And that’s exactly the ambiguity I was trying to get at with my last paragraph.

I’m kind of surprised I got downvoted while contrarian “source?” comments got lots of upvotes. In all honesty, it feels bad. I am not sure how I said anything anywhere near offensive that deserves disapproval, but being contrarian seems a lot more purposely meant to piss off and still meets lots of peoples’ approval.

But even still, I have gone and assumed bad faith or at best, an attempt to be funny and make people laugh through what is still in the end just contrarianism. I do not think it is possible they are genuinely asking for a source because I think we’re making claims based on general observation of the world, things that do not need to be cited, like “the sky is blue” or “things fall when you drop them”. Just look up and see (or trust the wealth of statements talking about the sky’s blueness if you are (color)blind). Perhaps I’m incorrectly assuming bad faith here based off of a trend of seeing contrarianism, and I’m incorrectly extrapolating that trend here. It is very ambiguous. I really do not think I am wrong, but given that we’re literally talking about the difficulty of determining good vs. bad faith engagement it feels a little arrogant to not acknowledge the possibility that I might be wrong.

I think the key part is whether it’s being done in good faith or bad faith. Sometimes I ask a stupid question on Lemmy, but because I am honestly curious and not trying to get into a fight, and I usually accept the reply to me and don’t take it as an invite to get into a debate, I think people can tell I’m not sealioning.

If I replied “source?” for your comment right now, I’d be trolling. I almost certainly know that it is a bad idea to discourage sourcing information, and that should not be something I need a cited source for. That would probably be sealioning. Someone asking for a source on a meme I posted is probably genuinely curious and not sealioning.

And as per usual, judging intent can be difficult, especially when people (including me) come into a forum with my own sets of biases, pieces of knowledge I have that I incorrectly assume that everyone else knows, and absence of knowledge that others incorrectly assume everyone else knows. So people who are not sealioning might get mistaken for it just because they want a source on something they do not know that most people do. I see where you are coming from.

(I did not create this community, and I am not a moderator of this community, but I’m usually the only one posting anything. Can we change that?)

Thanks for disclosing, usually it is a community’s creator posting it here although there are exceptions, so I assumed you made the community.

This is very much not my lane, but props to you for trying to single-handedly keep what seems to be a non-harmful community going, and good luck with attracting new contributors.

It would be nice to do something similar without locking it down to Amazon, a known Bad Company™

deleted by creator

So I thought my town did not have any food pantries, but I went to look it up anyways because of your comment. Oh wow was I wrong. Donation made partially because of your comment!

Just checked your home instance. feddit.org seems to be a Lemmy instance. I’m on Mbin, which is a totally different software. That could be the difference.

EDIT: Just checked how the comment appears your instance. It indeed shows up as one line instead of two on your Lemmy instance, though running that line through https://babelstone.co.uk/Unicode/whatisit.html confirms my suspicion that it shows it shows as an en dash, not an em dash.

Not on my end

I do hope you believe I’m a human ;-; you can probably go check all my comments and notice the many edits on them, because I often remember a point I want to make or think of a way I can express myself better after the fact, and I never thought being the type who comments my thoughts immediately instead carefully revising and waiting an hour or so (although to be fair, who does that?) would be the one proof of my humanity. Well, hopefully. It’s entirely possible you still believe I must be a bot, because they have probably gotten good at mimicking humans, including professions to be human and not bots, given how many sci-fi stories are written with robots and humans interacting and proof being needed or whatever. (Wouldn’t know, don’t use them myself.)

I typed from a phone. Creating an em dash is holding down on the hyphen button (which is already a bit of extra effort to get to) and sliding over two keys, pretty easy and fast. I just tested typing an em dash on my computer. I do not actually have an alt key due to being a Mac user (maybe newer ones or older ones have it?). For me, it’s Option+Shift+the hyphen key. It is slower to type an em dash for me than just a plain hyphen on both phone and computer, but not slow enough or irritating enough for me to make me choose not to. I feel my stubborn insistence on using em dashes, despite the disadvantage it gives me on getting perceived as a human being, could in itself be proof of my humanity, because what else do I gain besides a speck of affirmation of my identity as the type of person who still wants to use em dashes? Although of course only in this conversation, because most people who think me botlike would probably dismiss me as a bot and move on instead of replying to me and saying why they think I’m a bot: no chance to defend myself, and why would you let what you think to be a bot spew more slop at you about its supposed humanity? I’m also already comfortable using em dashes, maybe a fraction of a second wasted, whereas rewording my sentences, my train-of-thought run-on sentences typed straight from my stream of consciousness, to avoid em dashes is more effort for me, personally. Although you could make the argument that given my willingness to learn to do things the right way, I ought to type without run-on sentences and give people more of a signal I’m not a bot, and drop the em dashes so I am one less false negative when using the “em dash automatically equals bot” strategy.

Not saying you think I specifically am a bot, of course ;) Your approach probably works too. I learned to type in your manner because people did it on tumblr and I used to use that site. Bots do lean towards more formal grammar correctness, but I wouldn’t write off the possibility of telling it to type informally, without capital letters, and with the occasional omission of punctuation when not needed for expression or clarity. Or straight up telling them to write like they are on tumblr. However, I would write off a human lazy enough to use a bot to impersonate people as not bothering to try to vary the typing styles.

+1 for the second paragraph, I do both. !boinc@sopuli.xyz

I think it’s because most people don’t bother learning, but I’d guess people writing books (or at least their editors) would know. AI eats up all the books and learns how to use em dashes. The majority of the internet-using population does not use it. And so you get the heuristic that em dash = AI. This is just a total guess, by the way.

Looked up the difference between hyphens, em dashes, and en dashes in high school. Maybe for curiosity, maybe for some assignment, I forget by now. Started using em and en dashes, not going to stop now.

I posted a comment on YouTube exactly once in my life (providing the lyrics to what the person sang), and plan to never do it again. I usually scroll through others’ while watching.

I cannot possibly be the only person who does this, especially since some peoples’ comments garner a bunch of thumbs ups and actually coherent replies in addition to the usual trash you see on YouTube (spam or totally out-of-pocket insults).

Wow, you identified the entire reason I have avoided meme communities online. Glad to know I wasn’t alone in that. Thanks for making this! Now I can add some online humor back into my day.

!moderators@lemmy.world

“Please edit your post title to [whatever it should be edited to to reflect community standards]” in the comments from a mod would also resolve the problems you have. In my opinion looking anal about rule enforcement > potential for abuse.

Although I do think if flairs are implemented, mods changing flair would probably be a good option—far less room to change what the original poster is saying to make them look bad.

Eh, there were some nice things on Reddit. We don’t have to be a clone but we don’t have to resist everything that looks like them. I’m explicitly here because I wanted a forum-like social media that wasn’t Reddit; I wanted a Reddit replacement. I would like to leave certain artifacts of Reddit behind, but I do like actual Reddiquette (that admittedly did not get followed in practice, it does not here either) of upvoting good contributions to a conversation (including opposing opinions) and reserving downvotes for people who come in with hostility, spam/off-topic posts, etc. I liked communities there where I could talk about things I was interested in.

Trying off of lemmy.world, I approve. Best wishes!

!webrevival@lemm.ee would like this

!obsidianmd@lemmy.world

!pkms@lemmy.blahaj.zone

!digitalgarden@lemmy.world

!webrevival@lemm.ee

!academiagonewild@lemmy.world

!blood_donors@healthy.community

I inaccurately assumed the way I expressed myself would be interpreted as “when I was 12, I saw images that were reposted frequently on Instagram that contained text attesting to hating small talk,” and did not have it in my mind as a possibility that my comment would be taken as a statement on my current age. I made an inaccurate assumption. I am currently over 21.

Although when I was 12, although I didn’t talk about my age or lie about it in text discussions I did still use websites that were only allowed to be used by those 13 and up, or those 18 and up. I typed very similarly to the way I do now. For all you know I am a filthy liar and actually just a 12-year old with a good grasp of English, attempting to seem more credible (and evade any possible TOS violations and account bans) by telling you I am over 21 years old ;)