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More actual helpful answers came much later after a ton of sarcastic ones, and people refusing to listen. I'd say early on it was at least 50 percent people bitching or giving otherwise unhelpful answers (like "k custom sweet" is either them being stupid or more likely trying to trick me with a name that doesn't exist, and some people said it's obviously something like a k dark ride when it clearly wasn't. And people saying "k" are probably making a joke, but still, not helpful). But then the massive downvoting of anything I tried to say about the sleeve, and the doubling down or those people antagonizing me because of it, was what really got me down. And also, as I said, this isn't an isolated incident, just the latest. I don't know if you could see some of the earlier ones, because at least some of them were on my previous account, and I also deleted some retroactively to avoid more negative karma.
Edit: oh yeah, also one guy wrote a really nasty reply to my comment that it was from a community kit. He was saying something like "what are you wasting our time here for" etc. but it was only up for a few minutes because someone deleted it. I guess maybe he realized that obviously I was looking to find a similar cymbal. But the fact he even wrote that seemed like the behavior I hate. You see someone who's getting downvoted, therefore he's the villain, therefore pile on and make him feel even worse.
The prevalence of wrong answers is because most people are non-detail-oriented morons. If you ask them to identify a drumstick, they’ll confidently reply with a wildly inaccurate guess. If you ask them to identify a guitar, they’ll declare it to be a model that it clearly isn’t. If you ask, “does anyone know where this building is,” they’ll reply with screenshots of buildings that weren’t even built in the same architectural style. If you spend enough time on sites like this one, it’s easy to forget how stupid the median person is.
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