In every community I see this. There are always folks trying to narrow the community to some cut and dry descriptors—which for them are always obvious.
Sometimes the jab is perhaps intended as a joke. But to my reading it’s always a trope, namely the tired fallacy of taking a part as the whole.
Either way, it’s myopic. In any internet community, we’re always bound to narrowly see what’s happening. Because:
We can only see the posters, never the lurkers—which far exceed the former;
Posters, by virtue of taking the time to post, are most often than not highly opinionated;
Our reading is always selective. We’re either misguided by the way the comments are sorted, by our mood at the moment, by chance, or simply because we’re really bad at reading;
Our reading is always biased. Either by our mood, our current situation in life, our upbringing, our milieu, whatever;
the list goes on and on and on.
This results in a very reductive view that, although very teasing because very personal and idiosyncratic, is ultimately an exercise in futility. To those already biased, it simply supplies them with fodder to confirm what they already believed.
From afar, it’s just noise. Any view on what the community is is but a poor reflection of what the community ultimately is.
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.
I’m autistic myself. Unwritten rules are generally far more complex than their written form, and the translation into words loses a lot of information. I’d encourage all other autistics to develop their attention and working memory, and then the unwritten rules will start to become apparent.
Use sentence case and periods. I’ve seen other communities where omitting periods was fine. Also, try not to use emojis but if you do, do it sparingly.
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