Ask Lemmy

Relative to Reddit, probably the number of users. More users means more posts, more comments, more expertise on various areas, and more niche communities that become viable.

Somewhere down the list:

• Extremely determined negativity. There are a lot of...I don't know how to describe it. People who actively try to take the absolute, most utterly-pessimistic read on anything possible, to the point of having to make crazy assumptions to keep some kind of negative perspective on the thing. I don't know if it's people suffering from depression

which I understand can produce that effect

or doomerism or what, but it's exasperating. I haven't run into that sort of phenomenon, certainly not to anything like that degree, on other social media environments that I've used.

• The low-effort "capitalism bad" venting comments. I'm not really into far-left views, but that's not what irks me. I've seen people on here who you can at least talk to about left-wing positions. Like, some random user who is interested in, I don't know, adopting universal basic income and wants to talk about different proposals. But about 99% of the comments I see that contain the word "capitalism" don't amount to that. They're just venting. They aren't constructive. They don't reference any material. They aren't proposing any improvement or ideas or anything. All they want to do is to vent. I mean, it's like someone wanting to complain about their ex or how their sports team lost or something like that. And not only that, but a substantial percentage of those comments are complaining about something that has little to do with capitalism. Instead, it's virtually anything to do with the political or economic world that they don't like relative to some sort of idealized paradigm that they hold. You could use that "everything I don't like is woke" meme about the right, swap "woke" and "capitalism", and I swear, it'd apply to a lot of the comments. And I get that, yeah, one purpose of talking to people is to vent, and so you'd expect that occasionally when people talk to each other, sometimes they're gonna vent. That's human nature. But holy cow, as low-effort venting goes, the "capitalism bad" comments show up as a high proportion here.

  Occasionally I do talk about things, write larger comments about communal ownership. Like...okay, I know that on at least a couple of occasions, I've talked about the fact you've had communal ownership work at small scale, like families, say, or that there have been smaller organizations that have practiced communal ownership of property, and that maybe it'd be interesting to try working up in scale from smaller organizations to try and identify where any issues might crop up. And I have never had anyone actually respond with discussion when I do write something like that. No engagement. Like, it's not as if people have some raging unmet desire to talk about any of that. They just want to complain.

  I don't even see people who are writing "capitalism bad" comments engage in discussion with each other. Like, this isn't Marx and a bunch of activists in a London cafe throwing around ideas with each other. It's just one-off complaints, leaf comments in the thread.