No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
Very much, yes. Why is that?
I think it's because we got used to surround ourselves with high-pitched stimuli. Especially the digital world is designed to catch and keep our attention. There is kind of an evolutionary pressure for these services to develop in this direction, as those who manage to anchor themselves in our habits naturally displace others who don't. Yes, addiction is another interesting, related topic, but let's get back to attention span.
There are things we'd like to do, which are beneficial and provide long-term rewards, but we find it's difficult for us to concentrate on them.
Reading a book. Learning or playing an instrument. Studying, even for subjects which we find genuinely interesting. Spending time with people off-screen, talking with relatives or neighbors.
These don't give you a kick every few seconds like an instagram feed. When scrolling through lemmy, you could find the next exciting thing at every moment! Maybe the next Tinder profile is hot, or even a match? Oh, what's that meme?
I don't think short videos are particularly to blame or the root cause, I rather see them as one of many symptoms. Videos have to catch our attention with their thumbnail (which is often clickbaity exaggerated for that reason), and somewhat deliver the expected excitement, else the channel goes extinct.
I found myself using my phone as a second screen when the video on the big screen fails to keep my attention (of course it's actually me failing to focus).
Our brain gets used to what becomes our norm, lower-pitched stimuli seem less exciting in contrast. Yes, I could pick up my guitar and try to slightly improve my skills with that song, or reap the instant reward with just one more click, or just one more scroll.
There is probably no alternative for the cure. Adjust the normal pitch so that the things you actually want to do seem like a really good idea. Actively abstain from being bathed in superficially exciting content, to make room for actually rewarding activities. Or in other words, embrace boredom.