Every thread against people not strictly aligning with Leftist politics will be boiled down to: “There are three types of people: reasonable people who agree with me, crazy fascists on the other side, and lily-livered wimps who can’t pick a side (and are also secretly fascists who just won’t admit it)!”
Anyone with passable writing skills will be downvoted because creating cogent arguments against them is hard, and heaven forbid anyone see a smart argument that doesn’t align with your views perfectly.
In a similar vein, people will use the downvote as a “fuck you” button without commenting or adding any value to the conversation whatsoever.
(Edit: Yes, yes. You’re all hilarious. I may not have a button to hit, but fuck you too.)
Re: the silent downvoting: IMHO, it’s childish and worse than toadying as it’s both inherently cowardly and lacks any real effort at all. If I thought it would constructively improve the platform, I’d suggest a daily rationing of them, but what’s the point?
edit: D’awww, the chickenshits took the time to click. That’s adorable.
It really is the embodiment of that old joke about people never wanting to hear other people’s opinions, and only wanting to hear their own opinion parroted back to them by someone passably eloquent.
Upvote/DownVote/Likes/Thumbs Up/Etc etc are all bullshit and have ruined online discourse by, for the majority of online interactions, gamifying and distilling it into whatever reaction the poster… on some subconscious if not conscious level, whatever will get them the most positive praise and trigger that dopamine dump in the brain.
And thats when its not just dogpiling people who are saying things that are true, but you just dont want to hear.
internet would be better if this shit never existed.
That’s a tough one, the dopamine hit is real and encourages engagement, which drives up the active userbase and makes for more opportunity for discussion.
They get abused too but a forum with none of it won’t grow in nearly the same way as one that makes use of it. People like to earn something (karma, upvotes, whatever) even if it has no tangible value.
Honestly, reddit kinda nailed it but then made it very hard to keep supporting them when they took a steaming shit on the mods and massively overpriced the api to ensure they had more control of the userbase.
Overall I don’t think they’re hurting too badly from it though and I’m sure the extra ad revenue they get from ensuring everyone uses their app helps to dry their tears. Probably a smart business decision (at least in the short to medium term), depressing as that might be.
Sorry, kiddo, but that’s not “how the system is designed to work” (you’d know this if you actually read the community guidelines, rather than just wandering in and assuming it was Reddit 2.0), and instead is simply finding a similar fate that etymological morphology suffers at the hands of illiteracy.
We’ve got a linguistic prescriptivist here! Everyone come and look at the guy who’s sick of stuff shifting over time in response to community sentiment!
You summarised my feelings far more eloquently than I managed here yesterday.
Downvote for you!!
But seriously, lemmy feels like more of an echo chamber than reddit ever did to me (which is saying a lot), maybe that’s because it’s an echo chamber for views i don’t agree with and reddit was more aligned to my thinking so I notice it more here, but dear god it’s getting harder and harder to stick around.
Don’t worry, bud, ive got your right wing right here, despite not being right wing, an american, a frequent voter, or anything…I just apparently am to people so delusional they think a canadian style rational socialist is a fascist.
Well, no, I don’t vote ndp because I’m anti union and anti gun control. I’m perhaps center right and want the national health care fixed, not privatized.
You’re missing my point bud. Everything is hot compared to something at 0 kelvin.
Everyone is left compared to the most right wing person, everyone is right compared to the most left wing person. It’s why people here often claim reddit is right leaning, despite it heavily favouring the left.
Being the most anything is rarely good, extremes prevent people seeing the other side way too often and very few subjects are 100% anything, most have nuance.
Just making a joke about why someone might accuse you of being a fascist.
Leftists famously don’t have uniform views and bitterly disagree on important topics. Some leftists aren’t reasonable in my opinion, with many non leftists having better reasoning behind their beliefs. Too many leftists are purity testing assholes, treating leftism with the same elitism that people on Lemmy treat using Linux. I hate elitism, even if you want to limit how big a community is. It’s just an unpleasant attitude.
The word has different meanings in different contexts. That said, unless you’re a complete moron, it’s usually very easy to figure out what sense of “liberalism” is intended based on context.
What I have no patience for at all are the insufferable idiots who insist that only one definition is correct, and oh by the way, it just happens to be their definition.
This mentality is why lemmy has been haemorrhaging users since the July reddit migration.
You guys are some seriously judgmental bellends a lot of the time.
I don’t use Linux because I want my life to be simple, I use lots of Foss and lots of non Foss because I want my life to be simple. I’m glad others care enough about privacy to fight for it because that’s a demonstrably good thing in the world, but I just want a simple life and don’t honestly care if I’m getting tailored ads and Amazon are listening to my inane kitchen conversations.
I don’t want to support reddit but you guys (ironically) make it much much harder to leave when there is next to no acceptance here for anyone who’s not a Linux expert who pushes for communism and has never used a Google product in their life.
I know I know, I’m everything that’s wrong with the world :) x
I can’t help but to feel like this is a bit of an overreaction.
I happen to really like discovering unwritten rules, it says a lot about the place. I also think we all shouldn’t take ourselves too seriously. I am no Linux user, but I definitely respect people who do and have no judgment about it. I really like FOSS and I think it’s important, and I also think privacy is very important and have learned a lot from my time here on lemmy. I do like video formats, however.
What I’m trying to say is, I’m not judging anyone, I just think it’s nice to have a laugh about who we are
Same for the fediverse tbh. I’ve actually seen people treat it like an exclusive nerd club, then wonder why people are staying on Twitter or choosing Bluesky instead.
Linux is also like veganism as in that nonvegans/non linux users get very misunderstood and unnecessarily antagonised, although the second thing happens to vegans more from my experience.
All this talk about asshole vegans really sounds like those “SJW liberal triggered by facts and logic” videos that got popular around 2015ish.
A joke I didn’t understand, or a joke I didn’t find funny…?
Jokey or not, there’s no denying that users here frequently just write off opinions as wrong if it doesn’t match theirs exactly. Whether they’re correct or not it’s not a nice place for discussion when the pervading mentality is one of superiority for a large portion of users (and yes this can be said for reddit too).
I don’t want to support the poor practises of corporations. More than that though I don’t want to cut off my nose to spite my face, and when the feeling from the alternatives is one of non-acceptance that’s exactly what it feels like I’m doing.
Not sure I’ll be here much longer to be honest, the world won’t be changed by people who base their personalities on being morally superior while denigrating anyone who doesn’t follow their beliefs exactly. You’ll piss people off, but you won’t change their minds, and ultimately everyone’s a loser as a result.
Joke you didn’t understand. You are taking everything ludicrously seriously on, again, a jokey post. The amount of reddit energy flowing out of this comment is obscene. Accusing everyone of acting “morally superior” is copy/pasted straight out of reddits playbook.
Leave if you want. I really don’t care. From what I’ve seen so far you’re not exactly adding much substance to the community other than whining and getting personally offended by a vague meme.
I know you don’t, that’s the problem. I moderate a very small community for man united supporters which is supposed to be an alternative to reddit to discuss football. I feel like I’m contributing plenty, but if even if I wasn’t, I’m contributing more than people who actively discourage users from sticking around.
Shouldn’t we be encouraging users to lemmy? Doesn’t it hurt the overall experience if there are fewer users and opinions? Won’t it just become an even more extreme echo chamber than reddit?
I’m sorry that I apparently haven’t taken the post in the jokey way it was intended, but it does highlight a number of issues with the lemmy userbase, surely you can agree with that at least?
Accusing someone of using something “straight from Reddit’s playbook” is (ironically) copy pasted straight from the lemmy playbook. I’m not accusing evrryone of anything, just pointing out the problems I see with a large portion (not all) of users.
Anyway, I’m all about enjoying life. I enjoy it less here than I feel like I could and it seems to be very detrimental to the growth of lemmy.
Edit: I called someone an entitled renter because they were pissed off that their friend had decided to sell their house. Is that unfair…?
You’re not wasting time on a redditor though, except to go through their post history to try and find something to meme them for. Again… Seems like redditor behaviour to me :) x
Checking post histories and holding it against users, presenting Lemmy as “a site” instead of interoperating and independent instances where one can tailor ones experience, not advocating finding more suitable communities…
Why did you delete the example from this post bud?
You know, the one where I called someone an “entitled renter”. I thought it was a decent example tbh, even if it WAS framed entirely out of context to make me sound like I was attacking all renters (of which I’m one).
You know what? I’m back in, this whole discussion is exactly what I was missing. Thanks dude x
A joke that highlights what I feel is wrong with lemmy, I’m really sorry for commenting though, people have taken it very seriously considering the main criticism seems to be that I’m missing the joke.
Why not just downvote and move past my comment without feeling the need to leave a comment?
I find it pretty funny that I point out the non acceptance in this community and lots of the reactions could be summarised moreorless as “Well then fuck you!”. Is anyone seeing the irony?
Fuck everyone, people suck no matter what platform one’s one. But the main idea behind the fediverse is “make your own”.
Block people whose replies are of no value to you. Block communities that harp on about things you find annoying. If you find anonymous downvotes instead of proper replies cowardly, go to an instance that doesn’t accept downvotes.
The problem for me is simply lack of users to get a good discussion going on anything that isn’t tech or socialism.
I enjoyed it at the start when lots of people were trying it out as an alternative to reddit, but every day I get closer to sacking it off completely because there just isn’t the content or users to support the discussions I’d like to have to kill 20min here or there.
I guess my problem is that “make your own” sounds great in principle but when every group makes their own they each become echo chambers for that group. I also haven’t bothered fully understanding the fediverse and what I can do with it so that’s on me obviously.
I just want an easy to use discussion forum for a range of topics and opinions. And unfortunately it just doesn’t seem like this is it.
There’s close to 30.000 communities on the Lemmyverse, most of them on servers/instances different than yours. You’re on lemmy.world, one of the most “general” instances that took on a lot of the migrating users so there’s going to be a more “reddit” style userbase there.
Check out lemmyverse.net/communities and look for other communities for your favorite topics. I’m sure you’ll find different communities with different type of users. For instance, I browse !technology from several instances. Many of those communities I don’t bother commenting in, simply because it’s not my crowd. If there’s a good post I want to discuss with likeminded people, there’s always the cross-post function.
Yeah that’s probably one of the biggest barriers to growth unfortunately, which is a shame because it’s also potentially one of the best things about it.
With reddit I can just subscribe and unsubscribe to subs I like or don’t, it feels like (comparatively) a lot of work to achieve a similar thing here and even when you’ve nailed it it’s yet more work to have a discussion because users are spread so thin.
I think the sad reality is it’s just not for me. Ironically this whole thread has been about as enjoyable as I’ve ever found lemmy though, actual engagement is what I want instead of outright dismissal and this thread is the most in depth discussion I’ve had in 5months here.
If dude wants to air some grievances, let them. Lemmy isn’t doing too well. Listening to what our fellow users have to say so we can make the community a better place can’t hurt.
Im learning just keep all the toolchain stuff to myself cuz i dont care enough to change people. Got enough to change about me.
I voted up cuz there’s is a super non-robus line inherent to this platform where i get down for the most mundane random shit. Like either people have a sense of humor or they freak the fuck out and dont even comment but simply downvote
You objectively need to lighten up. This WAS supposed to be a fun post and you’ve unintentionally (good faith interpretation) sowed discord here where it wasn’t otherwise palpable.
No offense guy, I want you here as much as anyone but this isn’t Lemmy.Fucking.ML, c’mon man
I feel plenty light mate. I’m pretty amused by the reaction to be honest, particularly the irony being accused of redditor behaviour by someone who literally went through my posts to make that point.
I’m just slowly realising that lemmy isn’t what I wanted it to be, I.e. Reddit without the greed.
Maybe this wasn’t the post for my comment but it’s done now and I stand by the point I’m making. This joke post does highlight the biggest issue with lemmy imo.
Less drama please, i meant what i said. Let us know how many months you commit to leave and when we can expect you back and someone will set a remind:me thing or whatever. But none of us are that important singularly so I hope you adjust that cuz its offputting at best
Honestly mate I think I understood about half the post.
I’m not trying to be dramatic, I’m literally just calling it as I see it.
How many months I commit to leave? What?
Adjust what? My opinion?
Being offputting is exactly the criticism I’m making about lemmy and it’s current problems. This comment is to my comment what my comment is to this post (if I’ve understood that part correctly).
Honestly, i dont blame you for posting, i blame the OP for creating an instant divide, the tenor of what he requests is “jokey” the he added space for the downer stuff.
Don’t get me wrong you guys have valid points but its just annoying that everything is blended into one. That’s poor form on the part of the OP, I hope theg see this and do better.
You’re aftually fine, we shouldn’t need to fight here and I take ownership of my part in that, but you can see from my history i interpreted this (OP’s post) as a prompt for funny and lighthearted stuff. If I want the issues and problems and dissatisfactions, I will click on a discrete post about same. Its silly to ask for both in one megapost, everybody’s gonna be pissed about having to deal with the opposing side
Thanks and sorry for any misunderstanding/sass on my part
Edit: this is a great example of powerful people setting the agenda and framing things in a monolithic+inappropos way to get the little people fighting and “downvoting”/reducing each other like lobsters in a bucket when we could realize we can knock the bucket over and kill the asshole who set up the bucket that way and take over Crab-People style
It’s all good bud, ironically enough this post is the most I’ve enjoyed lemmy for weeks. Proper in depth discussion is all I want, with people who have opposing views and might make me think about my own.
Well… Lemmy is the place for nerds who understand tech or at least want to understand the tech they’re using. So everything you consider opposed to just being simple is pretty simple to the average Lemmy user.
I agree and that’s kinda the problem, I thought lemmy would be the place I could replace reddit with, it’s just not what I’d hoped it would be and for a very left leaning platform doesn’t seem nearly as accepting as I’d expect.
That’s not always the case obviously and even today I’ve had a discussion about distros as I was fed up not knowing what they were, people were polite and helpful explaining which is great, but that feels like the exception rather than the rule when I’m just browsing comments.
I feel like the reddit api drama was a huge opportunity for lemmy to grow but it shit the bed a bit (or rather, the users did collectively) and people like me have left in droves. Reddit has always been circlejerky and it’s probably the worst thing about it, but that almost feels like the MO of most lemmy instances.
There’s good and bad obviously, I’m not saying lemmy is a desolate wasteland where all users are coders who berate anyone who can’t write in python (probably an awful example, not a coder), there’s just an awfully strong feeling of “if you don’t do what we do then you’re wrong” in my opinion.
Ultimately I’m here 5months later so I don’t hate the platform by any means, but I’d be nowhere near it if reddit hadn’t been so greedy earlier this year. Not enough users and not enough breadth of topics to be properly engaging for a simpleton like me.
Simplest thing for me is not having to learn something new just so I can play trackmania AND be accepted here. I can play trackmania on windows just fine and I didn’t need to learn to set up an OS and work out what distros and the various other tech sounding things I don’t understand are.
But being personally offended when someone doesn’t use Linux and points out a valid reason is about 80% of lemmy it seems…
Trackmania requires no more configuration than it does on windows, and if you use KDE, the interface is almost identical.
The only thing you’d have to learn is to install steam from the app store instead of from the internet, if you give it a shot, I don’t think you’ll find it to be as difficult as you imagine.
The full steps would be
install linux mint (if you have no preference that’s the easiest distro) > open app store > install steam > install trackmania from steam > hit play
edit: just tested it to verify, yeah, trackmania required no additional setup or anything from the standard windows version
Installing linux is a 15 minute process, the only hard part is getting a flash drive, and you only have to do it once, once you have that flash drive you can do it easily endlessly.
I highly recommend trying it out, linux is significantly easier to use and has significantly less maintenance burden. That’s why I give it to the elderly, they’ve all said it makes their lives significantly easier, and none of them have switched back.
Plus, even on a windows machine, the first thing you should do is reinstall the operating system when you get one, especially for second hand machines. Every single major manufacturer puts a bunch of garbage on the computer some of which is nearly impossible to remove without a reinstall, considering you already should do this anyway, it makes it a much easier pill to swallow.
some examples of how linux is easier:
Your computer won’t forcibly restart for updates, ever
Your computer is never doing anything in the background that you don’t ask it to do, so you don’t have to worry about if the power cuts off, whether your machine will still work.
All of the updates are centralized so you don’t have to worry about various updaters
All of the installations are centralized so you don’t have to worry about using all of the various installers windows has, making sure not to enable it installing extra crap, etc
Guaranteed no cruft that slows your machine down every time, you don’t have to go through uninstalling a bunch of crap
Centralization means unless you do something very strange you never have to deal with malware
There’s other things, but I have found that these few things make a significant difference, especially for the elderly.
I would consider it unwise to avoid learning about a machine you regularly have to interact with, you’ll only make your life more difficult in various, impossible to observe ways from the other side. I guarantee the only difficult step will be the first install.
Wow that is a lot of words that I’m not gonna read. I have no interest in Linux, I had a curiosity when I joined Lemmy but the typical user just makes me want to not be counted among them. I know there are plenty of good ones too but so many just want to ram their opinion down your throat and judge you as a worse human being if you’re happy with Windows.
Thanks for the effort, but I just don’t give a shit. Windows works perfectly for me and if something works more perfectly I’m 100% happy living in ignorance anyway.
How do you know you’re happy with windows if you choose to live in ignorance?
What if windows does a ton of annoying things that you’re simply used to and accept as a part of life, that you’re missing out on fixing completely because you’ve chosen ignorance?
I don’t think you should say that you’re happy with windows if you’ve never investigated any other options, you really just don’t know, and it’s not shameful to not know or not care, but if you say you’re happy with something, that implies a level of knowledge that you don’t have.
If someone was proudly ignorant of a topic you cared about, would you not, understandably, be annoyed when they give their opinions founded entirely upon ignorance?
I think that might be what you’re seeing here, sorry if this is an upsetting post, but, I just want to make sure you understand how that sounds to the people who did bother to not be ignorant. I’m ignorant of many things, and I choose not to comment on those things or claim to know things about those things, because I know what I don’t know, I think it’s wise to do that.
Furthermore a number of people have a genuine emotional investment in FOSS that you may not understand, there are good reasons for this, the world would be a significantly better place if FOSS was the norm, for example, in electron microscopy, there are perfectly good electron microscopes that are no longer supported by their companies, forced to run windows 95 and that can never be updated because of proprietary software, the only way of updating these would be to spend literal millions of dollars on this. There’s various aspects of healthcare that would be dramatically improved by FOSS being the norm, when you know many many things like this, people often form an emotional attachment to these things that you may not understand from a position of ignorance, and that seem unreasonable. It’s often helpful to find common ground with people, rather than be proudly ignorant.
Especially for marginalized groups, FOSS could be a huge benefit, as an example, when the holocaust occurred, the nazis turned to companies to get information from people, in the modern era, could microsoft be used by a government not interested in your best interests to corral you and kill you? Yes, absolutely, even if this is unlikely, it’s something that couldn’t happen AT ALL with foss, ever.
I don’t care if you use linux or not at the end of the day, but I do hope you understand that these people have a genuine, reasonable emotional attachment to FOSS that makes them behave in unreasonable ways when it is challenged. Especially when countless people who are completely ignorant of the problem tell them it doesn’t matter on a regular basis, this is an extremely common, compounding annoyance for the community of FOSS enthusiasts.
I hope that makes sense, and doesn’t anger you, I just want you to understand where all of this emotional stuff comes from.
Oh look another essay I won’t read. This is exactly the shit I meant mate. Stop trying to ram your own opinion down my perfectly happy throat.
Try to consider the fact that I don’t care enough about my PC to try and optimise every aspect and that maybe some people have a different view of the world to you, it’s not something you need to be upset by.
Imagine what you could have done with the time you spent writing two mini essays nobody will read. Feel free to write a 3rd but the response will be the same. Take care :) x
Try to consider the fact that I don’t care enough about my PC to try and optimise every aspect and that maybe some people have a different view of the world to you, it’s not something you need to be upset by.
If you read what I wrote instead of assuming what I wrote, you’d understand that your response makes literally no sense in response to what I wrote, I was trying to make you see why people might be emotionally attached to these issues. Why reply to what you won’t read? Why comment on things when you don’t care what others think?
Odd that you decided to be rude to me when you don’t even know what I said. Or do you hate the idea of having a dialogue, in which case, why post anything at all?
You really do have to pretend that they’re insignificant.
They’re extremely significant. Overhyped? Maybe, but extremely significant nonetheless. I think a lot of people here have gone “well, if it’s overhyped, that means it isn’t even vaguely interesting” and I think the real truth, as much as I hate centrism, is in the middle.
What one would think is ai today is not really i. Chatgpt does not understand what it’s talking about and definitively can not lead the machine uprising. Straight up neural networks maybe could, but they’d need magnitudes more computing power then we have now. We would need a new ai for it to be practical.
In my experience gpt-s are more like “what are some examples of x” then “can you solve this problem”. Because the problems are either easy to google or, for the harder problems, gpt straight up lies or rambles uselessly. A search engine helper, in a way.
I’d rather we put all those MWh into solving real problems, instead of startups. Also; Nvidia, fuck you.
I think LLM’s are on the right track, while an LLM with its current architecture likely couldn’t without a ridiculous scale, they do show signs of understanding ( businessinsider.com/chatgpt-open-ai-balancing-tas… ), pretending they are nothing more than autocompletes as the people here do is disingenuous, what it does is predict, and while that’s all it does, that’s also all that makes humans special, the human mind is an object that takes sensory input, and predicts what muscle movements would be best given the sensory input, in fact, our heavy reliance on prediction is the reason magic tricks fool us, the only way to accurately predict things is through reasoning and understanding, we don’t know what happens when we scale, and there’s a reason experts predictions of when AGI will come are getting closer and closer, right before the LLM boom the average prediction was something like 40 years (based on memory), now it’s like, 10.
I consider an LLM to be akin to what would happen if a persons thoughts were immediately transformed into words, without any layer of verification, you think plenty of wrong things, but you don’t say the wrong things you think because you have a layer of verification before speech, and it turns out, according to recent research, adding a verification layer to LLM’s is extremely potent: arxiv.org/abs/2203.14465
It seems, according to this paper, that the trick is to have an LLM generate thousands of possible outputs, and have a separate tool verify their correctness, and then only present the correct output, this could possibly solve hallucination, which is one of the biggest roadblocks to actual intelligence.
While we aren’t at true intelligence yet, we are creating the building blocks that will allow for it, and it will happen, and the experts believe it’s coming soon, LLM’s are not insignificant in terms of progress.
These are tools made of the same component parts as our brain, admittedly, it takes approximately one thousand artificial neurons to simulate a real neuron, but the fact of the matter is, our minds are quite similar to these artificial minds, the artificial minds are just much, much, much, much more simple, it turns out, intelligence is likely a matter of statistical analysis.
When you look at a coffe cup from the side, you know it has a hole in it. Because you imagine, not because it’s a reflex.
LLM is basically a point cloud of words. The training uses neural networks and thus pattern recognition. But the llm itself is closer to a database. But hey, sql is also useful for ai (data storage/retrival according to logic).
I’m not an llm expert, by far. But right now they are not much more practical then a find out a bout things helper.
Edit: I do like them. It’s been helpful a couple times and i even got gpt4all installed on my computer for fun.
When you look at a coffe cup from the side, you know it has a hole in it. Because you imagine, not because it’s a reflex.
You’re looking at this backwards, you know those things because of previous experiences, you predict this might happen due to those.
This is still a matter of prediction, and if that had never happened to you even once, I guarantee you wouldn’t look for it.
They’re also significantly smaller than our brains and multimodality has been shown to help with reasoning, so, considering they’re text only and significantly smaller than our brains, their significantly reduced functionality is to be expected. Especially when you factor in that our brain has verification layers, which have only recently been discovered to work for LLM’s, none of them even implement this yet as far as i’m aware.
When you do the metaphorical moderation equivalent of running somebody over with your car, just return to acting to normal, no one will care and everyone will quietly suspect the guy in the metaphorical hospital making accusations regardless of how much the metaphorical tire tracks match.
If you get kicked from an instance, upon joining a new instance, make your first post a furious comment on the admins/mods/hivemind of the instance that kicked you, completely forgetting we can all see the modlog.
Can you show it to me for me+Lemmy.ML im legit curious about why they put a pin in me. I have zero pride about me/it despite my recent post concerning same. I’m judt pissed i nvr found out what did it but I’m curious/desirous of finding out and Lemmy can hold my feet to the fire Re:holding myself accountable if its a real reason and not some of the ideological bullcrap they’ve been accused of
Honestly, kinda true. Point out that someone is using a grifter with bad oversimplifications to support a political position you otherwise agree with? You’re on the other side and want children dead.
I think it’s way worse. At least on Reddit you can find smaller niche subs that are full of serious-minded, intelligent and well-informed users who have no time for pure amateur hour bullshit. R/askhistorians would be the premiere example, but there are a lot of others.
It’s only on the big lightly-moderated subreddits that your signal-to-noise ratio really goes to shit, whereas all of Lemmy seems to be awash in teenage level discourse.
Hopefully it gets better as its user sse expands and diversifies into more tightly-focused and heavily-moderated instances.
Poe’e law states that there’s no such thing as satire, and that every post that could be considered a joke is actually a display of incredible stupidity
Not really. Poe’s Law just states that extremist positions are often impossible to distinguish from satire. It doesn’t say that there’s no such thing as satire.
That’s why I append my sarcastic posts with /s. It’s a habit I picked up on Reddit where you could easily see someone posting that same comment, but being 100% serious. The /s kind of ruins the joke, but I’d rather the joke be ruined than have people think I was serious when I said those kinds of things.
Don’t comment on anything related to any conflicts immediately East of the Mediterranean lest you wish to be in an ad hominem “debate”.
This problem drives valuable content away from the site, unless the lurkers up/down vote based on the value of a contribution (and not their personal opinion) or the mods step in, which is still seemingly rare.
As a (sometimes) lurker, when I see a comment on the middle east I say “wow even if I studied this conflict I would still have trouble having an opinion here” and skip over it+the replies. I also can’t tell if the person said something so ridiculous that the ad hom isn’t out of line.
I frequent Lemmy, Mastodon, and Threads. I feel like this is true in any of the three. Occasionally, I’ll wade in, but more often than not I regret it.
This is especially true on Threads where the algorithm sees you arguing with someone saying X and then says “hey, you must want to see more posts that say X.” I finally realized that all I was doing was feeding the algorithm and stopped replying.
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