I truly don't want to come off as really mean, but it's so bizarre to see the glut of folks on social media with nothing to contribute and the seemingly pervasive idea that every post they see online is directed toward *them* personally
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there are like 500 ways to turn "never seen it" into an actual conversation starter and actually encourage engagement with and conversation with other people.
I think on some level it's also a failure to fully imagine that the OP is a person, and that the post isn't simply a disconnected bit of information floating around online. They know that, of course, but they allow themselves to react without thinking about it. Stream of consciousness replies.
I’m not so sure about the not thinking about op as a person part.
🥺 was I not supposed to respond to this? Was this just supposed to be information floating around on the internet 🥺
If you didn't have anything to say, yeah. The example in Sarah's post is something that if you don't have anything to say about, you can absolutely just let go. "Never seen it" is practically a non sequitor and doesn't add anything to the conversation, it comes across as a dismissal of the topic.
It would be different if she was speaking to you, personally, one-on-one, and you were admitting you had nothing to say about the subject, but she wasn't.
It's up there for me with people who comment on recipes with like "I didn't have flour so I used oatmeal and it was awful. I give this recipe 1 out of 5 stars"
None of the people on my stimulation rectangle are real. I have read seven articles about dead Internet theory and simulation theory and am now fully convinced that I am The only Human in the world. Which means I can be mean to others without consequence, yippee!!!!
Yes, and- I think we raised a lot of people on the idea that EVERY post is a request for dialogue, and EVERY thought is one to be shared. "I have nothing to say, but I know I'm supposed to, so..."
That's my impression too. They're people who's whole identity is being a customer and they don't even realize that there's a person on the other end. I'm tempted to think they're all bots but being consumed by clientelism is just as likely.
why is this a bad response? they didn't see it so where is the problem? I'm actually curious because it seems there is some missing context here i am not seeing
It adds nothing to the conversation and comes off as dismissive. If the commenter was actually interested, they could ask what the show's about. While that's easily searchable info, it at least opens up a dialogue. If they're not interested, and have nothing to contribute, then why comment at all?
they just want to talk? People talk. I don't know xD. But really the last thing i would think of is that was dismissive, wonder why really. Like when you hang around with people and someone says 'i've seen the new Alien movie at the theater' and someone goes 'never seen it', pretty normal imo
It's just inserting yourself in a conversation just to say "I have nothing to say." Like if your friend is talking about Alien they are talking TO YOU about it. This is like if your friend is talking about Alien and a random guy crosses the street to walk up and say "never seen it." Nobody asked.
Before I expanded the image I thought you were making a joke about being a worker in Severance. Like your "innie" made the first post and then your "outie" finished the post.
It reminds me of those Google reviews for locations where people will just go "I didn't go here..." or "Google told me to review this" like people just see a prompt on their phone and instantly respond without stopping to consider if it's relevant to them
I don't know you, Sarah. How are you talking to me in my house? I'm calling the police! [confused Facebook user noises interspersed with calamitous farting]
I have to wonder if this is people whose only social media experience is, specifically, Facebook, like people who are only used to seeing content from people they know irl. Who's to say
I feel like a very formative experience for online communication was spending time on forums with rules like "no low effort replies" & actually enforcing civility.
Having my posts deleted with "please rephrase that" was such a shift for 12 yr old me like ??? wait I have to think about how I speak!?
I fully expect to look at this person's other comments to find all of them in replies to things that appeared on their Discover page. "Who are you" "I don't know you" "What is that" "Amen 🙏"
i have definitely noticed a big uptick in facebookers fleeing meta (especially after its terrible recent rules update) and aside from bringing some of the most cursed political opinions with them they also just plain seem to be the biggest social media boomers
My experience with the internet in general, including pre-social-media, is that there has always been a population of people who assume that they are the center of the universe (or, more charitably, their own universe) and therefore it's of value for them to comment any time they feel moved to.
Even when that contribution is pointless, or uninformed, or meaningless, or irrelevant to anyone but them, or just contrarian. (I never saw that! I don't like it! Me, too! Look at my website! Click on my fundraiser!)
Facebook doesn't even show people you know anymore! Or even pages you follow! Last time I logged on my feed was about 75% shit I don't have any interest in but the algorithm thought I would like.
It's last good use was keeping up with relatives and now you can't even do that.
This might be the key- Facebook taught people to comment on posts from friends as if the two of you were having a conversation IRL. Then it took that same platform and shifted their feeds to mostly people and pages they don't know...
.. but any active user now probably still comments the same way.
This used to be an *extremely* common problem for older PC users in the 90s and early 2000s, when their kids introduced them to the idea of AIM and other direct message services where, yes, everything was directed at the user. They'd join an IRC chat or something and end up terribly confused.
Me looking at the screenshot thinking it was a Severance joke like the reply was the outie 🙃 Severance is really good, it may have broken my brain a little
sarah you're a kinder person than i am because i absolutely would bully someone for leaving a comment like that. at least in the sense that i'd want metaphorical water splashed in their face. im all for prompting people like that to actually think about the thoughtless comments they leave everywhere
A good chance they won't ever see it though if they're algo-pilled and you are inviting abuse on them if you make their id public, so I understand why Sarah doesn't.
Parasocial interaction is the closest to social interaction some folk get. Capitalist isolation and alienation is absolutely a thing. When you don't have a network of people you can connect and interact with then you start to reach out to try and form connections with anyone you can.
I wouldn't at all be surprised if it's something along the lines of either "Culture Shock" or "Off-Main Protagonism". The Discover tab being a random assortment of posts from users, unlike an auto-currated one from BirdApp or between friends and family on FB, makes it a VERY open forum.
I'd put my money on the latter, since asking a friend seems more natural to get an answered response, not realizing they're nosing in on a conversation with another just to go "idk" and walking off, leaving them dumb-founded.
I wonder if it's an adaptation "Oh shit people think I'm unsocial if I don't reply (and there will be consequences such as bullying) so I have to say something", but then it just fails at the second hurdle of being relevant/allowing for actual conversation. There's a good comic about it...
..here https://schnumn.com/sensory , second from the top, Autism and Conversational Processing. It's quite a resource to give people with this kind of issue (also I just really enjoyed reading Sensory and want to share it with the world.)
I am also always infuriated by this. Especially when you’re talking about something specifically and someone goes “I don’t know what you’re talking about?” Like…okay, cool? I’m not the context fairy, Google it.
Genuinely think it's a solipsism problem. I see it all the time on Amazon listings where -someone- is clearly asking a question and there are clearly answers from -other people-, and they somehow think "ah, this question that's already been answered by multiple people must have been directed at me!"
i imagine part of the problem with that is that amazon will occasionally email you to ask you to answer a question about an item. finding the “i don’t know” button is out of scope for some people.
I know people who do this, and one in particular who doesn't seem to have seen, heard or done anything ever in their entire life, but still feels the need to let you know they haven't seen, heard or done the thing you are currently talking about in the group chat lol
this at least sometimes has an excuse because google will send you an email explicitly to you asking how your experience was at somewhere it saw you at in google maps if you don't turn off that setting
google will then post the response to that email as a review
This is less related to the original post and more to this one, but there's a local Indian restaurant near me that has all perfect 5 star reviews except for one asshole who gave it a 1 star and said "food was excellent, but no one deserves 5 stars"
I really hate that this has for some reason become a common thought process among people. They think that 5 stars means absolute perfection so nothing should be 5 stars. Even if they can’t think of anything wrong they just can’t accept it as perfect since “nothing is perfect.” You literally like it!
It’s ridiculous because they’re just trying to make big dent in the overall rating instead of being honest about their own rating. They want the whole thing to drop to the 3-4 stars they think it should have, so they go as negative as they can. It sucks 😔
I used to think it was just old people who can't tell the difference between a text from a family member and a social media post but surely it's just gotta be bots, right?
I feel like it’s not hard to just say “oh I haven’t seen that yet maybe I’ll check it out now” but everyone feels like they have to take everything so personally
maybe it's like the legal advice platform i was on, where lawyers were answering that they didn't know.. and a friend told me it's most likely just boomer lawyers getting automatic emails for new questions and they think it's personally addressed to them so they respond to the email. idk, prolly not
The most diabolical instance of this is having a tech problem and searching through a help thread but the only replies are "I am also having this issue"
Why do you feel like everyone needs to "contribute"? Idk I personally try to only get bothered by people if they're somehow actively making things worse for me. Reality is demanding enough without me demanding additional things from others I don't really need.
I think part of it is people who feel every message or post requires their input.
I was watching a stream and asked in the chat "Hey what song is this it's really good." First response, almost immediately, "IDK Shazam it or something"
Like, why did they respond if they didn't know the answer...
Nothing about your observation here is mean.
It is not only true, it's one of the main reasons for our utterly pathological, diseased, abysmally ignorant 'society' now.
The terminally-online are the morons who vote for things like dRUMPf.
And? Why are you going out of your way to tell me this? Just because I have nothing to add doesn't mean I'm going to feel any better about myself. Of *course* I'm going to take it out on you.
Oh, and I turned on my adblovk to read this. AND i left a dislike. Keep it up and you're losing a viewer.
This is especially amazing with amazon's questions about the product, where people would post things like "no idea, gave it away as a gift" as responses.
Some people just don't distinguish between a personal text message coming to them and any other text appearing on their screen.
The term for this sort of thinking, the tendency to not realize that one's self is not the only person that exists and that is not the centre of the world, is "egocentric".
Bruh this gets to me so bad. I'm in a Facebook Group Chat for a game I like and this happens twice a day:
Person A: Hey, *asks a question*
Person B (NOT IN THE MIDDLE OF A CONVERSATION I WILL CLARIFY): I don't know sorry
like THEY ASKED THEM SPECIFICALLY?
I feel this when I post a positive/upbeat post about enjoying something. "I just watched this thing and I loved it!" And someone has to respond, "I hated that, it was had cause of these reasons", and I just think, okay, neat, go away.
I have an older relative who thought everything on her Facebook feed was literally messaged to her. I'd occasionally talk about anime or video games on there and I think she was really confused as to why I would send it to her. Some people still really do not understand how the Internet works.
…Doesn't that also apply to reposts?
It could be another parasocial phenomoneon (sp?); I'd like to look into how much study has been done about the psychology/neurology of "parasocial" behaviors, when I get a chance (moments like these might already be considered or under consideration)…
Yeah this is the stuff I really hate. Like thank you for telling me that you haven't seen it, did you have some actual engagement you want to bring or? This pairing with the whole world saying their opinions as though they are fact which makes them all look so terrible.
i think it's because we are social creatures and thus feel the need to chip in, even when there's no reason to. it's like a gut instinct, like "Shit, someone said something, I SHOULD say something, too, I HAVE to!", even when there's nothing to say.
It's weird to add that and nothing else. Like I've never seen it either but if I was operating under the pretence that the comment was directed at me I'd at least wanna ask more or something
Though equally bad is finding a reddit thread where somebody is struggling with your exact problem, sveral suggestions are made that do not solve it, only for the original poster to go "never mind I solved it" WITHOUT PROVIDING THE SOLUTION.
this is exactly how my grandmother treats her Facebook feed, but I can only assume the majority of these people are not in fact 75-year-old lead-poisoned boomers?
Out of morbid curiosity I clicked on a profile replying to NSFW art with just "Ewww" to see who even bothers leaving comments like that, and it's clearly a Facebook poster who is getting stunlocked by his feed feeding him NSFW art/men posting their own nudes and having no idea how to turn it off
I don't know if THIS account is a bot but this reminds me of a video I saw when Drew Gooden looks at the AI comment reply function on YT and a large amount of the automated replies were "I don't know anything about that/ I don't know what you're talking about/ I haven't heard of that" etc
I feel like if they wanted to start a discussion, they should've followed-up "never seen it" with a question like "Where can I go watch it?" or "What did you like about it?", ya know?
been thinking about the way people interact here a while and it seems like after the election we got a wave of people who for the most part have only ever used facebook and have this sorta mentality of “i should comment on everything”
Some of them are actually AI bots configured to find random posts to be contrary about and nothing else. Ever since I spotted one, I immediately blocked any randos behaving that way ever since, because its either a bot or a person comfortable being very weird towards a stranger.
the weird thing is that they're not made to follow each other or they follow each other in absurd amounts, so they'll always either have 10 follows or 10 thousand.
guess whoever was making them fired them off and wasn't sure how big bluesky was going to be? they're working as intended I guess
On the other end of the spectrum there's the people who make a post and then when you reply they get mad at you ("who asked?") As if they didn't want you to comment and just wanted a soapbox.
Some people (especially younger) have 0 social skills and it REALLY shows.
My pet peeve is similar, when I contribute to a joke by "yes and-ing," only for the OP to snarkily fact-check my joke and say I'm wrong, or get mad in some other way. It's happened more than once to me with large accounts here 🤷♀️
The other day someone got mad at me on here because I expressed the idea that they deserve a better world. Somehow it was interpreted as me "correcting" something they'd said. Which I sure didn't.
What is and isn't an extraordinarily obvious joke is a dangerous game to play on here, as for every such one, you have two people doing the same, but serious.
(Also, doing the exact same thing the OP is complaining about is always a bit of a dick move.)
People who post like this don't do it because they want their reply to be seen - they do it because they want/expect replies like this on their own posts. 'Love Languages' for posting
it's fucking annoying how every comment section for science news posts has these annoying fucking libs going on about trump/musk for completely unrelated reasons, wtf do neutrinos and quantum entanglement have to do with any of those people..jfc
Bluesky devs finally, like just a few hours ago, made it so you can turn off replies from people that don't follow you. I think it might be the only thing to make an impact on some of the extremely weird replies that have started since twitter started to exodus.
Dying to understand the person who follows Todd in the Shadows (presumably on purpose) and whose response to that question is something like that instead of "Oh, does Lady Gaga have a new song? I should go see!" like mine was when I saw that tweet lol.
if you’re still taking feedback on that one, I liked the song. I’m a Gaga fan, but not uncritical, and I felt the song was a really strong return to form for the Gaga I fell in love with, while also contemporary with its sound not to come off as a throwback.
Believe it's a subconscious thing. They are hoping for a slight hit of dopamine by someone interacting with thier thoughts, even when those thoughts are objectively pointless to a conversation. Our brains are being rewired in ways we are still trying to comprehend and it shows most on social media.
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https://www.youtube.com/embed/L3dxMGzt5mU
Oh, and Severance is effing amazing!
https://youtu.be/Ytz7qSH9QPI?si=aVsMyylNkTxt8TZC
🥺 was I not supposed to respond to this? Was this just supposed to be information floating around on the internet 🥺
Someone I've never EVER interacted with before promptly @/ed me to say "I can't, I'm going to England!"
Like. ?????
Why do they think these responses are productive?
Okay.
Something like that IDK, seems to contribute more than just "aint watched that."
Having my posts deleted with "please rephrase that" was such a shift for 12 yr old me like ??? wait I have to think about how I speak!?
Makes me think of the comments/letters I got when I still wrote for a newspaper.
It's last good use was keeping up with relatives and now you can't even do that.
.. but any active user now probably still comments the same way.
google will then post the response to that email as a review
I was watching a stream and asked in the chat "Hey what song is this it's really good." First response, almost immediately, "IDK Shazam it or something"
Like, why did they respond if they didn't know the answer...
It is not only true, it's one of the main reasons for our utterly pathological, diseased, abysmally ignorant 'society' now.
The terminally-online are the morons who vote for things like dRUMPf.
Oh, and I turned on my adblovk to read this. AND i left a dislike. Keep it up and you're losing a viewer.
Some people just don't distinguish between a personal text message coming to them and any other text appearing on their screen.
😌
Person A: Hey, *asks a question*
Person B (NOT IN THE MIDDLE OF A CONVERSATION I WILL CLARIFY): I don't know sorry
like THEY ASKED THEM SPECIFICALLY?
It could legitimately be a miscommunication of how these websites work and they expect that's how the rest of our internet works
It could be another parasocial phenomoneon (sp?); I'd like to look into how much study has been done about the psychology/neurology of "parasocial" behaviors, when I get a chance (moments like these might already be considered or under consideration)…
"Does anyone have a tall ladder?"
"No, sorry, we don't have any ladders."
"Local birdwatching event for anyone interested!"
"Sorry, my eyes are too old to see birds."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3dxMGzt5mU
(I am not asking anyone to reply, but I do hope I'm contributing ~something)
Weirdly I wonder about the thought process behind it, and yet I've undoubtedly done the same.
Me: Hey, is this side mode in this game worth streaming?
Guy who admitted he never played the game: Idk
Like FUCKING HELL I WASN'T ASKING YOU
When you make a post, you set it to "followers only" and don't get any more drive-bys
But chances are it wasn't :)
guess whoever was making them fired them off and wasn't sure how big bluesky was going to be? they're working as intended I guess
Some people (especially younger) have 0 social skills and it REALLY shows.
That's what you should be on, so you only see the people you actually want to see posts of.
Or stay on "discover" but shut the fuck up when you see a 'strange' post.
(Also, doing the exact same thing the OP is complaining about is always a bit of a dick move.)
I liked it btw, song was good
I'd wager I've done this myself a few times... So who am I to judge?