this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2025
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Sometimes I can't tell whether a question here is genuine and the author is interested in the answers, or whether they just copy-paste something to keep people busy. How am I supposed to approach that?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 hours ago

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

I'm with you on this. Reminds me of a thing you see regularly on the StackExchange sites:

  1. some rando asks a technical question
  2. an expert replies with a full answer, sourced, with examples, obviously took at least 10 minutes if not an hour - and that's an hour of an expert's time!
  3. answer gets no upvotes and rando has disappeared

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

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. 😉

[–] [email protected] 7 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 22 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Thanks Hendrik the other comment chain seemed to vanish so I commented twice. How's your weekend going?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

LadyButterfly just showed up. Now it’s a party!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 14 hours ago

Oh heeeeyyyyy

[–] [email protected] 5 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 19 hours ago

What are your hobbies?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

i would say to sTimulate activity and it works nicely!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

...

Block the user and move on with your day?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (2 children)

This is some meta shit right here

[–] [email protected] 2 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

That's funny because meta (Facebook) does this with their "ai" it goes into groups and poses random questions to generate engagement.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 19 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 18 hours ago

Now all someone needs to do is ask "Is this a meta community" to do a triple meta!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

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. 😅

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

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