this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2024
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Actual Discussion
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Are you tired of going into controversial threads and having people not discuss things, circlejerking, or using emotional responses in place of logic? Us too.
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Needs more posts.
I don't see as many insightful comments as I did on Reddit, but that's just a function of the number of comments/users.
I like that there are enough posts to keep me entertained.
There's a lot of smart people here, but I feel you're correct. There's no need for smart people to show themselves when everybody agrees with them or they're afraid to give a dissenting opinion.
It feels like we're all knowledge workers. I fit into the middle aged, D&D playing, politically left, software developing dad demographic. It feels like most of the posters here check many of the same boxes.
As someone who is not, boy does it get annoying hearing shit like "just change jobs and you'll get a big raise!"
Sorry for that, the software people tend to forget they live in a very comfortable bubble.
The funniest thing is that if people actually decided to "learn to code" as the common mantra goes, software types will be the first hurt as a surplus of labour in their field presses down salaries.
That already happened, at least where I live. I make only slightly less than an entry level dev as a tradesman at a grocery store. And all the dev jobs are in Vancouver where the cost of living is about 30% higher. But they're not making 30% more than I am.
Well, you certainly have me in that list. I just feel the need to be correct for correct reasons, not just because it makes me feel morally superior. I frequently try to prove myself wrong as an exercise in keeping sharp.
Really insightful or just creative and well-worded variations on what people "already know"?
The latter are very common, even here. Truly insightful comments are vanishingly rare anywhere there's an up/down vote system.
As an example, if I were to comment on someone's post about the evils of the Chinese government (with the inevitable mention of Tiananmen Square in 1989) with the truth, that would be downvoted to perdition. Hell, there's a good chance the post would be removed. I would almost certainly be branded a "tankie". Because truth is not an issue in populism. Popularity is. And the popular opinion says hundreds to thousands of students were massacred in Tiananmen Square when in reality the truth of the matter is no students were massacred and the massacre that did happen didn't happen in Tiananmen Square.
You see the real massacre happened several kilometres away and was of protesting labour. The student gathering in Tiananmen Square was a sideshow to the real perceived threat the Chinese government was reacting to. A mild annoyance vs. the perceived existential threat of the nationwide labour protests that even included elements of the PLA. But bring that genuine insight, not just rewarmed and creative expressions of popular opinion, into a thread and you'll be voted into nothingness.
Lemmy had an opportunity to improve on Reddit. The (openly communist) developers of it decided instead to just make their own Reddit with leftist leanings and blackjack and hookers.