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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I use it for quick reading material while doing other stuff and to monologue. I’m a spectator that likes to give my lengthy opinions unprompted, but otherwise open comments purely for reading material. This colors my thoughts hugely.
I like that it’s not Reddit. Didn’t like that company. I have found Lemmy users to be a lot more willing to stand up against corporations and boycott acceptable products due to ethics— something very lacking in society now and a massive contributor to the disrespect companies treat consumers with. For enjoyers of certain niches, it has good content and good people. For me, the community is a much needed reprieve from a world that feels increasingly consumerist and accepting of evil.
I don’t think the discussions are very high quality. They don’t contain as much useful information or corrections as Reddit, which due to user count had more relative experts. Misinformation is nearly as bad here but less insidious because Reddit misinformation was sneakier, but it’s more obnoxious so it elicits more confusion than annoyance like it did on Reddit (which is better, to be fair). Comment sections feel repetitive due to lack of unique ideas or analysis, and they usually will not delve further than knee jerk reactions to parent commenter knee jerk reactions. So much so that I strongly believe that, if Lemmy was fed into an LLM, 95% of comment sections could be more efficiently created by bots. It’s a lot less civil than most of the new internet, vitriol and bad faith arguments that never acknowledge the other commenter’s statements are common. Lemmy is wildly tribalistic with little room for disagreements, even minor. This makes for poor reading material.
So it does remind me of the older Internet, before the forced civility and mainstream use that leads to deeper discussions. I sound critical but a lot of this is nostalgic, and I like it. While I’d love for Lemmy to improve, these flaws are familiar and some part of me is glad to see them again. Reddit was kind of feeling stale and sterile by the time I left, and I expect it’s significantly worse now (and quite possibly actually mostly bots). And the benefits, primarily the anti-consumerism, is refreshing.
Honestly speaking, I wouldn’t say Lemmy is good and I could never suggest it to “normal” people. But I like it, and it makes for solid quick reading material, which alone offsets the negatives.
Oh, and the questionable quality discussions here make it easier to stop reading comments and reconnect with real life. This past week I found myself actively watching the waves on a beach. Back on Reddit I used years worth of beautiful places as a backdrop for what felt like more interesting information on the app, and sometimes came off as an ass for doing so. I would never return to Reddit for that alone, and I think it’s part of why I’m okay with Lemmy staying this way.
You summed up a lot of my feelings quite well on why I wasn't sad to leave Reddit.
My personal dissatisfaction with a lot of what is going on on Lemmy is why I created this community now. Groupthink, even if it is correct, often does not understand the reasoning it is correct. They present weak arguments and straw man the opposition and frequently will even strawman undecided readers.
I don't know where in the last 20 years this became the de facto way to convince people that you are correct, but it isn't.
I ran a somewhat large forum for about 10 years from the mid-90s to the mid-2000s and we used to argue forcefully on there. If you argue even somewhat forcefully on any of these public-facing "forum replacements" now, you get absolutely shit on without anybody countering anything you said. At some point, it seems every group has just made the assumption that they are correct and will not ever discuss it.
That’s actually pretty much the issue I have with the discussion here, I hadn’t really seen it put to words. I’ve read what should have been respectful disagreements turned into what I feel are autopilot arguments with name calling peppered in. It often feels like people are waiting to get a response so they can go in, but they don’t always read the response first. I assume it’s for the benefit of the “audience,” but it frequently strawmans them too, as you noted. Compared to a point-counterpoint setup which is more interesting and actually has a chance of convincing someone, the oddly common Lemmy discourse feels kind of pointless. Like, who is it for?
When I first came here, I believed the talk about how the discussions were high quality so I said more. I don’t think I ever ran into the people who churn out dissatisfying arguments but I also only very rarely got good talks. That combined with the bottom-tier fights that happen with controversial subjects? I see why most people only lurk.
On the subject of controversy though, my current guess is that most people here are so similar that any deviation on strong subjects leads to a need to crush opposition as fiercely as possible. I sometimes feel it happening to me, which is the clearest sign that I need to step back and reevaluate to make sure I’m not falling into the same vice. It’s also part of why I don’t engage in controversial discussion— there’s no real point, and I’m here to have a good time not fight people.
Yeah, you seem as disappointed in the way things shook out the same as I did.
The intention for this community is to help to understand other views, not bury them. I feel that's what makes us different. Hell, sometimes I want to make sure I'm correct on something and would like people to pick apart my view to make sure I'm logically consistent.
Problem is, most people are not logically consistent themselves and tend to not be able to articulate their position when pushed. It used to be perfectly fine to not have a stance on something, but as the internet grew, you HAD to have a stance on everything, even if you were deeply uninformed. Now people create a stance first and just get mad and block anything contradicting it.
I am somewhat disappointed, but I hope these are growing pains and that the community will improve. I don’t think Internet toxicity like I see is sustainable— who would want to only have interactions like that? It’s exhausting to read, participating must feel like a chore of unbelievable pointlessness. I can see a better Lemmy on the horizon where they get it out of their system, so to speak.
Commenters learning how to argue would go a long way. I took years of debate and honestly feel like one semester should be a requirement. There are respectful and effective ways to argue, but Lemmy users are more prone to unconvincing attempts to bulldoze. On Reddit that led to being buried, with quality arguments on the same topic getting upvotes. Here, the quality arguments are rarer so you only see the bad faith ones.
Still, I’m not giving up on Lemmy. I truly believe it can improve. But I can also see it driving away new users, or turning into an extremist platform like Voat. Now Lemmy is nowhere near the cesspool that Voat was so I’m optimistic.