Does anyone else feel worried when you see a big number in the Lemmy notification inbox?

I feel this comment acutely.

If I blindly agreed with everyone, I probably would be dead, having killed myself from the lack of moral obligation and common decency this species seems to be deficient in. I'm only sticking around because I feel like this is the end of the Anthropocene and I want to witness it. Is that honest enough for ya?

Try mentioning that you’re a Christian that despises the GOP.

All they hear is Christian and the comments begin.

Some times you just roll the dice and see what happens. Make a risky comment of the day, pay the price, get back up again and do the same thing next week. Basically, just spread your unpopular opinions in places that weren't designated for it.

I've burned my fingers a few times, but also found some unexpected supporters. Write a teasing remark about a particular group, and you'll find that everyone hates you and you get downvoted to oblivion. Say the same thing in a different place, and all you get is upvotes and comments that go even further than you did. It's a dangerous game for those who like to live dangerously.

Blindly agree with the majority if you want to play it safe. Not a very spicy way to live your life, but I can see the appeal of it.

At least one of those notifications will be calling you a liberal.

Yeah, but you don’t respect those pissed off commenters, so it’s easier to distance yourself from them. Maybe that’s my problem. I don’t usually try to be abrasive enough to cause such reactions, so I take each comment more seriously than I should.

Same, or a holier than thou comment, or a gatekeeper which is the most annoying because they can get passive aggressive

Yes, but what if they’re also infuriating enough. I have very mixed feelings about that number.

Normally it's like 0-2. On days when I write more actively, it gets a bit higher. If I happen to drop a comment in a popular thread at the right time, it can suddenly jump to 3-5, and that's when I start to worry. Did I cross some line I wasn't aware of, or maybe I was just at the right place at the right time. Who knows. 🤷 It's probably ok, but my subconscious mind immediately jumps to conclusions, naturally expecting the worst.

Oh wow! So you never ever mark them read, or how did that happen?

I think you’re somewhat interesting.

The number of comments, likes, upvotes, responses and other metrics rarely tell you about how interesting you and your comments are. Let's say there's a post with 100 upvotes, and the top comment has like 50 upvotes. If you drop a comment there, you can expect to get 10-30 upvotes. Not more than 50, because the the parent comment already has 50. In some rare cases, the child comment can get more upvotes than the parent, but don't count on it.

You are still a wonderful person even if you get only a handful of comments or upvotes. Even if you got zero, that doesn't change who you are or how good your comments are. These metrics usually tell you something about the time and place of the comment.

The content matters too, but to a lesser extent. If the comment is all middle fingers, don't expect many upvotes. Although, there are always exceptions. Posting the classic "fuck spez" is the kind of hostility people can get behind.

Yeah, that's a familiar feeling. One evening, you find interesting things to write about, and the next morning you have a stack of replies from the other side of the world.

Thanks. The number is already a bit overwhelming. Hopefully, I’ll get better at handling that feeling.

You're approaching it in a more sensible way, and I prefer that style too. It's just that my immediate emotional response to seeing the number is not in line with that sort of thinking. Most of the comments are totally harmless, so why worry so much. Some part of my mind just does irrational things.

Agreed. I prefer this place to be a spot where you can disagree. I learn a lot from disagreements.

It's true that the opinions and comments don't matter. At the end of the day, they're just meaningless internet points and text that will be lost when the disk of my instance eventually gets formatted or when bit rot gradually eats them away.

However, that's not how my social monkey brain feels about it. Some primitive part of me that ignores all logic and reason clings to the notion of social acceptance and shivers at the mere thought of rejection. Can't disable that sort of thinking. Seems to be a hard-coded part of a function or something.

Yeah, anxiety is a pretty strong word, but feeling worried is what I'm really talking about. You know, that uncomfortable feeling that you may have said something wrong and you're worried about what people might say. It's in the the same general direction as anxiety, but nowhere near as extreme as actual clinical anxiety. Maybe "worrying for nothing" is a more fitting expression for this thing.

Finally someone who agrees with me and validates my fragile ego and childish vulnerabilities. Thanks. You made my day!

Usually, my inbox has like 1 or 2 replies, but anything bigger than that makes me think I must have screwed up somehow. For whaever reason, it just doesn’t cross my mind that all those comments could be neutral or even positive.

Wait, you're an actual real-life economist?

Don't mind if I do. I've wanted talk to economists for such a long time, because that's one of the many areas I couldn't include in my formal studies. Yeah, you gotta graduate eventually, and you can't keep on adding more and more courses that have nothing to do with what you're really trying to achieve, LOL.

Anyway, I'm really curious about the state of economics as a discipline. Do you see it as a mature science, or do you think economics still has a long way to go? Are there widely accepted solid theories that no longer change? You know, like a solid foundation you can confidently build upon? Is every new recession a hurricane that tares through the walls and buries the previous foundation under a mountain of mud?

Yeah, that randomness can be addictive… and anxiety inducing. You never know which seemingly harmelss comment kicks up the hornet’s nest and which doesn’t until it’s too late.

Or dozenz to rip you a new one for defending a non (f)oss way of computing.
How dare you.
(and yet the same will use something like Plex, lol)

LOL. That sort of messing around is exactly what I would be tempted to do as well. I know that feeling a bit too well.

Also, totally agree with you on that social monkey thing. Must be like some sort of evolutionary adaptation that kept our ancestors in cohesive tribes. I guess lonely hunters would die of starvation or get eaten by wolves, so sticking together has some tangible value.

Mission accomplished! Now I know that I'm not alone with these confusing feelings. It's a journey of self-discovery we can all embark on together. Well, maybe not all, since some people use Lemmy in a very different way.

It’s mostly about time and place. What the post actually contains matters far less. Post in a big community or at a time when most people are awake, and you’re guaranteed to get lots of upvotes and comments. Post in a niche community, and you’ll be lucky to get a handful of upvotes, and maybe even a single comment.

Yeah.... Thanks, I guess. I knew what I was getting into, and I got what I deserve.

Then again, I would have done the exact same thing in your place, so I have exactly zero moral high ground here.

132 updoots! I feel so validated for 90 seconds!

I politely disagree.

That's really interesting, because a surprising number of people here ignore the number or just mark all as read every month. It's like treating comment replies as spam. I guess that's what you have to do if you're a drive-by shooter and never wish to face any consequences, but I'm not that kind of a psychopath.

BTW that could be a great post for !unpopularopinion@lemmy.world. If you end up posting it there, I'm really curious to see why people disagree with that... or more importantly, how many actually agree. Based on the small sample here, I think the latter group is not a tiny minority.

I will answer the first one, if it's not condescending, but most of the time it is, so I just don't respond to it.

Wait, so you're primarily expecting the responses to be written by people who disagrees with you? You must enjoy politics.

You like to play it dangerous, it seems. Keep things spicy? In this thread I've bumped into more than a few people who do the same and ignore all notifications too. To them, it's just a huge meaningless number that grows all the time. These people are essentially the drive-by shooter of the online world.

Teams is hell, on a job we had all teams having their channels (so like 30?) and you were "supposed to follow them" but they churned out hundreds and hundreds of messages every week, add your own channel and emails and gasp your work... So productive.

Same here - any notification, for anything, my immediate assumption is that it's someone who (rightly or wrongly) is angry with me or has bad news, or whatever. It's fucking exhausting.

Wow! Anything above zero? That must be agonizing. At work, I get lots of Teams messages, but I don’t find that so crippling. It’s just social media stuff like Lemmy where I have such mixed feelings about the numbers.

Oh, and sorry for the reply. Hope you can handle it. Here, have some flowers to cheer you up. 💐

Makes sense. If the responses are just just trash, treat them as spam. Hopefully that doesn't happen very often.

I'm on .ml . They don't tend to like opinions.

Yeah, business as usual. You say what you usually say, people freak out, nothing new. Rinse and repeat.

LOL. There are surprisingly many people like that. There should be a community where you can post these pictures. It could be like a competition of sorts.

LOL. So, I take it you never mark any of them read. I mean, that's one way to fix the problem, sure.

Viewing it as an opportunity is clearly the way to go. Far healthier than worrying for nothing.

We may be a minority. Turns out, lots of people don’t get that feeling.

So you don’t read them at all?

It takes time to heal from that kind of trauma. Stay strong!

Emotions and rational thinking don't really see eye to eye. One is like: "OMG! We're all gonna die!" while the other is like "Take it easy. It's not a big deal."

In many cases, you think your emotional response is unique and applies to nobody besides yourself. In reality though, many people feel the same way, but they just don't talk about it.

Now I want to see that thread, you must have got some beauties.
What was the top suggestion?

FUCK YOUUU!!!

Let's see if you see this one

Let me guess, you throw those light-hearted boomer jokes in political threads. I prefer to avoid places like that, since they bring me no happiness. For me, the web is a place to chill, a balancing force to the dull reality of normal life. Sticking with nicer places makes the web serve my purposes.

Anyway, that's yet another very interesting way to use Lemmy and its inbox. I'm learning so much from people in this thread, so thanks for opening my eyes. If I had kept my mouth shut, expecting everyone to use Lemmy the way I do, I would never have found out.

I merely cruise through the chaos, letting it happen everywhere around me. No comments on who caused it originally.

There is no clarity, there is confusion.

There is no structure, there is disarray.

There is no order, there is chaos.

I sometimes will respond to some comments if they aren't being obnoxious, and will block the trolls

Judging by some of the other comments here, there are surprisingly many people who try to have a civilized conversation in a places where things escalate very easily into a flame war. I prefer to avoid conversations that lead to that much negativity, which highlights yet another interesting usage difference. Because of that, I don't face anywhere near as much hostility as some other people. If I used Lemmy that way, dogpiling might occur more frequently, and I might approach it exactly the way you do—by neglecting those messages for a while.

Speaking of the friendly vibe, I think that's just one of the many benefits of being a small platform. If Lemmy got like 100x the number of users, that vibe would probably shift in a more negative direction.

This is the way. Basically, the rule 1 of internet.

Always react based on the title, ignore any news articles or long explanations the post may have. Never click the news article, since we all know journalists are very good at conveying the core message in the title without implying anything even a little bit distorted. On top of that, the average Joes posting their random ideas are also professionals when it comes to crafting descriptive post titles.

That's an interesting strategy. Looks like we are using the inbox in very different ways.

That is very interesting. Talking to people about weird things like this shows me that we use the same tools in very different ways. For example, many people prefer to look at the "all" feed and filter it with an ever expanding black list. I do the exact opposite, which is to use a reasonably short white list. Just ignore the "all" feed for the most part, focus more on the "subscribed" feed, and you get what you want.

Now I can see that people don't even use the notification inbox the same way. If there's an alternate way to do things, some people are going to do it that way.

I treat political discussions the same way I deal with radiation—distance is key. If you can't have enough distance with the radiation source, you need limit exposure by having something suitably protective between you and the source. Needless to say, I don't read any political communities. While browsing c/news I tend to avoid the comment section if it looks like the headline is likely to ignite another flame war.

That sort of endless debating just siphons my will to live, so I think it's safer to steer clear instead.

I should hope it's more real. I think there's less AI spam bullshit here, because companies don't know or care about us.