They were gonna raise the rent anyway.

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.

What they did to Foundation should be a crime.

And people immediately repeat the same patterns without understanding where they come from.

First, the difference is negligible between doing something ironically and just doing it. The “ironic” part stays with it, but becomes irrelevant almost immediately. The “/s” needs to exist for a similar reason. Generally it’s just better to not make the /s comment at all, but if you’re going to it should have the /s.

Second, if you have a couple hundred people read something and think the same response, one of them is probably going to type it.

Changing these things requires a culture shift where we encourage people to think about their comment adding something original rather than the first thing that comes to mind. You have to attack that root problem instead of the symptoms. Is it worth the effort?

FlyQuest vs Dignitas