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No, it's not a joke. I'm frustrated and I'm probably not choosing my words carefully.
This community has had steadily falling engagement - our last 3 weekly threads have had a grand total of 1 (excellent and well-articulated) response, and the number of topics not generated by myself (or the other mod) since the inception of the community has also been 1.
Very few people want to actually talk. From what I've seen, the masses want the same things that they wanted on Reddit:
- Memes
- Articles they don't read (but will bitch about endlessly) that reinforce their opinion
- Angry responses to someone (who may be trolling) that reinforce the current politics of the reader (that they couldn't have given a fuck about a few years ago until it became heavily politicized)
- Shitty easy jokes
- Personal politics circlejerking
I hate that I can see a hundredth point-free meme post and view 200 replies on it. I hate that it's just the same talking points being strawmanned over and over again in every thread. I hate that any point outside common groupthink is downvoted to oblivion and buried instead of discussed.
The reason I'd like to back away from Lemmy seems to be the same reason I started this community: we need more people who can articulate points, and less downvoting, but it doesn't seem to be getting better.
Maybe one day, but today is not that day. Lemmy needs to mature in more ways than one.
Lemmy seems to cloned Reddit without much thought into what was wrong with Reddit (besides the ads, and the corporate ownership). So it's not much surprise that Lemmy has many of the same faults (I blame the design decisions, rather than the users).
As for 'actual discussion', it can be difficult to switch gears if you associate the app you're using with simple dopamine hits, to go from 'scroll, scroll, chuckle, scroll ... ' to start properly engaging. Also, I think people genuinely find it hard to know what to say: if you ever see a link that leads to another platform that allows comments, you can see for yourself how often people take a comment from there, and copy/paste it back to into Lemmy.
Re: this community. There's no great advantage to deleting it, at worst just let it fester with the thousands of other dead communities, so it's still there to revive if you get back into the mood. In the meantime, it's probably worth investigating the alternative platforms (both Fediverse-based on non-Fediverse-based). The challenge will finding one that's both more serious and satisfyingly active (e.g. tildes is more geared to discussion, and has expanded on the simple upvote/downvote system, but it's a bit quiet)
Well, you're right. I probably won't delete the Community, but I won't engage either if my mind can't be changed. Some discussions on here have been awesome, and it'd be a shame to wipe them out.
I wish there were a way to have to force users to have to opt into the shitty dopamine hit mode you mentioned instead of it being the default. It's one of the main problems with modern social media and one of the reasons I feel that Forums were dramatically better.