Just to be clear, thank you to a quality comment when you don’t have anything more to say is fine. The weirdness is when someone responds to every single commenter with something so generic and pointless you aren’t even sure if they’ve actually read the content.

If you genuinely appreciate someone posting, feel free to say thanks. Also this is just one person’s opinion and you should take from it what you find valuable and ignore the rest. No one says this is gospel. 😉

if you seem to be in a place that doesn’t seem like a friendly place to chat, might be a sign to just leave that community and find an appropriate alternative.

This is a really good point. There are places for nuanced discussion of AI, for example, but most of Lemmy hates it. Understand that some stuff isn’t going to be received well in certain places regardless of quality or intent.

If you are a rookie realize that people will judge you for a young account age, since you could be seen as a bot.

Good point. I am wary of accounts that pop into existence and start focusing heavily on a particular agenda. They might be genuine or they might not, but it’s a clear sign for me that I don’t want to engage because they are looking for a pulpit, not a conversation.

I’m not really qualified to respond about creating great discussions because I pretty much just reply. But from the prospective of a participant, yeah I think it’s good to upvote any commenter that isn’t actively being a jerk. Even disagreeing comments can promote good conversation.

I wouldn’t suggest replying to every comment unless it contributes further to the conversation. That’s a judgment call, but posts where OP is replying to everything with “Thanks!” or “Yep” rub me the wrong way. Certainly reply to try to sustain conversation when there is more to discuss, and try to frame it in a way that invites not just the person you’re replying to but anyone to respond.

I think most topics are near death after about a day, but I browse by new and the only time I see more comments on posts I’ve already visited is if I get a reply or I’m looking through my comments later and open the topic to see what people said later. Topics that get more engagement live longer because a lot of people browse by hot.

Low effort to me is posting a link without summary or comment. The reality is unless the headline is a good summary or there is another comment or OP giving some context for why the link is interesting, I never click them, and then I have nothing to comment on either (usually).

Cross posting is fine. It’s slightly annoying when I’m a member of all five boards something is posted to but I’ve gotten accustomed, and sometimes the conversation can be different in different boards.

As far as Lemmiquette, I personally like people who stand by their words rather than deleting things that turn out to be unpopular. I don’t mind being the lone voice of an unpopular opinion. The threat of downvotes just makes me think harder about whether what I want to say is important to say right then and there and if I have time to back up any pushback. I don’t disagree as often as I want to, but I generally don’t delete comments unless it turns out I was really misreading something and responding to something in my own head rather than in the post/comment.

Make sure fediverse links are properly formatted so they go to the user’s instance cache instead of a direct url to the host server.

I am very quick to block folks I don’t think I can have a fruitful conversation with in good faith. I suspect as a poster, one would want to do less blocking than I do, but still I recommend doing it for peace of mind. Negative engagement or returning bad behavior just winds up making you look bad. A block prevents you from being tempted to respond to incendiary comments.

Oh and from personal experience, saying “I agree with 95% of this, but let me respond to this one thing where I disagree” is read as being an absolute refutation and can provoke defensiveness. Try to at least quote some of the stuff that you particularly agree with to take some of the bite out of any disagreement. Some day I’ll learn that better.

Good luck!

Sometimes it’s more than I can take and I take time away from social media. And it’s not lack of caring, it’s just a weariness of feeling helpless. What can men do in the face of such reckless hate? But I can’t do it forever. Evil can’t be left to its own devices.

The Boys Are Back In Town by Thin Lizzy is our song. Has been since after high school and we both joined different military branches. Of course he lives in the Deep South these days and I’m in the far north, so it has been kinda irrelevant for 20 years. But I always think of him when that song comes on. We were close like brothers in high school. I’ve had a couple of good friends since, but no one like him.

I hate iPhone keyboards so much. It’s like they actually hate me. It’s almost enough to make me use voice to text for everything. But I can’t make my brain and mouth work at the same time.

What a wonderful phrase!

Kinda sounds great. I was on a city-based discord server for about a year before I got bored and sick of arguing. I guess I’m technically still on it.

I made some friends. Almost had a couple face to face meets with the idea of exploring actual friendships, but he was more conservative-leaning than I (but very reachable) and kept getting into fights and leaving discord for bouts. He took the “suburbs are evil” crowd a little too seriously.

Not utopian, but having the geographical focus in common and knowing we could meet these folks face to face as we go about our days I think added an honesty and restraint to the interactions.

It also gives it sort of a community extension vibe without the douchebaggery of HOA Facebook groups or corporate bullshit of Ring neighborhoods.

I was closing in on forty before I finally gave up on achieving that. I didn’t even go back to school until I was nearly 30.

Now I’m 52 and I definitely won’t get the salary boost (if any) for long enough to be worth the cost. And anyway I don’t have any more time than I did at any other point in my career and that was the main factor for why I haven’t. In fact, I’ve never worked harder or made as much money or frankly enjoyed myself as much as I have these past few months.

I have, over the course of my career, run into a few jobs that wouldn’t consider your without a degree, but they were few and not even the best places to work in IT — looking really fucking hard at you guys, American automakers.

I don’t gamble with money, only with lives.

Seriously though, I don’t get the allure of sports betting. Or slot machines — which are just very expensive, very boring video games. You might win a couple of bucks, but the house just takes it right back. I’d rather put the same money into a pinball machine. It would take me longer to lose it and I’d have more fun and challenge.

That said, I thought the vote count looked skewed so I threw an upvote because I don’t think the discussion in and off itself is bad. But no, I can’t relate and don’t care to change anyone’s mind.

My first response is yes but it sucked.

But there is a more nuanced response that goes something like we have an obligation to all of our kids and to the point that his dysfunction made us unable to take care of our other kids either directly through time demands or by extension through exhausting us to the point where we couldn’t care for ourselves and thus for them, you have to do a bit of triage.

Who do we have the greater obligation to, a 25 year old man or a 10 and 12 year old? Also he could have spread it around a bit, but he couldn’t be honest with his dad or grandpa what he was going through. He expected us to all but kill ourselves so he could conceal what he was going through from people who wouldn’t understand or would lose respect for him. He expected us to forsake obligations such as work and siblings, which could lead to loss of job and all the itinerant complications of that. That’s all kinda bullshit, right?

Hell he was on our insurance, so losing our jobs would’ve directly harmed him in any event.

TL;DR mental illness.

My son used to have panic attacks. Every time he got in a car, he was convinced they were an undiagnosed heart condition. We spent a couple of hours every single day trying to convince him to go to work, not to call 911, and that he wasn’t going to die. For at least a year to eighteen months, every trip to work or the store or on his way home, we had to be on the phone with him for every mile of the trip.

Sometimes he’d go nonverbal and we’d just have to listen to him hyperventilating. Other times he’d be ranting about how no one took his symptoms seriously, despite getting maybe as many as 3 scans in the emergency room with no finding of anything physically wrong.

We couldn’t go to bed until he got home. We had to wake up for his trip to work. Two hours out of almost every single day. He’d call my wife at work. If she wasn’t available he’d call me. And he would get pissed and tell at my wife if we weren’t available.

Anyway, between therapy and meds, we managed to get over that, but that was so fucking exhausting and frustrating. And the sheer presumption that we had to accommodate him regardless of anything else going on.

My grandson is almost 6 months. My wife and I several times had to take him overnight or even sleep in their guest room so they could sleep. How anyone manages without family support, I have no idea.

Take solace, though. Right now she pretty much only needs to communicate that she is hungry, tired, or need to be changed. Before you know it she will have a lot more to say, but the tools she uses (screaming her head off) stay pretty much the same. Sometimes words give you context clues, but I find most of us lack the self-awareness and emotional regulation required for clear verbal communication until sometime in our thirties or forties.

I think we’d all like to go back to the days when politics was only occasionally interesting.

Shit, I want news to be boring again. I remember when there was just thirty minutes of national news power day from 6 to 6:30. Then local news, and then The Muppet Show to put the world back into proper context.

I don’t believe in an afterlife and I’m not afraid of dying. No copium. My death will be a much bigger problem for those around me than it is for me. My problems will be over.

Now, I have kids and a wife and here and now my death would leave them in a bad situation, and I don’t want that. There are lots of things I’m looking forward to, but if I don’t get them… that’s just life. There are no guarantees and I don’t expect any.

I just don’t want anything lingering or debilitating where I’m a drain on my loved ones. As lonely and horrible as it would be, I would want them to move on and let me go and not take drastic action to spend all their time focused on me.

When I was young I was terrified of dying. Now I’ve accomplished everything that really mattered to me. That’s the big difference to me. I’m satisfied with my life and now I just need to do as much as I can for my family and myself with whatever time I have left.

Definitely don’t do this. Not that you should listen to randos online for life advice, but in this case… no, don’t do this.

‘Amoral’ might be a strong word, but it’s definitely an asshole move. I’d judge someone who did that harshly.

A half dozen daily? All I can say is your perspective strikes me as highly industry-dependent.

I have a bunch but I don’t think I’d recommend any of them, necessarily. Mostly they are familiar names and you either want them or don’t. I do pay for Bit Warden. And I would like to anti-recommend Nord VPN for shitty practices. I donate monthly to my Lemmy server.

That’s about it.

helped me heal a bit

The only way any of us heal.

I wrote parts of the above with tears in my eyes, but a smile on my face — that’s a good summary of how I experience grief. Getting to think and share stories about them was like spending time with an old friend, and I relished the opportunity.

It can be tough to gauge the value of my words because my memories are so personal and what feel like profound moments could feel empty to others far removed, so thanks for saying something. I’m glad my words can help anyone — I think they’d have liked that.