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I like the idea of this place, I really do, but why do people write such long posts. It strikes me as quite obnoxious. Don't you get bored of writing and reading so much text?
You're aware of nonfiction books, or academic journals, right? Finishing one of those takes a few hours, and many academics dedicate their entire lives to poring over and gleaning information from texts. And they're both much more popular and wordier than we are.
"I like the idea of music, but why do people listen to so many different songs? It just seems boring.". "I like the idea of talking to people, but - for more than a few minutes each day? Why bother? People aren't that interesting, my time is valuable."
Text is the same as written speech, and speech can do all sorts of useful things. Exactingly make an argument. Tell an interesting story. Communicate something subtle via examples. Dig into something you're uncertain about. Elaborate precisely why something is true, creating jumping-off points for disagreement. I can just say "trans is bad" and my opponent can say "trans is good" and we can lock antlers and grunt, or I can detail how and why I think that, and then find out where I might be wrong.
And maybe we are too wordy - but your question's clearly not enough. What is boring about our precise flavor of 'so much text'? A lot of things are made of lots of words, what's different about us?
Replying at the tail to these comments, which I've appreciated. Obviously nothing wrong with people's preferences and of course nuanced and complex ideas take time. I mean I write out some fairly lengthy ones myself, just if most of them lengthy walls of text, then quite intimidating. Maybe sometimes less is more, might it be just a habit of the community, as alluded to?
Every forum discussing politics that isn't wordy gets very unpleasant very fast. In the spirit of this subthread, I'll refrain from theoryposting why that might be.
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