What makes the average Lemmy user smarter than the rest of the population?
What makes the average Lemmy user smarter than the rest of the population?
I’m always surprised by the quality of comments on Lemmy and the analysis provided, often by experts in their field. It gives a sense that the average Lemmy user is a lot smarter than the average member of the public.
Also, when it comes to politics, I think the average Lemmy user is pretty perceptive of what real power dynamics are at play and what interests society should be looking to promote.
It's been a pleasure to be on this platform with you all. Where do you all come from? And why is it so hard to find people like you in the real world?
Brother, I'm dumb as hell.
33The trick is being just smart enough to stay silent on topics we know nothing about.
31Spittin' words of wisdom right there.
13that's why I'm always quiet
9Yeah Lemmy fails on that one
Cue 12 year olds passionately expounding on how they would organize government
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I don't know if we are smarter, but I'd most of are here because we don't want to put up with some companies antics. So we seem to be a group that left on a matter of principles, I can get on board with that.
25That's a small number of people.
There's also the people who were IP banned from other social media sites like reddit. They're not choosing to be here, this is just all they have.
I'm also pretty sure OP just changed some old reddit copy paste thing to Lemmy, and people are legitimately believing it
5Meh I'm here not just because I got banned from Reddit but for why I got banned from Reddit.
I told some troglodyte to crawl back into his hole and got permabanned for "threats of violence".
My foot was already out the door due to a lot of the censorship rules as it was so this was just the final nail in the coffin.
8Who gets IP banned in this day and age? VPNs are all over the place
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I don't think people here are smarter. Maybe communication is just more pleasant when removed from all the noise, and when posting is not incentivised by the wrong things.
19Your spelling and grammar is perfect. This place isn't even close to representing the average internet user.
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It's harder to join Lemmy than to join something like Reddit; you have to understand the concept of fediverse, choose instance, etc. It requires some thinking and willingness to learn something new.
15All I'll say is: I'm confident we are collectively smarter than a 5th grader
12What if 1/5 grader is really really smart?
5
This is a self serving thread if I've ever seen one!
Lemmy users, myself included, are not smarter than the rest of the population, but we are a small community, a small community that probably joined for similar reasons, meaning we probably have better cohesion than other similar communities.
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I don't know that we're any smarter (or dumber) but I think the asshole filter has far less impact here. On reddit, niche subs often became so much worse after growing to front page status. Once the assholes start flooding in, the nice people tend to give up and leave.
8Yeah, Reddit had its own enshittification cycle for niche topics. At first, it’s just the people who are passionate and/or experienced in the niche interest. Then as it grows, those experts slowly get drowned out by the hobbyists who know juuuust enough to activate the Dunning-Krueger effect. So now you have a bunch of people who are confidently spouting surface-level info (or even outright misinformation) as if it’s gospel. And since the majority of the users also only have a surface-level understanding, that’s what gets upvoted.
On Reddit, it’s less about what you say, and more about how you say it. If a comment is eloquent and makes the reader feel smart for understanding it, it gets upvoted. But highly technical comments will tend to get downvotes, because they make the average reader feel dumb.
I saw it all the time in my area of expertise, audio. There’s a lot of snake oil in the hobbyist audiophile circles. Lots of $1000 cables, $900 isolator boxes, etc… All will claim to make your system sound better. Meanwhile, in the professional world, we’ll use the cheapest $1/foot cable and $5 connectors, because we know they’re durable and they work just as well. We’ll set up million dollar speaker arrays for a concert, and run the signal down $15 cables and $10 isolators. Because we understand the physics of getting an electrical signal from A to B, and know that a more expensive cable won’t do that more efficiently. I can guarantee that Taylor Swift’s Eras tour was run through $1/ft cable. How can I guarantee that? Because I’ve seen the specs of their rig. I know people who worked on it. But good luck going into an audiophile subreddit and saying that; You’ll get downvoted to oblivion and called a troll. Because they don’t go to those subs to listen to actual experts; They just want to go to a place where they can have their surface-level knowledge validated.
There’s an old saying along the lines of “everyone trusts the news until they talk about your job.” Because just like Reddit, the news is targeting the broadest audience possible. And that means they can’t do deep-dives into a topic. They just skirt along the surface, giving just enough context to make viewers feel informed. Because validating the viewer is more important to audience retention than actually informing them.
9Gold cables just work better, man.
Totally kidding. I know exactly what you're talking about. I'm not an audio engineer but I have worked with some.
And you're 100% right that on reddit it's more about the "hip vibe" of the post than the content.
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FOSS
7Not answering in this thread puts you above the bar...
Wait
Fuck7I wouldn't call myself particularly intelligent, I'm just here to enjoy this slice of the web. The rest of the world is similar, it has bits and pieces of bright people and more basic people. Lemmy I think just happens to have more passionate people.
5I don’t think I’m any smarter than average. Lemmy as a whole may seem that way, though, and two reasons come to mind immediately:
One, many of us have spent some time on reddit. We’ve grown up since then, and most of us have said “no more of that reddit crap, please and thank you.”
Two, people seem to have the patience to read longer comments, and think about them. I see more genuinely thoughtful comments here than pedantic ones where the subtext is “look how smart I am.”
5Extreme sexual frustration and involuntary celibacy, I find it drives me with a pure energy which allows me to really hone my ability to bullshit.
5I think a smaller community results in more thoughtful posts, due to likelihood of interacting with the same person more than once. Additionally, a smaller community tend to fly under the radar of those who join a community with the sole purpose of shitposting and trolling. Now, combine this with the fact that lemmy is (for the most part) not built around an identity or political stance (even though the creators have them), and the result is generally a diverse community with more thought put into a comment.
Source: None. Just my hypothesis.
As to where I come from, I'm a reddit refugee. And I joined reddit as an IRC refugee. I like decentralized smaller communities that don't tend to attract mainstream attention.
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2I was in the top half of Reddit. I'm in the bottom half of lemmy.
2Nice, Thank :)
Well, that depend, we can also write some very dumb thing, even clash with each other. Even myself. You can see that in the mod log.
I don't find us smarter than anyone and there is some bias due to our culture and knowledge. Which kind of people have heard about Lemmy ? Not a lot. We belong to the 5% Linux market share, maybe even less. :)
I think longer post play a key part in argumentations' quality, we not only react but also convey our thoughts, then add a sprinkle of moderators that care about human and try to find the best way to solve an issue. That's part of the recipe.
Edit : typo
2I think that would be only true for tech. I don't think people here are smart about politics. For example, I asked What do you like about liberalism, capitalism and conservatism?, and only a few were able to give ok answers (e.g. Nemo's answer that was actually downvoted).
2I don't know if I'd even say that about tech as a hole. Mostly just Linux and FOSS. Anything involving Windows or Mac is met with blind fanboyism most of the time.
3as a hole
Checks out
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The other day in a political post I replied to someone by saying being well off doesn't automatically make you an asshole and we should judge people by their character and not their wallet, and that was not met with positivity.
I'm very much to the left, but I think there are more communist and anarchist viewpoints here than you would get somewhere more mainstream.
Not that I inherently disagree with many of their beliefs, but I don't find it as useful to talk about in broader political news posts as they do. I know it discourages me in participating in many threads.
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smart people get pushed out of the public discourse, so we end up congregating in small circles.
2So I mean
Probably a third of the population is impossibly, mind-bogglingly stupid. Like it is literally difficult for even somewhat intelligent people to truly understand the depths of stupidity that the bottom 30% live in. Like, pushing the envelope of nonsentience level of stupid. Literally - literally - never had an original thought in their entire lives stupid.
Most of those people are physically incapable of accessing lemmy, so that drags our average up.
Of those smart enough to be able to post on lemmy, I don't think Lemmy is anything spectacular. I think Lemmy is, on average, dumber than reddit. Part of that is inexperience - Lemmy skews younger. Over time, through simple trial and error, most people get less stupid. Boomers excepted (maybe the leaded gasoline, who knows).
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Jesse what the hell are you talking about
2There are multiple reasons I can think of. First, the entry barrier is quite high in comparison to other social media platforms and might filter out many unmotivated or technically inexperienced people. Second, moderation seems to work different on Lemmy than on other platforms. Where other platforms try to be "free-speech" (which they seem to misunderstand as letting anyone say whatever blatantly false stuff they want), Lemmy moderators seem to be more strict in that regard and generally enforce stricter rules.
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