Asklemmy

44672 readers

637 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

724

Has anyone else noticed a sudden lack of reading comprehension skills? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

460 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Just as the title asks I've noticed a very sharp increase in people just straight up not comprehending what they're reading.

They'll read it and despite all the information being there, if it's even slightly out of line from the most straightforward sentence structure, they act like it's complete gibberish or indecipherable.

Has anyone else noticed this? Because honestly it's making me lose my fucking mind.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 167 points 1 year ago (35 children)

I'm afraid there's nothing new about this, it has been going on for a long time. What I do believe is happening is now that every idiot with a cell phone can jump of sites like lemmy or reddit, we are simply seeing a lot more examples of the problem. Pretty much like when camcorders became affordable to the general public, we suddenly saw all kinds of police brutality videos and some people thought this must be a recent trend when in fact it had been occurring all along.

[–] [email protected] 76 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (34 children)

One of my last comments on Reddit was about this.

The biggest difference I've noticed is that people have stopped reading sentences. They'll read all the words and then upvote based on the feeling those individual words give them. They won't consider the meaning of all those words put together.

And yeah, "upvote does not mean agree" is something Reddit has always struggled with, but it has definitely had exponential growth lately.

It has made me start writing more clearly. There are comments I've written that have been wildly misinterpreted from my actual meaning. Part of that is that I tend towards sarcasm, and it doesn't translate well over the internet no matter how absurd I get with it. But I've also started aiming to use more simple sentence structure.

[–] slinkyninja 1 points 1 year ago

It helps to use only happy nice words. A happy sentence is an objective sentence, free from judgements or pronouns.

“You watch that stupid thing too much.”

Starts with a pronoun, contains “stupid”, ends with a judgement. It’ll make people furious and it’s not the content for them but the trigger words they scan for.

“Maybe we could go outside instead of watching TV?”

Same reasoning behind why you said it, different responses sometimes.

load more comments (33 replies)