Why is Lemmy not a place for thoughts and observations, rather than just links, questions, and memes? And could it be?
Why is Lemmy not a place for thoughts and observations, rather than just links, questions, and memes? And could it be?
Does it have something to do with the rise of smartphones and no one typing on real keyboards? (Maybe why blogs died.)
Is it a consequence of voting, which blogs didn’t have?
What happens to your thoughts? Do you turn them all in the form of a question? Do you tear them down into a Mastodon one-liner and hope a popular person notices it?
If Lemmy had more of ourselves in this way, maybe it would be a healthier place.
Being idle until the media put out an article on something for us to talk about gives them too much power over us.
There’s an actual_discussion community, which isn’t exactly lively. There’s a casualconversation community, and even that’s all in the form of a question.
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Lemmy has both thoughts+observations, and links+questions+memes. It's just a lot more of the later than the former.
There are a thousand potential reasons for that. I believe that a few of the ones that you mentioned have some impact, but there are two that you didn't mention that might be extra relevant:
- Lemmy starting out as a federated replica of a link aggregator, also mostly about links, questions, and memes; this is bound to replicate a certain culture.
- The Zeitgeist of the internet of the 20s is considerably less kind to people who form their own thoughts.
On how to solve this: perhaps the first step could/should be to co-ordinate with other people who have the same desire, and nurture communities with that goal.
The Zeitgeist of the internet of the 20s is considerably less kind to people who form their own thoughts.
This rings true and it may come from the wider world. Seems to me that we have entered an era of fear and pessimism. Partly as a result of that, today's younger generation had protected childhoods and now, given the state of the world, they themselves are afraid for their futures (with some justification). All this is creating an atmosphere of hypersensitivity, aversion to causing offense, a general lack of openness to new ideas and contradiction.
Nothing I say there is particularly original and I can't offer data to support it. But my anecdotal experience on this forum and elsewhere backs up the hypothesis completely. Something has changed.
I agree.
I used to use Reddit some, although I would never manage to stick with it well and become an accepted regular anywhere, but it was big enough that I never realized it was a link aggregator before all else, since people were just talking about whatever in communities. I actually had to look up some fediverse site yesterday when checking what’s out there for blogging and whatnot for it to label reddit and lemmy explicitly as link aggregators, for me to really get it.
Forming their own thoughts, is it the voting, is it the culture wars? I know I have the chilling effect of thinking that my response to some article will just get tons of downvotes so why bother. And I don’t think upvotes mean the same thing to me that they mean to the average person.
Coordinating with other people, I’ve had zero success with and must just not have any clue how to go about it.
Yup - Reddit is still mostly memes, questions, and links; this gets evident when you look at the top 5 subs: memes (r/funny), links (r/gaming, r/worldnews), questions (r/askreddit), "fluff" (r/aww). And yet Reddit is large enough that you can ignore those and find people sharing their minds in smaller comms.
That won't last long though. The place is collapsing, and the first ones to kick the bucket will be the smaller subs, that'll become ghost towns.
Forming their own thoughts [...]
I think that it's deeper: it's the impact of social media in our societies, plus phones (that you mentioned in the OP), plus the voting system (that you mentioned now). Together they shape a culture that encourages short, shallow, uncontested, polarised worldviews.
And when people are exposing their thoughts on a matter, there's a high chance that they actually thought about something that is longer, deeper, controversial, full of counterpoints. As they share it they get replies like:
- "WAAAAH TL;DR!!!"
- "U say dat 50 is not 100? than u think dat 50 is 0? dats dumb lol lmao"
- "If you're saying that you like apples then you hate bananas! Fuck off banana hater! Why so hateful?"
- "I dun unrurrstand, why you think that [distorts what the other person said]? I'm so confused..."
Eventually you get weathered by that. Too much attrition to bother; you stop exposing your thoughts.
Coordinating with other people, I’ve had zero success with and must just not have any clue how to go about it.
Frankly? Ditto. But this is the sort of issue that we can't solve individually, we need numbers for that.
It must be a great skill online to know how to write in a way that can’t turn into something else in someone’s head and trigger disproportionate reactions.
Since I remember Before Phones, I’m worried that people who grow up with phones don’t know how completely crappy a way that is to interact with the internet. It makes good consumers. I remember the shift in laptop display dimensions around 2010 so they would become Movie Watching devices. And phones take phone-shaped pictures.
I suppose I’ll have to start tracking what I wish to talk about to find out what communities could be needed. Today the only ones in my head are one of no importance at all that would fit in the existing casualconversation just fine and another that made me laugh but is nothing deep and I might feed it to asklemmy at some point.
I might have to ask asklemmy where questions that are a little more factual are supposed to go. Their sidebar says they want open-ended, although probably no one pays attention.