this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
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Asklemmy

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Just as the title asks I've noticed a very sharp increase in people just straight up not comprehending what they're reading.

They'll read it and despite all the information being there, if it's even slightly out of line from the most straightforward sentence structure, they act like it's complete gibberish or indecipherable.

Has anyone else noticed this? Because honestly it's making me lose my fucking mind.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 169 points 1 year ago (35 children)

I'm afraid there's nothing new about this, it has been going on for a long time. What I do believe is happening is now that every idiot with a cell phone can jump of sites like lemmy or reddit, we are simply seeing a lot more examples of the problem. Pretty much like when camcorders became affordable to the general public, we suddenly saw all kinds of police brutality videos and some people thought this must be a recent trend when in fact it had been occurring all along.

[โ€“] [email protected] 76 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (34 children)

One of my last comments on Reddit was about this.

The biggest difference I've noticed is that people have stopped reading sentences. They'll read all the words and then upvote based on the feeling those individual words give them. They won't consider the meaning of all those words put together.

And yeah, "upvote does not mean agree" is something Reddit has always struggled with, but it has definitely had exponential growth lately.

It has made me start writing more clearly. There are comments I've written that have been wildly misinterpreted from my actual meaning. Part of that is that I tend towards sarcasm, and it doesn't translate well over the internet no matter how absurd I get with it. But I've also started aiming to use more simple sentence structure.

[โ€“] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

One of my favorite Redditisms was picking out incredibly obvious sarcasm with massive downvotes. Bonus points if replied to with a huge angry essay.

And due to the voting patterns, I learned to be suspicious of my own comments that were highly upvoted. I started to see it as a bad smell. My best work was the controversial stuff.

[โ€“] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

My biggest upvotes were always jokes. If I tried to make reasonable points about anything, or god forbid, shared my experiences - I was downvoted into oblivion and people would actively comment to tell me how much they hated my way of thinking or just repeat to me that I need therapy as if going to therapy harder was some how the answer.

[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Excuse me but you are interrupting my dopamine flow. Your response appears to be neither a meme, rage bait, justice boner, nor even a pun. I hope you learn from this experience and do better.

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

"do better" is my personal ragebait.

So many people where I live over use that shit.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If I tried to make reasonable points about anything, or god forbid, shared my experiences - I was downvoted into oblivion

Introducing quotes from authors that were related to the subject would really show how people were locked in the context of media immediacy, the environment. Links to outside citations would almost always generate replies from people who obviously did not study the citation and just wanted to respond back.

It used to be something people said 'out loud' about people not reading links and just commenting... then it just became normalized.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

oh yeah the good ol' [citation needed] meme even though they were already given a damn citation.

Such an obvious sign of someone just responding to respond. Relies on repeating memes as a crutch and can't have a real discussion about a a topic.

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