I have had a tendency since my earliest days on social media where I will get halfway or more through a response, and end up just cancelling it. Sometimes I feel like I’m just being to over the top with snark or otherwise don’t want to be that kind of person, but a lot of the time I’ll decide I just really don’t care enough to finish it. Sometimes I just know it’ll be an argument and I know what the person is going to say, and just have no interest in continuing the discussion. I did it on Reddit, I did it on bulletin boards, I even did it in my teens and twenties on Usenet - and I’ll probably go on doing it for as long as I continue using this medium. I probably do it a bit more than half the time. I know that lemmy benefits from more content and I have had some great discussions, but sometimes it’s just not worth it for me.
How about you? Do you hit publish or cancel more often?
I used to do it a lot.
Typically this would be responding to someone being provocative.
I decided that they were angry people just trying to make other people angry.
So now I write articles mocking them.
I am much more relaxed now.Something akin to 10% of unwritten comments here. 5% are shared between cases when I write it for too long and still can’t see it as a complete thought, or when I get distracted half-way through and can’t care to continue. Other 5% is my stupid phone optimi… pushing apps from memory when I switch to something else (even if it’s for fact-checking this exact comment), so I lose whatever I wrote and the thread itself.
Rarely ever
Probably 50/50. Mostly because I don’t care enough to get in an argument or have to defend what I say.
Simple throwaway comments, observations, generic opinion stuff I’ll just drop it and move on.
Anything I’m really knowledgeable in though, I’ll start and then cancel because there’s always someone who wants to challenge and argue and it’s just exhausting.
I do this all the time. I see so many brainless, low-effort posts all over the internet that I don’t want to add to the pollution with anything I’m not confident is either informative or funny.
But I also want Lemmy to grow and thrive, so here I’ve been making more of an effort to try to finish and post even comments I’m not so certain about. I figure that has to be better for the site than contributing nothing at all.
Sometimes I realize I’m not contributing anything new to the conversation. I just upvote the post that said what I wanted to say and be done with it. Yeah, I could get some upvotes, but what’s the point? It’s not like I can buy things with imaginary points.
It depends how long the comment is. Short comments get past the “dont post it” filter 99% of the time. But long posts give me time to realise i dont care enough to carry on.
Dunno about “we”, but “I” do. I got plenty malice to watch them suffer! MWAHAHAHA [/evil villain laughter]
Serious now: if the person can’t be arsed to help themself, or if their request for help sounds like a demand/whining/passive aggressiveness. A noob saying “pls help how do i shoot web tnx” is 100% fine in my book, a “waah, why isn’t this community helping me? [insert easy-to-websearch question]” is not.
And this happens often?
Can’t recall doing it in Lemmy. But I did all the time in a certain other platform.
I do that often. Sometimes I stop and touch grass and realize I’m being stupid. Other times I realize I’m just wasting time, or just repeating what someone else said. Like yeah, my opinion matches up with someone else’s, but it isn’t helping the discussion any. Or other times I just need to chill from a heated discussion.
But usually the biggest one is when autocorrect is fucking with me and I just don’t have the patience to go back and fix just about every word I just swiped. I figure, if it’s that bad, then it just wasn’t worth posting.
Quite often.
I start organizing my thoughts by writing them down. Then I’ll realize it’s going to be impossible for me to succinctly yet accurately convey my point.
If what I’ve written is too long or too convoluted, I don’t bother posting it, as the intended audience is usually the least likely to actually read it. If what I’ve written has too many caveats or too many points of contention, I don’t bother posting it because I generally don’t have much interest in connecting with pedants or those being intentionally obtuse/ignorant/etc.
Honestly, my experience has been that this place is mostly just a slightly different iteration of the same shit as the alternative it is modeled after when it comes to discourse. And I have minimal interest engaging in much of that. So, definitely more likely to lurk and/or to bail on a response than to actually post here.
I can relate to this so much. I’m active in tech support communities and sometimes there’s so many scenarios involved that being concise, accurate and still trying to sound human is quite difficult.
I’ve been trying to shift my perspective in treating replies as the start of a conversation, where a shorter post with less information or caveats makes more sense to start from so you can narrow down the direction of the comment thread later.
I realize my feelings might be highly specific to support/question threads, but your words really resonated with me regardless.
I’ve been trying to shift my perspective in treating replies as the start of a conversation, where a shorter post with less information or caveats makes more sense to start from so you can narrow down the direction of the comment thread later.
This is how you do it, put the most important details and fill in the rest if it comes up. The more words in a row the less anyone is going to read them.
i have a pretty specific example, but i do this in the comment section on pretty much every post about EVs, because very frequently there’s somebody repeating the lazy myth that oh actually EVs are just as bad as internal combustion engine vehicles because loose awareness of life cycle assessment. people state this all the time as if it’s some kind of philosophical point about the impossibility of technological solutions to climate change, when in actuality it is a quantitative falsehood that is easily disproven with very cursory research, like you can pull up the relevant data from the IEA in like five minutes. ive told this to probably like fifty people, including at my job at an EV company, and it has never once changed their mind, i guess because again people are actually not looking to engage with this point quantitatively. but it still takes me a little while to disengage from my natural inclination to be helpful about something that on its surface is a math question.
I still catch myself in the process of replying to someone who is Wrong On The Internet, but for the most part I just let it go. It still bothers me, but I’ve accepted that nothing I say on a webforum is going to change any hearts or minds. Nowadays I mostly post to try and give people a cheap laugh.
About four words in
Fairly often. I’ll get a sentence out and then
I find people online tend to have a lot more passion for arguing than I do so I often rethink posting any responses I come up with.
This is what I hate the most about the practice of using a very “scorched earth” style of rhetoric focused on shaming and berating and making things uncomfortable for opponents. There’s probably a lot of people with objections but they just don’t feel like dealing with that stuff so they don’t say anything.
