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

1. 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 or flagrant disrespect for graceful degradation of your blog)
2. your own voice (pretty much the same as above, but your version of it)
3. how to bridge 1 and 2 (this is sometimes called “meeting people where they are”)
4. when to challenge audience expectations.
5. 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.

Edit: spelling, grammar, and mention of blog presentation

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

Edit: Oh you edited your comment without putting an Edit line. The above was a reply to your original comment. I’m not changing mine

Also weird:

• Claims anti-intellectualism
• Gives slippery slope reasoning

Again, can’t make this up

“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.”

They are one of several signs of LLM writing. That said if you’ve always used them then you do you

Edit: To the idiots who downvoted me: The article’s author literally mentions that he used AI to write it, so it isn’t speculation on my part. That said, my point still stands: em dashes are just one of several tell-tale signs of LLM writing. See here, here, and here.

Obviously, AI picked this up from writers who used the em dash. 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.

Final Edit: I see replies stating that from people who’ve been using it for years who don’t want to stop because LLM’s appropriated it. I already left a Lemmy comment here that more-or-less goes over why you should care about optics (especially when writing in an activist adjacent space), but what do I know 🤷

Ugh why can’t you read the article without Javascript? Trying to do that gives you the error message: " You need to enable JavaScript to run this app."

That reminds me. There was a post on Lemmy recently about “graceful degradation”. One useful tip from that post was about maintaining a balance with your sites.

DO NOT use Javascript to implement vital content and navigation (especially if you are running a blog or some other information heavy site).

If you do use Javascript, only use it to support ‘nice-to-have’ features. Good candidates for ‘nice-to-have’ features would be things that can break, but wouldn’t impact the user experience significantly.

Anyways why am I yapping about this? I’m hoping this is read by someone planning to start a website or blog, and that they’ll take this into consideration.

Edit: Double ugh. I just noticed they used an LLM to write a 5 minute article. Dude literally left em dashes and kept the grammar the same. You can’t make this shit up.

haha look, I love reading and writing (and wished the whole world did, too), but either way if you need to deliver a message to as many people as possible, then you need to meet them where they’re at. In the case of advocacy work, it’s irresponsible to try to do everything on your own terms without considering your audience’s needs and preferences.

As for why people prefer videos and audio? Some guesses: its less effort, people have been conditioned through tiktok / short form content to keep consuming from the content machine, the growth of the attention economy, etc. Honestly I feel more pity than I do contempt.

I run a blog (not linking it here on this account), and I experienced the exact same thing as you.

People generally prefer audio-visual content more than reading. Why else would audiobooks take off as well as they did?

fast forwarding is your friend