type my response, sometimes a paragraph or two, now, I feel like my thoughts are already added. I look through the comments again, what once felt like I had something great to share is already said and over. I close the whole thing and leave.

Let's say it happens to me all the time, every time I read and want to add to it it's already said, I just lurk. Am I contributing or not?

Imo yes, I'm contributing by NOT duplicating what's already been said. If I had done that I would have created noise over anything, adding noise would have made that thread worse and if I continue it'd make the whole community worse, lowering the quality overall.

This is very different from inactive and non-engaging members. Here I get to be active, engage at times (upvote when I agree) but I'm only not a part of the conversation because I don't have value to add. Members of any community may also be doing the same, they may not be contributing in terms of comments or responses but if they are not adding noise they are an active contributor already.

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    By upvoting / downvoting you are part of the “curation committee”. You help shape the criteria for good posts and comments.

    It’s like voting, even though you are not actively participating in political work.

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      So you're saying upvoting/downvoting is a contribution towards the community? Or the opposite?

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        Imo downvoting does more harm to a community to be considered a contribution/part of curation.

        Most members downvote simply because they don't like or they disagree the viewpoint, it's supposed to be used when a comment/post is off-topic not otherways. When there is a downvoting system, it is also much easier to game it.

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          This comment was deleted a year ago.

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        I am saying that it alters the metrics for popular content in your community. That’s part of shaping online communities, and I see it as a more invisible way of contributing to the community, even if noone will see the contribution.

        So yeah, it is definitely a contribution to the community, just not one with a huge direct impact like posting or moderating.

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          In that vein, I can’t believe you haven’t got anything to contribute.

          Your combination of experiences in life are uniquely yours. They will never be redundant nor superfluous.

          Share that shit :-)

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    not everyone sees the noise/duplication your talking about the same way

    if you change hats and think about the website owner, the search engine, the curation algorithm, the original poster, the person who's opinion your supporting, other lurkers that read comments...
    They would all see this differently

    if you track threads, you can see that many times two comments that might have the same core message continue in discussions on different paths. Self expression usually contains way more than the main message you think you intended in conveying.

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      Self-expression is one thing, given the hive way is how both traditional and modern communities work, members of a community discuss around one subject where comments sound the same, they think the same way like most of the members, ideas that resonate with the rest of the members appear on top, and so on. So how does adding a comment that means the same to another comment does not create noise? (even though it's self expressing?)

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        Well IDK which communities you experience but for me the only type of communities that are hive Mind like are politics, cults and strict diets, which should be all one group somehow.

        If you look at IH on topics like

        • Landing page feedback
        • How to grow this
        • Ideation of projects

        For me reading the comments I find a lot of variety between people's responses and ideas even if they support the same core premise.

        The creative side tends to have more variety than a SaaS startegy or the validation/MVP concept, high level people might agree when you get to the details the world is very colourful

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        Maybe another idea, write a longer more detailed comment

        Avoid just agree/yes/+1/ X said so

        And get into an example from you life, or pick one specific detail to deal with like a colour, a shape, a word a sentence or anything that gives another level of Dept...

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        I'm not saying be the 10th person saying the same thing

        But for example for someone asking for a landing page review there is a big difference between getting just one response total saying he does get it, and having 3 ppl say that same thing.

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          I see. Here, I mostly meant discussions where the first person would angrily come up saying "I said the same thing" because what they originally said is down (no votes) and just a few changes to wording is on top (upvoted).

          As I'm building Coulf- a private community for indie product makers and founder, I'm researching on communities, I spoke with a few of these "said the same thing" guys, they said they would actually leave that conversation as their participation was not valued because of the duplication by big guys/gals in a forum.

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            Would love to see deduplication features in communities become a common thing

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            This is weird to me. Is it an indication that people care more about receiving “credit” for contributing more than they care about the contribution itself?

            If someone asks a question, I answer it, and the original asker is the only person that upvotes, that feels good. Upvotes and such feel like a vanity metric to ME, but I understand some folks really care about having the top response. I just don’t know why!

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    This comment was deleted a year ago.

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