I’ll share mine first.
I had a psych patient one night pile shitty toilet paper next to his toilet overnight. Normally my psych nurse brain would consider this a symptom of disorganized psychosis, EXCEPT!
I remembered an aita post about a conflict between a western OP and his middle eastern roomate trying to figure out why their roommate put their shitty toilet paper in the trash. Turns out many middle eastern toilets can’t handle toilet paper.
Oh and inpatient psychiatry doesn’t provide freestanding hard plastic trashcans (turns out they make great clubs). We gave him one of our freestanding paper bag trashcans and problem solved.
TL;DR; Reddit expanded my cultural knowledge enough to differentiate disorganized psychotic behaviors from a genuine cultural difference. Thanks reddit!
Anyone have any similar examples of positive exchanges of knowledge or culture using reddit?
I learned to just shut up. Reading something that bothered me, even though it may only have been a technicality. I often had an answer typed up, held up a second and thought, “who cares?”, and deleted it. Ironic that my first ever comment here on Lemmy is about that.
Someone is wrong on the internet!!! :)
I had a similar epiphany, though it also coincided with my second divorce, so who’s to say where it really came from?
My inner thought wasn’t “Who cares?” though, it was “Why wrestle in the mud with a pig? All you’ll get is a broken arm, covered in mud, blood, sweat, and who knows what the fuck else. To top it all off, the pig enjoyed the hell out of it.”
You can see why this epiphany may have coalesced at or around the same time my divorce finalized. Still though, I think Reddit had a hoof in this too.
I think it’s just an age/wisdom thing. When I was younger I was all about “The Truth” and would fight to the bitter end for it. At some point down the decades I realised that sometimes it’s better to just know “The Truth” myself and not share it with people who would disagree and fight about it.
Now a lot of the time I find myself just observing something and smiling at the wrongness and walking away.
The trouble is that the more people that give up on truth, the more disinformation is allowed to thrive and appear as consensus.
They’re hopeless. You’ll never change the consensus. Just let people be consumed by their stupid.
Lemmy has taught me that nice comments are very welcome. So welcome and please post more.
The amount of stuff I learned is a large part of why I didn’t consider reddit to be social media. I was primarily a lurker. I would post if I needed info, and I would comment if I had info to share.
I learned about modding games, pregnancy, personal finance, breastfeeding, sourdough baking, painting, slime molds…etc.
I left when reddit is fun went dark, and it hurt to lose a resource that I had used to navigate through a third if my life.
Same here. My family and girlfriend always ask how I know so much stuff. I just tell them I read a lot. Which is true, little do they know I just read a lot of reddit and the sources people post. I also left when Boost went dark. Bittersweet.
What were your favorite subreddits, if you don’t mind me asking ?
Besides a bunch of gaming and weeb ones I usually browsed trending and would gravitate toward the classics. Ask reddit, wtf, piracy, personal finance, lifeprotips, malefashionadvise, cool guides, the various explain like I’m 5 type subs, out of the loop. Etc. The trick is in the comments. Even in gaming subs people would have conversations and go on tangents in the comments with interesting facts or statements. I always make an effort to take a step forward whenever I read something I feel is interesting. For example, if someone mentions the Reynolds pamphlets in their comment about Alexander Hamilton. I’ll go ahead and Google what they are and give it a read. There’s always something you could learn even if it’s tangentially related. Even if it’s just the sentence structure or formating of a long comment, the way the camera or sound is done in a movie or show, someone’s mannerisms as they’re talking to you. It’s about wanting that knowledge.
I’m not a particularly smart person but my family and friends think I am just because I know a bit of everything. Im just a naturally curious person that likes to learn.
The ability to go on tangents to me is what makes this website format so special. So much knowledge and discussion happens that wouldn’t be possible in other formats, whether in a traditional single column forum where it would be derailing or on a microblog site
That is an incredibly good way to put it, also my favorite thing about this format is the conversations that occur in the comments!
I felt so too(but not as strong) but it was infinity for me
I switched to infinity for lemmy, it was like meeting an old friend, all grown up
I learned to make sure my carbon monoxide detectors are working
A fellow denizen of r/legaladvice, I see… I miss the CO detector jokes (though it also served as a pretty damn effective PSA, which was cool) and tree law / SovCit jokes…
And shitty MS Paint diagrams.
Are they really necessary in Europe with electric stoves and everything?
If you’re in a detached house, I suppose not. But if you’re in a townhouse or apartment, are you sure your neighbours are 100% gas free too?
Yes, here in Italy the whole building is either connected to the gas grid or not.
Moreover, they add a very strong garlic-smelling additive to gas, so you can smell it from far away if there’s a leak.
There must be something different because I’ve never see a gas detector in Italy (unlike fire detectors, which are everywhere)
Do places with no gas NOT have CO2 detectors?
I still don’t have carbon monoxide detectors… 😬
Please buy one… They’re so inexpensive
IIRC the OP had what sounded a lot like paranoid delusions, and sought reddit’s help - someobody figured out there was a CO leak and the guy was stable and mentally healthy except for the CO…
Alternative was him walking into a police station in an altered state trying to report people doing arguably crazy sounding things to him, which would have ended very poorly in many places.
I’ve learned to shut up more often. Just because I think I understand how something works, doesn’t mean I actually do. Just because I know enough to extrapolate an answer to something, doesn’t mean it’s always right. It’s scary how often it is, but that only makes this problem worse.
There are funky exceptions here and there, and on Reddit you absolutely will bump into the expert who will call you out on your misguided reasoning.
I know in your example you’re trying to give the right answer or explanation as you see it, but this is also very closely related to Cunningham’s Law:
The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer.
So you’re still providing a service even if it feels bad to have an expert steamroll whatever perception you had. Chances are tons of people had the same vague notion as you and your misguided logic eventually led to the correct path.
Thanks. At least I know I’m helping everyone by being punched in the face here. Too bad it doesn’t make or hurt less.
At the same time (on platforms where conversations don’t get bumped so people don’t usually come back to them if they didn’t participate in the first place) wouldn’t that convince some people that your answer is right and they’ll never see the true answer? Wouldn’t it be better to only have answers good enough that the actual expert doesn’t feel the need to intervene?
I wish there was a forum version of Reddit/Lemmy and that’s one of the main reasons, longer discussions with all the info in one thread…
I guess an extension of this is that everything is bullshit on the internet and most “experts” are just people on the first peak of the Duning-Kruger chart.
The amount of heavily upvoted content that’s just plain wrong in the field I’m actually an expert in is concerning. I generally try to disregard anything that’s stated without explicit evidence, which is difficult because for some reason the culture of linking sources has just disappeared entirely from the internet for some reason.
This answer resonates. I am not nearly as detail oriented as I’d like to be on most topics, even though I can feel their placement, and reasoning. Alot of stuff I read everyday is brand new to me tbh and I really don’t know shit outside of a very few small areas, with a side of some basic human behavior through my experience. I guess that’s why we come together (: all pieces of the whole.
I learned about Lemmy.
This is the way
Next thread: What are some things that you could forget reddit taught you.
The Swamps of Dagobah
I certainly can’t eat jolly ranchers anymore
Didn’t like coconuts to begin with but now I can’t even look at them
Oh god, I had wiped that from my memory
There are more pseudo experts and people that talk out of their asses than there are actual experts on the site. Typically actual experts responses aren’t that popular and are nested beneath various comments. The ones on top just “seem” informed.
It’s scary how these comments pass this off in a matter of fact way and promote tons of misinformation.
I used to make shit post comments where I would vehemently demand something as fact, and even cite sources. At the time, I thought people were upvoting them because they saw it was satire and shared my humor. Later, I had someone ping my account as a citation to their own argument, and when I chimed in and told them it was a shit post, they blocked me and deleted the comment with the ping.
I realized that I was just spreading misinformation and the fact that it was satire flew right over people’s heads. I didn’t think it was anywhere near subtle.
If you say something confidently enough, and add in some fake but legit sounding sources, people will just believe you.
Yikes! Good on you for correcting it! Satire is definitely easier understood in a visual medium as opposed to text based. Can’t say I’m surprised that people actually did that though.
That day you learned how 4chan keeps manipulating people again and again!
I realized that I was just spreading misinformation and the fact that it was satire flew right over people’s heads. I didn’t think it was anywhere near subtle.
I think this is something I learned from Reddit too, although from the lurker side vs your example. It seems like it’s one of the scary and cool things about the Internet, that your words can be seen by anyone and interpreted in many ways you didn’t intend. Even if something seems perfectly clear to you, someone else might not see it.
I think I also learned that I am also vulnerable to misinformation, just as much as the people that I’ve scoffed at for falling victim to it. It’s made me more cautious in how I relay information to other people - if I am speculating or don’t have complete information about something, I make sure to mention that. I think the people in my life have come to trust me more when I tell them something because of this.
I once posted a comment that was misinterpreted by a bunch of neo-Nazis as an expression of a sympathetic view. I was showered with compliments and expressions of friendship and invited through private messages to join a range of exclusive Nazi forums. They were extremely welcoming and warm, and it felt good except for the whole thing about them all being Nazis. So Reddit taught me something about how the far right recruits by making people feel appreciated and special. And I also learned to check my comments for ambiguity.
I would call myself an expert in a the field of astrophysics. Not a world leading expert at all, and imposter syndrome comes with the part, but I did study it extensively and have a phd on galaxy formation.
The amount of complete non-sense comments on this topic with lots of upvotes I’ve seen, made me realise how much highly upvoted misinformation there must be on other topics that I’m not an expert on.
It made me realise you shouldn’t take anything at face value, no matter with how much confidence it’s said. Easier said than done, and I most likely still fell into the same trap. But still a valuable lesson.
Thank you for chiming in! I love astrophysics and always have been fascinated by it. In another life, perhaps I would have pursued it academically and professionally.
But yes, agreed on all points. I wonder how social media will impact humanity collectively over a few decades in the future and how history will remember this part of the age of information.
The best way to get the right answer is to confidently state something you know is false.
The most frustrating part of this is when I post about stuff I actually am an expert on, and get “yeah uh huh sure, but I read on Wikipedia that…”
I may have learned things about tech and computers on reddit, but I don’t remember the posts, only the knowledge.
Also I learned that redditors in the comments are 75-90% stupid and useless in any post. I sometimes had to answer tech related posts just because the other answers were completely wrong and did not help the OP.
Tho sometimes there was some useful info. But only sometimes…
This is every reddit thread. One or two good answers and lots of bad ones.
“That people are stupid” was my first instinct, like I needed reddit for that confirmation, but it’s bewildering to me, still, to this day.
Lpt is always in the comment
Seems like every cs major who worked at a startup for 2 weeks is suddenly an expert in every single tech field. The amount of tech misinfo on social media in general is insane.
One of the more interesting things I took away from Reddit was that there is a fairly noticeable threshold of community size above which the quality of participation abruptly drops. I think there’s a conversation worth having about what barriers to entry are desirable or not.
Agreed, I was on Reddit for almost 12 years before I bailed, and although it was a “frog in a pot” kind of slow boil, the quality of content and interaction across the entire site was far worse at the end than at the beginning. But within individual subreddits the change would happen overnight after being linked in a popular comment. But the big thing for the site as a whole was that subreddits stopped being communities about specific topics and were just kind of catch-alls for any kind of post or memes. The whole thing eroded into a vaguely categorized iFunny clone and any sense of community just vanished.
People not adhering to the sub purpose was a constant source of frustration for me. But when the post is at 24k upvotes, downvotes or reports won’t do much.
I had the same experience with /r/winstupidprizes recently. There was some post were someone just did something dangerous but nothing bad happened at all. Not even a little bit. It was upvoted thousands of times, had a ton of comments, and only a few of them were calling out how it didn’t make any sense why it was getting upvoted at all.
I wonder how many were bots vs stupid people.
It might be interesting to see if we could create “honeypot” posts like this which are super stupid and outside of the point of the community, then just keep track of the accounts which upvoted them.
You’re in one of those places right now. This is reminiscent of the old askreddit before the major rules overhaul and aggressive moderation
Meirl is a great example of this. Ten years ago it was specifically for a certain kind of meme: So-called “selfies of the soul”. Then over time more and more people flooded in who barely got the joke and it became such a diluted meme sub that the top post on the front page was very often just a repost of something from r/funny
Lots of things, especially from niche subreddits. Outside of the frontpagers, there’s a tremendous wealth of knowledge. It’s one reason why it’s often good to do * + “reddit”* when trying to find things, in particular tech topics, because you can find that one comment where OP lays out the exact info you actually need for topic X.
On a more macroscopic scale: never, ever think that a corporate service will not enshittify. It’s literally part of the life cycle. In my view, it’s why it is so important that we on Lemmy take strides not only to support the platform (more specifically, one’s home instance) but also avoid situations where corporate influence can slowly but pervasively affect it (e.g. the often slippery slope of ad support). We have a rare gift of a platform that may not enshittify, depending on many factors.
- Get a carbon monoxide detector
- I should have broken both arms when I was a teenager
- Poop knife
Get a carbon monoxide detector
Why do I know the exact post you’re thinking of when you say that ?
Because the idea of gradually slipping into psychosis as you question if someone else is leaving you notes as carbon monoxide slowly kills you is pretty terrifying and likely something most people didn’t think about beforehand.
You actually wish you were in a position where your mum would give you a hand job?
Just a hand job? 🤔
No coconut?
No Jolly Rancher?
What is the broken arms thing a reference to?
Reddit lore of a teenager who broke both arms and was unable to rub one out as a result. Frustration sets in so mom helps him out with a handy and that turns into a full on sexual relationship.
There’s a Lemmy community dedicated to preserving this sort of stuff - https://lemmy.world/c/archive
It doesn’t actually have Broken Arms, but it does link to the original on R place: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/nmmjr/iama_man_who_had_a_sexual_relationship_with_his/
Oh no…ok I actually know that story too. Aw man what has the internet done to me…
What’s a poop knife?
What?! Why would you need to cut up fecal matter? Cut the shit man!
Someone wants to be a momma’s boy.
I learned quitting it was much easier than expected.
Just gotta replace it with another equivalent addiction.
I tried that. Now I’m addicted to audiobooks instead of TV.
Idk, I use Lemmy a lot but I’m nowhere near as addicted
No shit.
That there is a genuine cohort of young, intelligent, technically literate people who identify as social conservatives. I have never met one in real life (at least not one that comfortably speaks about their political leanings) and if you had told me these people existed twelve years ago, I’d have called you a liar. Just goes to show how non-representative the bubbles we live in truly are.
I learned I’m a Communist for wanting to live somewhere with nationalized healthcare
You do have an abmormal trust in the government to not fuck things up
Lol, try telling commies social democracy is enough and they’ll lose their shit
I don’t think they lost their shit because of your opinions but rather the way you said it
To be fair commies lose their shit from just about anything
You just don’t hear anything from the commies that see your dumb shit, roll their eyes, and decide not to roll in the mud with you. It’s a hard selection bias
commies that see your dumb shit, roll their eyes, and decide to delete a racial minority from existence
Nah bro, they do comment back to me, just recently I was talking to someone who, I think, threatened to “kick my ass”. I guess that’s communist theory in a nutshell really.
I guess that’s communist theory in a nutshell really.
With that level of comprehension it’s not surprising they’re impatient with you.
Who said anything about impatient? Its only natural for commies to be violent, you do know where the word tankie comes from, right?
Yeah, you didn’t understand my comment.
People who don’t freak out are, by their nature, not responding to you. You only see people who do.
The person I was talking to was actually very far right, as in they were calling me a communist because I believed in any form of social program.
A subreddit can be a scary echo chamber circle jerking place
With the way some people treat the fediverse I’d argue that this place as a whole is well on its way to becoming an echo chamber.
The number of posts I’ve seen along the lines of “hey I don’t like x, can we de-federate” is shocking. People need to have some level of accountability and block people / communities / domains for themselves without resorting to pulling out the de-federation ban-hammer which affects everyone else on the instance
On top of that, the Lemmy user base consists mainly of left wing people and tech power users currently. Not a bad thing for me, but it does make me wonder about how effective it will be at attracting a larger user base; I personally think Lemmy needs to simplify/streamline/modernize its default UI/UX and sign up process to something more people are familiar with, but I’ve gotten a lot of pushback when I bring that up
Yes and no. Some instances truly are made to cater to people who will ruin the experience for the average person/might possibly put admins in a position where they’re hosting illegal content and the good thing about Lemmy is that the consequences of defederation are small, these people get to keep their platform to interact in, they just don’t get access to some of the content available to others, it’s much better than making their platform disappear and seeing them invade other platforms.
Not like accounts are needed to be able to see content either, which is a plus even if the instance you use is defederated. I think it’s better to just see each instance like an old school forum. Sometimes you need to make another account to access a specific forum. Sometimes not if the forum has categories you are interested in already. So it’s like a way of going back to the old way of the internet where things are starting to get much more decentralized.
I mean go to lemmygrad, seriously just go to a few top posts and read the comments, you’d be shocked at how echo chambery it is when their posts get on all
Oh and especially when they think they understand genuine psychiatric or psychological terms! Take this from a halfway professional!
Ex: They ALL think they know what “gaslighting” actually is from maybe watching a movie one time or reading a Wikipedia article or just reading enough Reddit posts…
I know enough even as a psych nurse to relay in report that like “this is what the patient is saying. These are the ways both them and their so-called social support persons could all be lying about this. I am so grateful that the final verdict on any of this is falling above both our paygrades. just letting you know about what’s up in case it rolls up on the unit today.”
Professionally we don’t speculate any more than preparing for the fallout of possibilities. I let you know as a coworker to take extra precautions to play it extra close to the chest if our patient’s possibly abusive ex calls.
That’s what we do. We prepare and prepare each other for contingencies. Y’alls social media speculations are just entertainment.
It was interesting to see a jarring divide between similar communities on identical topics. I used to follow /r/Australia and /r/auspol (I think that’s what it was called) and the same news could be posted in both subs with a huge variation on answers. I used it as a way to experience different viewpoints but someone whose only exposure is to one of those subs would only see one type of viewpoint regularly.
I mean I didn’t learn this from Reddit but I used to piss in bottles a lot in my room and my wife caught on to it (we have separate rooms because to both of us sleep as sacred and we don’t need to share a bed to love each other) and got really upset about it. Until I explained to her that when I was young my dad used to beat my ass for getting up and going to the bathroom in the middle of the night as if I was some kind of pussy for not being able to hold it. As a result, I conditioned myself to not pee at night in the bathroom, but pee only in what was most readily available. As I became older, it carried over when I would wake up in the middle of the night and be too scared to go to the bathroom for obvious reasons. Sounds ridiculous. Might even sound disgusting but that’s my experience and there’s nothing wrong with me and I don’t do it anymore but it took me a long time to understand that nobody was going to kick my ass for going to the bathroom in the middle of the night. It wasn’t because I was disgusting and it wasn’t because it was mentally ill. It was because my father had conditioned me.
Definitely not the answer OP was looking for. But I’m glad you shared!
Also. Fuck your dad. How is your relationship with him now?
I mean you were definitely being abused/traumatized by your dad
