Rules
I think about this a lot too. There are a lot of people on Lemmy who just post and never replied to any comments. They're not invested.
On the other hand, some people are very invested in what they post.
I roll the dice, and I see what happens every time, but I hope that people are having good conversations and get some reward from their engagement
I have a policy that I tend to follow. Mind you, it's policy, not dogma, there's exceptions and I'm not obligated to do shit.
But I come at every question with a few things in mind, if I intend to answer.
The one that's relevant here is that it doesn't matter if OP is trolling, reposting, posting bot generated questions, or is a bot themselves. Very little matters beyond whether or not I can say something.
Doesn't have to be useful, though I hope it would rise to entertaining or humorous.
Why? Because fuck OP. It ain't about them. It's about the community. OP could be an llm bot, but other humans are scrolling by. Maybe one of those gets a laugh, or finds something helpful, or whatever.
If OP happens to be a human asking a real question, even better! But it isn't necessary to be a contribution to the community.
There's trolls on lemmy that are known to fuck around, and I'll still respond to their posts if there's a point. Who cares if they're seeking some specific response or whatever? I don't, I care about spending some time writing stuff and reading stuff.
I'm fine with posts that are "busy work". The comment section is where all of the threadiverse really shines anyway. Same as reddit used to be. So the post is there to drive community activity, that's a good thing.
Now fakey comments, that's where shit can just go away.
Maybe we come from different corners of the internet. I'm used to help people with their Linux questions and I take 15mins out of my day to write a helpful answer, and that adds up. And my wasted time is taken away from people with genuine questions.
I also like to discuss politics or random stuff. But I kind of do that because I'm interested and want to engage in a discussion with some substance to it, whatever that is. I want some human at the other end and hear their perspective. Not type something into the void. But I get you. Sometimes it works and other people come. Sometimes they don't. I just wish there was an obvious way to tell so I could balance that and not feel like I waste a good chunk of the time and all it's good for is some AI scrapers or some number.
I see where you come from, but this community is quite generic, it's not supposed to take people a lot of expertise and time to answer. "What's the best unexpected gift you ever got?" is quite open and fast to answer.
I would definitely agree for support communities, the issue has been raised recently: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/19646137
I'm with you on this. Reminds me of a thing you see regularly on the StackExchange sites:
In this scenario, I can only guess the experts are not discouraged because they're there for the reputation points and it's all just a numbers game. For every case like this there'll be another where they get 100 points for their efforts. If my theory is correct then these kinds of situations are only sustainable with a karma system. Alas.
Hooray, Karma it is...
But seriously, I do that distinction as well. I consider some things as work. I'll do it for example for the money, could be Karma or whatever, and at the end of the day I try not to care if my labor has been wasted, as I mainly wanted the money. And then in the afternoon I'll do things for fun. And I love the more human motives there. I get to help people, connect to them on a human level. I volunteer stuff or just talk casually or have fun. And it's really refreshing how it's devoid of some numbers which increase on my bank account or in my profile.
There's another interesting quality of your "afternoon work": if you didn't do it, nobody else would. Paid work is by definition fungible: there's an economic demand for it, so logically if you don't do then somebody else will. Net benefit of your labor: zero! But when you work on some project from other motivations, you know that the marginal utility of your labor is 100%. Nobody's paying for it so it might never get done otherwise. It took me a while to grasp this but IMO it's an important latent motivation for volunteering.
Good take. Well... I just watched too much Star Trek when I was young. They live in a post-scarcity future. Just did away with the first thing, and do everything just because they like to do it, and with most things portrayed in the series it's at the forefront, and no one has done it before... And "utility" becomes yet a different thing. 😉
Hey Hendrik thanks for your comments! I like to make lemmy a nice place to hang out so I start threads. If you look at my post and comment history I do it a lot (I also have lazysoci.al and lemmyworld accounts). For this community I have a list of questions I add questions to when I think of them, the odd one I've got off reddit but I've NEVER copied one off lemmy for obvious reasons. I usually answer in comments but if I'm short of time I don't.
Thanks, I know. I replied above
Thanks Hendrik the other comment chain seemed to vanish so I commented twice. How's your weekend going?
LadyButterfly just showed up. Now it’s a party!
Oh heeeeyyyyy
Answer what you want; ignore what you want. I don’t bother worrying about people’s motivation for asking a question. I’m just grateful to have something to do when I’m bored. Like now.
What are your hobbies?
i would say to sTimulate activity and it works nicely!
This is some meta shit right here
That's funny because meta (Facebook) does this with their "ai" it goes into groups and poses random questions to generate engagement.
Now it’s double meta
Now all someone needs to do is ask "Is this a meta community" to do a triple meta!
It'd be really meta if I had posted this to bait people into engagement... But I don't think I did. I'd like to know, so it's just meta on one level. 😅
I was always under the impression that people made those posts because they wanted to announce to the world what they think the best of whatever thing it was, is, and why their opinion of said thing is the most correct. And that they didn’t really care what other people wrote after that in the comments. But that could just be my cynicism.