Trash post history. Opinion invalid

And thank you for getting a chuckle out of it. Seriously, this platform needs more positivity.

Have a great day, stranger.

I swear Lemmy is the only place where a throwaway sentence (in a comment that has nothing to do with that topic) becomes a giant pedantic thread about em dashes. Wtf is this platform lmao.

It reminds me of my post about Stop Killing Games where half the comments became about video vs text 😂

Alright then. If you were always using them correctly then you do you

Let me post an original comment here, since this was apparently divisive.

When communicating through word or writing (especially regarding topics that lean towards activism, philosophy, politics), you need to understand:

your audience as well as their expectations (this can include point of views on the topic, grammar, punctuation, tone, etc. Yes, that includes now-alienating punctuation like em dashes.)

your own voice (pretty much the same as above, but your version of it)

how to bridge 1 and 2 (this is sometimes called “meeting people where they are”)

when to challenge audience expectations.

when to have your expectations challenged.

It is essentially a game of tango.

Let me give you an example.

A year ago I started a blog on FOSS and setting up homelabs (not linking to it on this account). A friend of mine was supportive, although he had no idea what FOSS was. He was using pretty much all of the big tech services you could think of.

That said, I still took time to hear him out. I didn’t make fun of him when he complained about Spotify’s price increases, or shows being pulled from Netflix, and other shitty practices. I understood where he was coming from: most of these services have high advertising budgets and so in most cases this is all he knew.

Once I realized where he was coming from, I explained what FOSS was in terms he would understand, and in ways that just about anyone would appreciate. What was the result? Nowadays he is a user in my homelab and he gives regular feedback on my blog. Furthermore, this discussion directed some of my earlier articles, giving them a much appreciated conversational tone. This was a excellent end result that could only have been reached by balancing idealism with pragmatism.

My main point is: you need to understand and play this game of tango. If you don’t, you risk alienating your audience without ever having the opportunity to challenge them (and them challenging you). As an example, look at people in this thread who didn’t even read the article due to the author’s brazen use of AI; it went entirely against their expectations, so a discussion was never had with the author and his topics.

LMAO well at least you weren’t a dick about it. Cheers and rise up lol

Ok, you gave a way more reasonable response than the other guy. Thank you for your input; it sucks when something near and dear to you is “taken away” or bastardized in some way.

Anti-intellectualism… lol?

Anyways if you go back to my original comment, you’ll see that my original Javascript comments were written as advice towards prospective blog / site owners, in an attempt to get them to create something UX friendly. My comments on LLM are an extension of that: if you use AI (or write closely to AI) to write your blog you’ll just shake your readers’ confidence.

I have no idea where you got anti-intellectualism from, you’ll have to show me the hat you pulled that from sometime. That said you can substitute em dashes, they don’t hold dominion over the English language lol

“One symptom does not make a diagnosis.”

Read what I wrote again, slowly. Ask ChatGPT to summarize if you need to: “However, ChatGPT uses it excessively and so now it is a sign of its writing. Practically speaking you should avoid it in your future writing, since no one really cares if it is a false positive or not.”