Sometimes I can’t tell whether a question here is genuine and the author is interested in the answers, or whether they just copy-paste something to keep people busy. How am I supposed to approach that?

  • jetAEnglish
    1·
    13 days ago

    I think about this a lot too. There are a lot of people on Lemmy who just post and never replied to any comments. They’re not invested.

    On the other hand, some people are very invested in what they post.

    I roll the dice, and I see what happens every time, but I hope that people are having good conversations and get some reward from their engagement

    • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deOPEnglish
      0·
      14 days ago

      Uhm, maybe my phrasing wasn’t the best. I meant how do I deal with that?
      I’ve left other places on the internet because I don’t like bots and fabricated engagement. So sometimes I struggle here a bit as well. (In various communities and for different reasons.) I’d rather have genuine conversations with people who asked a question because they’d like to read my answer. Or if I can help them or contribute something… I’m not really sure if this is what we do here or not.

        • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deOPEnglish
          0·
          14 days ago

          I don’t want to call anyone out. I think it’s great if they make it transparent to us that it is a repost. They could have skipped that. But what’s the point? That person is never going to read the answers. And the posts are already on AskLemmy, so why duplicate random ones of them? (And some of the quoted posts I couldn’t even find. Some are there and attributed correctly.)

            • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deOPEnglish
              0·
              14 days ago

              Thanks for the link! I agree a lot with that OP’s points. Those reposts feel a lot to me like I’m a dog and someone just half-heartedly threw a slice of cheese at my feet, expecting me to eat it. But maybe I wanted ham, idk. Plus they literally just scraped it off the floor in the kitchen and now it landed on the livingroom floor.

              • Blaze (he/him)@piefed.zipEnglish
                0·
                14 days ago

                The other perspective is that some instances are problematic, and we should try to reduce their influence on the platform as a whole. To fight the network effect that older communities use to get more activity, there needs to be some crossposting done at some point.

                Both perspectives are understandable, it’s a matter of personal preference.

                • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deOPEnglish
                  0·
                  14 days ago

                  I get that. But I think it mainly obscures the problem. And has negative side-effects. We could do something different here… Have lower frequency but higher quality posts… Do it differently than LW. But we can’t. We somehow need to import the cross-posts from a different place. Strip them of the comments and the person who the answers would matter to, and re-upload the same ones here.