I genuinely struggle to understand this weird social game people play on platforms like Lemmy, where they seem eager to engage with content they don’t even like or that pisses them off. It’s like joining a bicycle forum only to find out everyone mostly just spends their time there shitting on tricycles.

It’s unbelievably bizarre to watch the back-and-forth: someone posts something that reinforces the negative parts of their worldview, then people rush into the comments to signal they think exactly the same way everyone else here does, get showered with upvotes for saying what people want to hear, and that incentivizes them to keep doing it. Meanwhile everyone else sees that as long as you make the right noises, you get to feel included in our little tribe - whose only real common ground is mutual hatred of the outgroup.

I can understand it from an anthropological point of view. We’re social primates and this kind of status game is what we do. But it’s incredibly difficult for me to put myself in any individual’s shoes and figure out how they’re seemingly oblivious to the pattern. When I scroll through some people’s post histories, that’s literally all they do, and it’s so fucking weird to me.