Setting the “US defaultism” (or whatever it’s called) thing aside for the sake of staying on-topic… People on both sides do the TL;DR thing. Sure, more academic/scholarly types tend to lean left, but that doesn’t mean that everyone who leans left is an academic/scholarly type. If you assume that people who do that on Lemmy are MAGA, I’d confidently bet that you’re correct less than 50% of the time (again, that’s not even considering the users outside of the US).
This behavior predates the entire existence of MAGA and the massive divide between right and left. Many pre-2016 e-commerce copywriters would probably know what I’m talking about. For example, Amazon puts those five “About this item” bullet-points near the top of product pages, way above the actual product description. It’s not some politically-driven design; it’s just from research and testing. It’s a very important area when creating an effective Amazon listing, especially the first and last bullet-points – because yes, plenty of people don’t even bother reading all five before quickly scanning the first and last. (Many of them don’t even realize that they do this until someone points it out.)
BTW, insulting people (i.e. saying they’re like MAGA people) is probably a very ineffective strategy for influencing them into reading more of your writings. Again, just basic human behavior stuff (there’s a famous Dale Carnegie book about these things).
At least consume a lot of movies and TV shows, and I mean a lot, all of IMDB’s top 250 movies, shows, animations, even if it’s background noise in a secondary monitor.
Just to add another suggestion to this: Audiobooks while physically busy (driving, exercising, repairing/tinkering with something, etc.)
I don’t disagree with anything you’re saying there. You’re also right about being kind can be more effective, but it has gotten really hard, they successfully wrecked my tolerance. Picture it:
I am chronically online because I am a Mexican who couldn’t go outside because of the insecurity, homicides, narcos. I’d hear gunshots near my house, and I live next to my city’s major residence, just to paint the picture of how bad it was in 2012-2014.
Your grand-grandfather escaped from Lebanon and Gaza, which are currently being invaded. Your small brother has Down Syndrome, he can’t talk, can’t clean himself, can choke on food, and then you see people online wishing people like him didn’t exist just because they make them uncomfortable.
Videogames, the Internet and school were my only human interactions. Parties and hanging out with your friends wasn’t as possible, it was a gamble for your life, one I still took with my cousin, a narcissist junior who’d treat me like a shadow, mock me for being overweight, humiliate me in front of his friend, but would still treat me like a brother in private, I took long to grow respect for myself; would go to sketchy places at 1AM, I didn’t care, but still, that was the vibe for a long time during my childhood and others’. It fucked many of us up.
The “Meta of life” seems to be: the more evil you are, the more rewards. It’s difficult not to lose your mind in a world like that, especially if you have seen nothing but death your whole life, uncensored, on TV, newspapers, and the 5x times amount of weirdos at school who’d come and show you an illegal video, a snuff film of a kid our age getting beheaded just to be edgy and say they can handle it. For every weirdo like that you had in your school, we had five because we were seeing fucked up shit on the news, at home, and in social medias too, people taking photos of recent shootings or events. Always graphic. I compared that to how America reports homicides, say a school shooting, and they were lucky they are more censored and prude, they’d blur things more. Ours didn’t give a fuck for years. For empathetic people is worse, we can “feel” the pain more vividly of the people in the videos. I even had to see my middle school Spanish teacher dead in her car next to her son whom I had personally talked to at school, both filled with bullet holes. Apparently her husband was involved in sketchy shit, she had botox in all her face, she was mean, but I still felt disgustingly bad seeing that ending for them, in a newspaper, uncensored.
Lost faith in my government. I think the US has a lot of influence over it, so I thought paying attention to US’ politics is more productive to us, even if I get belittled for trying to opine about it without living there. I used to admire the US, I would hate whoever they hated, but ever since the “grab them by the pussy” scandal in 2016, I have encountered nothing but hate, anger, insults, even while I was very kind, everyday, even in irrelevant places like an Overwatch or CoD match. If I speak in the mic, I attract a lot of racists because of my accent. I have my mic disconnected now, for everything I play, I don’t socialize anymore, I play solo. They started with the “snowflake” insult because we were being “too nice” and so on… It’s been a whole decade of disappointment and injustice after disappointment and injustice like that, and I can’t just tune out and ignore it, my country is on fire everywhere I go. “Politics” forced its way inside our home long ago, and dude’s still here, emptying our fridge. We can’t do anything about it, because violence is bad, we keep getting told. We have to curl into a ball and take it all in. No matter how hard we try the legal way, these wages and opportunities are going to kill us very slowly and silently, with a mediocre conformist life.
The bar increasingly amped up, it really sucks. It’s hard for me to not feel a lot of anger when I see even the slightest bit of red anymore, I really hate it, I used to be super chill, I had a YouTube channel where I made people laugh with goofy ass animations, my weird accent and nothing else. I still love being goofy, but fuck, I think they successfully depressed a lot of people with their doomscrolling algorithms and bots. I don’t see the endgame of that, I refuse to believe they want us to attack them, because that’s what it feels like: they are provoking us, laughing in our faces, especially with the Jeffrey files thing. I don’t get it. Are they pulling an Ozymandias from Watchmen or what? They aren’t that smart, or that benevolent. It has to be excessive narcissism, they don’t sound that different from an insecure childish narco who will happily blow your head off just for rubbing them off a little. Homelander, literally.
Even when I summarize, they will shit on the ideas and intent. I do still keep it short and kinder in other platforms, like YouTube. It’s only in Reddit and Lemmy where I write this long, I don’t know why, I always saw these online forums as that. 4chan (have never used it, but have seen posts), general forums from the 90s, etc. sometimes had sizeable walls of text.
All I’m gonna opine last is: I believe we should somehow convince people of reading more. That’s it. An educated society is what they fear the most. I will try and do better, get up again if I fail. I am betting on “humiliate people who believe might makes right,” which are most of the Alpha Male type of people, right-wings who think they are winning, but still can’t afford a family. There are plenty of those here in Lemmy, but yeah, they are rare. I am wasting these on people who don’t deserve this level of flak or anger, I will leave, I already said everything I could say in Lemmy anyway. To keep repeating it is just going to be pointless. I will try and rely on short one-line jokes again, these didn’t work.
Setting the “US defaultism” (or whatever it’s called) thing aside for the sake of staying on-topic… People on both sides do the TL;DR thing. Sure, more academic/scholarly types tend to lean left, but that doesn’t mean that everyone who leans left is an academic/scholarly type. If you assume that people who do that on Lemmy are MAGA, I’d confidently bet that you’re correct less than 50% of the time (again, that’s not even considering the users outside of the US).
This behavior predates the entire existence of MAGA and the massive divide between right and left. Many pre-2016 e-commerce copywriters would probably know what I’m talking about. For example, Amazon puts those five “About this item” bullet-points near the top of product pages, way above the actual product description. It’s not some politically-driven design; it’s just from research and testing. It’s a very important area when creating an effective Amazon listing, especially the first and last bullet-points – because yes, plenty of people don’t even bother reading all five before quickly scanning the first and last. (Many of them don’t even realize that they do this until someone points it out.)
BTW, insulting people (i.e. saying they’re like MAGA people) is probably a very ineffective strategy for influencing them into reading more of your writings. Again, just basic human behavior stuff (there’s a famous Dale Carnegie book about these things).
Just to add another suggestion to this: Audiobooks while physically busy (driving, exercising, repairing/tinkering with something, etc.)
I don’t disagree with anything you’re saying there. You’re also right about being kind can be more effective, but it has gotten really hard, they successfully wrecked my tolerance. Picture it:
I am chronically online because I am a Mexican who couldn’t go outside because of the insecurity, homicides, narcos. I’d hear gunshots near my house, and I live next to my city’s major residence, just to paint the picture of how bad it was in 2012-2014.
Your grand-grandfather escaped from Lebanon and Gaza, which are currently being invaded. Your small brother has Down Syndrome, he can’t talk, can’t clean himself, can choke on food, and then you see people online wishing people like him didn’t exist just because they make them uncomfortable.
Videogames, the Internet and school were my only human interactions. Parties and hanging out with your friends wasn’t as possible, it was a gamble for your life, one I still took with my cousin, a narcissist junior who’d treat me like a shadow, mock me for being overweight, humiliate me in front of his friend, but would still treat me like a brother in private, I took long to grow respect for myself; would go to sketchy places at 1AM, I didn’t care, but still, that was the vibe for a long time during my childhood and others’. It fucked many of us up.
The “Meta of life” seems to be: the more evil you are, the more rewards. It’s difficult not to lose your mind in a world like that, especially if you have seen nothing but death your whole life, uncensored, on TV, newspapers, and the 5x times amount of weirdos at school who’d come and show you an illegal video, a snuff film of a kid our age getting beheaded just to be edgy and say they can handle it. For every weirdo like that you had in your school, we had five because we were seeing fucked up shit on the news, at home, and in social medias too, people taking photos of recent shootings or events. Always graphic. I compared that to how America reports homicides, say a school shooting, and they were lucky they are more censored and prude, they’d blur things more. Ours didn’t give a fuck for years. For empathetic people is worse, we can “feel” the pain more vividly of the people in the videos. I even had to see my middle school Spanish teacher dead in her car next to her son whom I had personally talked to at school, both filled with bullet holes. Apparently her husband was involved in sketchy shit, she had botox in all her face, she was mean, but I still felt disgustingly bad seeing that ending for them, in a newspaper, uncensored.
Lost faith in my government. I think the US has a lot of influence over it, so I thought paying attention to US’ politics is more productive to us, even if I get belittled for trying to opine about it without living there. I used to admire the US, I would hate whoever they hated, but ever since the “grab them by the pussy” scandal in 2016, I have encountered nothing but hate, anger, insults, even while I was very kind, everyday, even in irrelevant places like an Overwatch or CoD match. If I speak in the mic, I attract a lot of racists because of my accent. I have my mic disconnected now, for everything I play, I don’t socialize anymore, I play solo. They started with the “snowflake” insult because we were being “too nice” and so on… It’s been a whole decade of disappointment and injustice after disappointment and injustice like that, and I can’t just tune out and ignore it, my country is on fire everywhere I go. “Politics” forced its way inside our home long ago, and dude’s still here, emptying our fridge. We can’t do anything about it, because violence is bad, we keep getting told. We have to curl into a ball and take it all in. No matter how hard we try the legal way, these wages and opportunities are going to kill us very slowly and silently, with a mediocre conformist life.
The bar increasingly amped up, it really sucks. It’s hard for me to not feel a lot of anger when I see even the slightest bit of red anymore, I really hate it, I used to be super chill, I had a YouTube channel where I made people laugh with goofy ass animations, my weird accent and nothing else. I still love being goofy, but fuck, I think they successfully depressed a lot of people with their doomscrolling algorithms and bots. I don’t see the endgame of that, I refuse to believe they want us to attack them, because that’s what it feels like: they are provoking us, laughing in our faces, especially with the Jeffrey files thing. I don’t get it. Are they pulling an Ozymandias from Watchmen or what? They aren’t that smart, or that benevolent. It has to be excessive narcissism, they don’t sound that different from an insecure childish narco who will happily blow your head off just for rubbing them off a little. Homelander, literally.
Even when I summarize, they will shit on the ideas and intent. I do still keep it short and kinder in other platforms, like YouTube. It’s only in Reddit and Lemmy where I write this long, I don’t know why, I always saw these online forums as that. 4chan (have never used it, but have seen posts), general forums from the 90s, etc. sometimes had sizeable walls of text.
All I’m gonna opine last is: I believe we should somehow convince people of reading more. That’s it. An educated society is what they fear the most. I will try and do better, get up again if I fail. I am betting on “humiliate people who believe might makes right,” which are most of the Alpha Male type of people, right-wings who think they are winning, but still can’t afford a family. There are plenty of those here in Lemmy, but yeah, they are rare. I am wasting these on people who don’t deserve this level of flak or anger, I will leave, I already said everything I could say in Lemmy anyway. To keep repeating it is just going to be pointless. I will try and rely on short one-line jokes again, these didn’t work.