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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.
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:
Eventually you get weathered by that. Too much attrition to bother; you stop exposing your thoughts.
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.