Every time I see that little red number in my inbox, my first thought is: Did I mess up? My brain jumps to the worst-case scenario—maybe I said something controversial, and now everyone’s correcting me and downvoting my stupid comments. Even though, most of the time, the messages are actually helpful and fun, that number still triggers some sort of insecurity and anxiety. The bigger it gets, the louder my worries grow.
Logically, I know I don’t screw up that often, and most feedback is neutral or even positive. But deep down, my insecure monkey brain panics at the thought of being wrong—or worse, publicly called out. Even when I’m right, the number still makes my stress levels spike up. What if people disagree with me? What if they don’t like what I wrote?
And yes, I see the irony in posting this. Writing about it is basically asking for it and feeding the very anxiety I’m trying to ignore. Maybe it’s my version of exposure therapy.
Lemmy needs the “disable inbox replies” feature for comments imo. Although lately I see mostly polite disagreement.
That’s really interesting, because a surprising number of people here ignore the number or just mark all as read every month. It’s like treating comment replies as spam. I guess that’s what you have to do if you’re a drive-by shooter and never wish to face any consequences, but I’m not that kind of a psychopath.
BTW that could be a great post for [email protected]. If you end up posting it there, I’m really curious to see why people disagree with that… or more importantly, how many actually agree. Based on the small sample here, I think the latter group is not a tiny minority.
Of course if someone never wants to read comments they can just do that, but I think that’s a bit of a different thing because it seems that would indicate disinterest in back and forth engagement here overall instead of just a specific kind.
I wonder though why you feel that you should “face consequences” for expressing an opinion you expect will be unpopular, while at the same time expressing anxiety about the possibility of it happening (when you have conviction you’re right even), because that’s honestly confusing to me. Why would it necessarily mean you ‘screwed up’ just because what you have to say triggered hostility? Wouldn’t it be better just to be able to worry about it less, and express yourself more freely without chilling effects? People might say this could be abused, but I guess the way I see it is that letting others have the last word is what it amounts to externally, and what you choose to read or feel yourself is private and something you have broad license to make your own choices about.
For me the most common situation on Reddit where I use this feature is if I have something to say in disagreement with someone who is already talking aggressively about something. Where I have good reason to think they’re likely to leave a nasty response, and that there likely won’t be anything productive left to say, I’ll probably have to hold myself back from responding further anyway, so there’s no point feeling anxious in the meantime worrying about getting the inbox notification.
I also disable vote scores, though fortunately that’s something Lemmy does have now afaik.
I politely disagree.