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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Hey Wellness Wednesday, I've completely lost faith in the motte this week. See I've used "I think I fucked up my niece/nephew by playing a single song/tv show/movie" as a premise about a dozen times over the course of my life, and the only time it was taken seriously was with a group of college freshmen. Everyone else immediately understood that it was a premise, because you would have to be totally disconnected from reality to think a single piece of media reshaped someone's entire worldview. 100% disconnected, Being There disconnected.
But the thing is, I know the motte isn't full of freshmen, it's full of gen xers and millenials. And yet posting here was the second time my ridiculous premise was taken seriously. I used to make jokes 10 times as convoluted on /r/cwr and everyone got them, and when I'd do one on the motte I'd get accused of going for cheap laughs!
So it brought to mind a lot of other things I have noticed over the past few months, which can be summed up like this - I no longer believe I am stupider than the average motter. But, and this is the important part - I still know I'm a fucking idiot. Half of the cwr threads might as well be written by markov bots these days, there are still quite a few insightful comments every week, but so much of the rest is just rote bullshit. Just everyone talking down to each other, using passive aggressive laziness to evade the modhats - but not even making it entertaining, it's just talking points vs talking points.
I want to feel stupid again. I want to have to bring my a-game again. I don't know how to make that happen.
I'm going to chime in, too, because I was looking at this before nara, dammit!
I can't tell how many levels of irony you're on. It's kind of a moot point, given the "speaking plainly" rule. I don't have any reason to believe that you're trying to pull one over on those dumb idiots who can't comprehend your humor. And yet, users dipping into farce have a strange tendency to push that boundary. Please don't give me such a reason.
It was the Friday fun thread. I don't want anyone to feel bad in the Friday fun thread. This is not a speak plainly issue because the joke was only, in my eyes, a clear cut example of the issue of surface level engagement. It was in itself not a big deal, but it both made me think of a problem I had seen more and more and appeared to be a perfect example of it.
I made a mistake in this Wellness post. I forgot how highly smart people value their intelligence, and so my claim that I no longer felt stupid here is all anyone can focus on and has caused great injury. I am sorry. You should probably mod me. Threatening to shut down analogies and metaphors on the speak plainly rule is absurd.
You've missed the point of why people are upset with you and I honestly can't tell if you genuinely don't see it, or if you're trolling. People aren't annoyed because you said that the posts here are getting less intelligent. They are annoyed because you are using people's good-faith responses to your Friday Fun post as some kind of gotcha.
Your actions here, simply put, come across like you were setting out to pick on people from the beginning. Of course nobody likes that. If you simply had posted about how you felt like the posts here have gone downhill (and left the movie thread out of it entirely), nobody would be upset.
I can get thoughtless good faith responses from reddit or Facebook or a million billion other places.
Really? Which ones? The action where I mentioned being a fan of two of the posters who misunderstood? The action where I said I don't think people are actually less intelligent, but behaving less intelligently? The action where I said the problem is people are retreating from their humanity out of fear and complacency? Or is it just the action in the op where I impugned people's intelligence?
I genuinely can't see it. I expected people to be upset with me, but I didn't expect this level of upset, with cjets mantra of mod vengeance and so on - it genuinely looks to me like narcissistic injury (as in identity injuring, not implying narcissism). The conflict I was expecting was for people to bring up examples of times I have been guilty of using semantics and passive aggression to avoid actually engaging, because they absolutely exist. Is any critical comment a gotcha now? Can we not just say "yeah that was dumb, we need to get our act together" Not to mention if I brought it up without an example it would have been immediately dismissed as a strawman.
For what it's worth I agree, some people were made a fool of and aren't taking it well. I don't see why your statements should be modded here or there. I responded as though the question were a serious premise, though if it were the question under discussion I would have argued the premise.
Part of the problem might be people getting used to truly insane posters, who have become legendary around here in some cases, and as a result responses were tough to nail down tone for. Is believing Fight Club might brainwash your teenager more or less crazy than any other aspect of American politics at this point, though it may represent a decline for this particular board?
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Not to pile in, but people are trying to give you thoughtful good-faith responses. The expectation of good faith is one of the things that separates the Motte from most of the rest of the internet; I really don't want to try and dissect exactly which bits of people's posts are truthful and which bits are jokes, ironies, or falsities for the purpose of eliciting a reaction. Especially when many of us come from quite different cultures.
I really think this is just a cultural expectation that's being violated. Maybe as we move off reddit our demographics have changed? Personally I value sincerity and prefer to be straightforward when discussing things; a friend enjoys being gratuitously rude in order (he says) to shock out a reaction and that doesn't sit well with me at all.
I would have appreciated the pile in earlier, I don't know why anyone would think I wasn't expecting pushback, if everyone agreed with me there wouldn't be a problem because everyone would have also decided to make an effort to understand every post they reply to at the start of the year.
But I have learned my lesson now. I was picking on people and no I don't get to find out how I should just shut up already. This is fine.
For what it’s worth, I have caught myself deleting posts a couple of times because I responded to what I thought someone was saying rather than reading their post properly. I’ll try to be more careful.
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I'm not really interested in hearing your defenses. What I said is how your post came across to me, regardless of whether you think it should have come across that way. I can't speak for others, but you certainly rubbed them the wrong way and I would guess it's for similar reasons. If I were you, I would walk away from this one and simply accept that it didn't go over how you thought it would, rather than trying to defend yourself.
Yes, less engagement is what this place needs.
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