Everyone pretty much hates it, its just here is one of the few places online where money and stupidity can’t be waved around frantically to hide that.
Everyone pretty much hates it, its just here is one of the few places online where money and stupidity can’t be waved around frantically to hide that.
This has not been my general experience on the Fediverse. I’m in a thread over on a games community right now explaining in detail how I make use of AI when putting together tabletop roleplaying adventures for my friends, as the most recent example, and I’m getting a ton of people downvoting me and telling me my friends secretly don’t like me or have “Stockholm syndrome” or whatever.
I have been getting upvotes in the mix too, though, so I’ll keep on explaining my various use cases and pointing out various good tools. The tide does seem to be ever so slowly shifting.
I understand and have analogous experiences presenting nuanced details to support one position or another. That’s the crappy part about open forums, they are open and much of the audience won’t or can’t give any attention to the arguments you make.
Your experience also shows that part of the audience does pay attention, however.
The only thing that helps me keep trying to learn and teach things important to me is managing my own expectations about what I expect to happen when I expound online.
I am setting myself up for certain disappointment if I don’t admit most won’t even read the words, some will have an emotional reaction and go off on their own tangent, and a few, a very few, may engage in a way that helps me learn more, too.
Most of my professional experience is in ‘science’ and R&D. You have to learn (at least) two completely different communication styles in these fields.
In a closed community of specialists, you need easy access to all the details as well as clear presentation of the grander vision that motivates the work.
In a more general setting, soundbites and punchy anecdotes are more persuasive. Too much detail brings out the cranks, who then generate so much noise your message gets lost.
In summary, if you really want people to hear you and engage with your ideas, I have learned:
Be extremely clear with yourself about your intended audience.
Be clear with yourself what results you can reasonably expect from that audience.
Brace yourself to just ignore the distracting peanut gallery, not every reply needs a response. Only engage with substantive replies that appear to be good faith.
Be prepared to have your mind changed too.