Upon careful analysis of the top posts, I believe lemmy needs more unhinged text posts
man cannot live on memes and news alone. there is a void here. news stories breed reasoned discussion, generally filled with stringent, on topic remarks. memes breed tepid remarks, a step above twitter blue check replies, but little worth reading.
what we need is rants. schizophrenic analysis of an old tv show. schizophrenic analysis of taylor swift's private jet schedule. takes. banter. self-posts, text-posts, and OC content in general.
only about 10% of people in any given community contribute. that means 90% of you are stifling your need to post with other, healthier methods. but i implore: to post is the way. posting is light. posting will bring you a better life, posting will heal your children, grant you a healthy crop, and secure your place in the grand hum of modern discourse
It won't work. I regularly post banter, irony, sarcasm. But it just gets taken too seriously. People accuse me of having an agenda or seriously believing some of the utterly outlandish things I say.
I'll sa stupid shit like "the Java programming language causes cancer" and people will think I'm fucking SERIOUS?!
The other day I said the VERY obviously unserious: "Only bourgeois homosexuals and gentrified lesbians use Wayland".
Bear in mind I'm gay and my that user account has a rainbow flag in it!
One lesbian found it funny and responded. It was mostly downvoted and it lasted 4hrs before getting deleted and my account banned.
I regularly make comments that are blindingly obvious sarcasm - they use utterly ridiculous sentences like the above about "gentrified lesbians".
Everyone takes them seriously. There's absolutely NO fucking humour allowed unless it follows a VERY stale Reddit-esque meme format that people are used to.
When someone said they tried meth once and hated it I replied "Skill issue".
I was battered by downvotes.
Another example: I puffed on a strong vape for the first time one morning and made a WHIMSICAL post of: "WOW! How is nicotine legal!?" - cos it almost knocked me the fuck out. I wasn't serious!
Dog-piled by people saying - "Yeah well alcohol is legal!" or "What's your endgame here? What's the agenda?!". Or "If this is bait, then youâre pretending to be an idiot. If not, youâre an actual idiot."
What's with assuming the fucking worst of everyone's posts?! What happened to "que sera sera"?
"Yes Iâm bragging about fucking my body you well-oiled grape." - -9 downvotes.
"WELL OILED GRAPE!!!" Oh of course I must have absolutely meant that fuckign classic burn. I don't even WTF it would mean if taken seriously.
"But if I dropped you in the Pacific ocean you wouldnât live long." to a "Hydro Homie" espousing the virtues of water. -8 downvotes (fucking sarcasm!)
"The weight of my intellect is a heavy burden to bear." - Obvious fucking sarcasm -8 downvotes
"Java devs are the reason humanity will never have FTL drives." - -3 downvotes. Java devs really have NO sense of fucking humour.
I refuse on principal to add the brain-dead "/s" bollocks for obvious sarcasm. It's not my problem the world is wet lipped and loose knickered.
The entire fediverse is filled with humourless, miserable, cynical wishy-washy cunts who dont' spot sarcasm irony or anything unless it's written in BIG FUCKING CAPITALS.
Someone posted in a UK sub asking if a "Good News UK" community would be good.
I commented something like: "It'd make sense to set up and leave it empty while bloicking any submissions cos there's bugger all good news about this country"
4 DAY BAN but not just from the Good News UK community - from every other community they moderated including the Nature one which pissed me off most of all cos I fucking love British nature!
Hedgehogs are my fave animal and I've nurtered some back to health. I love tits and especially the crested tit.
Heaven forbid anyone leave a wry comment! Christ you'll get banned from fucking everything.
So no, banter is dead. Humour is dead unless it follows a brain-dead Reddit meme everyone understands.
I think wit is hard over text. To you it's obvious you're joking, and that your joke is that this comment is ridiculous.
To others it can read as someone making a joke with little respect for the Original post.
Take the meth one for example, I can see you being downvoted for that if the original post was serious.
The UK one just sounds stupid though, but then again mods of a Lemmy instance are likely to be people that take things (like Reddit fucking their API) quite seriously. This means our population pool may be a little skewed towards the serious.
On the other hand, I've seen lots of humour here. Especially from the AI generated community with their, a'hem, themes.
I feel like lemmy was a lot funner a few months ago. Imo, the weeks between the reddit protests and the actual app ban were peak. People were so optimistic and friendly! It really felt like a better reddit. I know that the honeymoon feeling wouldn't have lasted, but I think the social dynamic here really took a turn for the worse when hexbear first federated. After a few weeks of putting up with them for the sake of giving them a chance, I finally had enough and blocked them, but I feel like their general sense of unhappiness and combativeness has spread. I'm considering laying off this place because it's getting toxic and I don't think it's good for me.
I think I have an idea. When you post/comment, there should be a checkmark for "are you being serious?". The default value should be chosen on a sub-per-sub basis, so all comments non-serious by default on, say, c/memes, and serious on c/news, for example. Then that information should be hidden unless you downvote or reply to a comment/post of the opposite seriousness to the default of the sub you're in (I guess there could also be an option to see the warning always or on demand).
I think I should post this properly somewhere but idk where...
Unfortunately it's because the sheer amount of stupidity in the real world means you can never be sure if someone is being serious. Also unfortunately, when a platform has a wide enough audience there will always be people that have a vested interest in topics no matter how potentially outlandish it might seem. So they will react emotionally to things that for most people aren't that serious. That's just my take though. Also add in trolls and that tops it all off.