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239

How often to you bail on a half-written post or response? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

139 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I have had a tendency since my earliest days on social media where I will get halfway or more through a response, and end up just cancelling it. Sometimes I feel like I’m just being to over the top with snark or otherwise don’t want to be that kind of person, but a lot of the time I’ll decide I just really don’t care enough to finish it. Sometimes I just know it’ll be an argument and I know what the person is going to say, and just have no interest in continuing the discussion. I did it on Reddit, I did it on bulletin boards, I even did it in my teens and twenties on Usenet - and I’ll probably go on doing it for as long as I continue using this medium. I probably do it a bit more than half the time. I know that lemmy benefits from more content and I have had some great discussions, but sometimes it’s just not worth it for me.

How about you? Do you hit publish or cancel more often?

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Quite often.

I start organizing my thoughts by writing them down. Then I'll realize it's going to be impossible for me to succinctly yet accurately convey my point.

If what I've written is too long or too convoluted, I don't bother posting it, as the intended audience is usually the least likely to actually read it. If what I've written has too many caveats or too many points of contention, I don't bother posting it because I generally don't have much interest in connecting with pedants or those being intentionally obtuse/ignorant/etc.

Honestly, my experience has been that this place is mostly just a slightly different iteration of the same shit as the alternative it is modeled after when it comes to discourse. And I have minimal interest engaging in much of that. So, definitely more likely to lurk and/or to bail on a response than to actually post here.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I can relate to this so much. I'm active in tech support communities and sometimes there's so many scenarios involved that being concise, accurate and still trying to sound human is quite difficult.

I've been trying to shift my perspective in treating replies as the start of a conversation, where a shorter post with less information or caveats makes more sense to start from so you can narrow down the direction of the comment thread later.

I realize my feelings might be highly specific to support/question threads, but your words really resonated with me regardless.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

I’ve been trying to shift my perspective in treating replies as the start of a conversation, where a shorter post with less information or caveats makes more sense to start from so you can narrow down the direction of the comment thread later.

This is how you do it, put the most important details and fill in the rest if it comes up. The more words in a row the less anyone is going to read them.