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No, it’s not a joke. I’m frustrated and I’m probably not choosing my words carefully.
This community has had steadily falling engagement - our last 3 weekly threads have had a grand total of 1 (excellent and well-articulated) response, and the number of topics not generated by myself (or the other mod) since the inception of the community has also been 1.
Very few people want to actually talk. From what I’ve seen, the masses want the same things that they wanted on Reddit:
- Memes
- Articles they don’t read (but will bitch about endlessly) that reinforce their opinion
- Angry responses to someone (who may be trolling) that reinforce the current politics of the reader (that they couldn’t have given a fuck about a few years ago until it became heavily politicized)
- Shitty easy jokes
- Personal politics circlejerking
I hate that I can see a hundredth point-free meme post and view 200 replies on it. I hate that it’s just the same talking points being strawmanned over and over again in every thread. I hate that any point outside common groupthink is downvoted to oblivion and buried instead of discussed.
The reason I’d like to back away from Lemmy seems to be the same reason I started this community: we need more people who can articulate points, and less downvoting, but it doesn’t seem to be getting better.
Maybe one day, but today is not that day. Lemmy needs to mature in more ways than one.
I have to admit that as, I think, the author of that 1 response, I found the utter lack of engagement to the points I made rather dispiriting. It definitely coloured my decision not to reply to the next one (well, that and me not being boots on the ground in USAville, so not having a meaningful opinion to warrant a full-on response vis a vis division).
I tend to agree with you on what Lemmy contains. Especially #5. As a result I’m probably going to drop Lemmy entirely from my list of sites to visit.
Yeah, I should have replied, but last week was one of the busiest weeks I’ve had. My apologies. The response was great and definitely deserved more people engaging with it.
I’m not American either, but the division seems to be a worldwide phenomenon. It’s definitely in Canada where I am and seems to be feeding off the American version.
Every social change in the USA is mirrored by a later Canadian one. The worse the change, the faster the mirroring.
For example women’s suffrage started off in bits and pieces in the USA in Colorado in 1893, culminating in full, universal suffrage in the USA (without property restrictions, etc.) in 1920. It took until the 1950s to get approximately that level of women’s suffrage in Canada, and that in a really bizarrely fragmented process. A completely unified approach didn’t happen until 1999 (!).
On the other hand the current split between Nazis (I refuse to call them “conservatives” because they’re not “conserving” anything!) and normal people is something that really came to a head in the USA in 2008 and started happening in Canada c.2012.
Bad social ideas get imported from the USA a good ten times or more faster than good ones.
You can see similar dynamics appearing in things like the respective nations’ “Yellow Peril” laws. (And keep in mind that the last vestiges of the USA’s “Yellow Peril” laws were finally removed in the 1970s… while I was alive! Took Canada a bit longer to match that, as usual, though Canada was practically alongside the USA in starting them.))