The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
A good friend of mine published their debut novel earlier this week. I was very proud of them, so in my naivety, I decided to break my usual rules against using social media, and look for some early reviews online to see how it was being received.
Mostly I just found banal comments along the lines of "I liked it" here and there, but on Twitter I came across a screed alleging that my friend was a hack and that the novel was completely AI written for absolutely inane reasons.
Honestly, it's been ruining my whole day and I'm not quite sure why; objectively it was probably just some LLM or third world engagement farmer trying to ragebait and get views. Yet, it does feel like we've lost something as a society where incentives to drive engagement are so deeply a race to the bottom that the semantic meaning of writing only matters insofar as much as it evokes emotion and generates clicks, and where it's so easy to counterfeit human effort.
I suppose that on an intellectual level that this was something I always knew was happening to the world, but it does feel worse when it's directly about someone that's close to you.
It's not weird to be upset about it. It sounds like potential libel to me and it could, if it went viral, cause your friend serious reputational damage. The yellow journalism era had exactly the same incentives and produced exactly the same problems.
Yeah, you're right.
Luckily, the post wasn't very popular, but these are the inevitable consequences of a world where the wrong post going viral at the wrong time can ruin the lives of people who did nothing wrong. I don't envy those who need to be publically on the internet for their careers at all.
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