Moment of clarity? Embarrassed? Lost control of an antagonistic agenda?
A little mantra I like is
Don’t believe everything you think
Sometimes I come to that realization after I’ve hit the post button, and whatever I’ve said is either a dumb take or needlessly antagonistic. We already get so little free will, no need to throw away the bit we get just to be a stupid asshole.
You also shouldn’t believe everything that you breathe, or you’ll get a parking violation with a maggot on your sleeve.
I delete stuff if I was objectively wrong. If people just disagree with me I’ll leave it up, I don’t care about fake internet points.
I deleted everything on Reddit because fuck Reddit, website doesn’t deserve my content. I even got dms complaining about nuking my solutions to questions in gaming and the blender subreddit, but I just told them to leave reddit too lol.
Sometimes on reddit I post a comment that I know will be controversial, but I don’t really want to be getting abusive comments on it several days later.
I’m also in a different timezone to the Americans so more often than not, I’m going to be waking up to a bunch of furious redditors who have worked themselves into a frenzy circlejerking each other when I’m not even there to reply.
So sometimes I’ll just delete it once I go to bed
Why are you posting on reddit? That’s gross
You ever see those posts about something you have a lot of experience with, maybe a niche topic or something you do professionally for work, and it’s so confidently incorrect (and upvoted) that you can hardly stop yourself from commenting?
Although lately I’ve just been closing out of the app more often than not, nothing positive has ever come from engaging with those people and I’ve never felt like I changed anyone’s point of view or anything - so what’s the point
I used to do this when I was on reddit from 2011-2026.
I did it because I’m a narcissist. Like actually, I was diagnosed with NPD in 2023. People disagreeing with me physically hurts. I don’t know how to explain it but when a person has a worldview disagreeing with me, it feels like an attack on me and causes this kind of ache in my chest.
Everything just gets translated to, “Oh, you think this way? God, you’re fucking stupid! I HATE YOU!” We cannot just disagree because my opinions and worldviews are so intrinsically linked with me. My whole world is me looking into a mirror and seeing nothing but my face. If it reflects something else, that’s frightening.
I obviously am trying to be a better person now and don’t react the same anymore, but in the day that is why I would do it.
Thank you for writing this.
I’m from the neurodiverse crowd so while I might not be able to relate completely or agree, I can completely relate to the situation of people telling me they understand but behaving in a way that proves they really don’t and really can’t.
Best wishes for your progress!
Kudos on you for trying to better yourself!
Being a narcissist sound surprisingly like have zero inward confidence and self esteem every time I hear it described. Is that at all accurate?
I disagree.
EDIT: this was a bad attempt at a joke and insensitive, please accept my apologies
Delete this
That has got to suck. Absolute kudos for the self-awareness and working to better yourself, npd can hurt a lot of other people if you let it run wild.
Fascinating. What if your opinion was objectively wrong and you just found out? How else does NPD manifest?
I delete comments pretty frequently. Sometimes you just realize you’ve said something that’s gonna lead to a bunch of unpleasant interactions, and you’d rather just everyone have a pleasant day.
I mostly just add stuff in that situation. I might’ve been wron, unclear or in a different context. Just now I had a post where people thought I was supporting trump(a actions) in a way and I tried to add things I thought obvious.
But I also get what you’re stating. I think that’s when I wrote a post and then delete the test before posting. So maybe thats basically the same.
I actually wrote a big reply mentioning a time I did this… and deleted it because I didn’t want to chance another dog-pile.
I cancel posting comments all the time. I write out this whole thing and then when I get to the end of it, I realize I don’t actually want engagement. Sometimes the internet can be a bit hostile and I’m not always in the right state of mind to want to invite it into my life that day.
That’s my realization back on reddit after a few years since I joined around 2015. I rwalzied I just don’t want any engagement when it’s something even slightly heated.
Back before I joined reddit I used to hang out in manga scanlations (scanning and translating) forum sites and well, things always gets heated and I a was a vile young man. As I get older and got a job, I realize I just have no energy left to do other things if I’m constantly enraged and seeking things to get enraged about. So off my own sanity I avoid commenting unless it’s just something silly or whimsical.
But even then people still sometimes do that twitter meme: “I like pancakes”. “SO YOU HATE WAFFLES HUH!!!”.
I usually when that happens I put down my phone / step away from my computer for some minutes and just ignore it.
Now that I’m here, I’m also being even more careful. Being a lot smaller than reddit, even compared to the period around 2016 - 2020 reddit, makes it that my name might be a bit easier to stumble upon. Not that there’s stopping anybody to stalk me here or even in back on reddit. I keep a low profile and just lurk. Seems to work fine for me.
I want there to be a less turbulent internet where all the biggest media and message board sites are carved up into shallower pools and someone just making their first post is more likely to get constructive engagement instead of being immediately at the mercy of ten thousand people who will tear them apart. Let us focus group our posts with likely pals before it floats out to the open waters of global criticism. I know you still have to prevent echo chambers and figure out how to balance safety with engagement, so it’s not a simple problem to solve when it comes to finding the right algorithm. It’s just that right now, engaging with mass social media feels a lot like boarding a rickety canoe that’s already actively immersed in Class 5 rapids.
Even deciding to say something in small social media places such as this one involves bracing myself for a potential onslaught of disagreement about something I didn’t think about or got wrong or didn’t think was as big of a deal as they clearly do. It’s part of what made me improve my debating and spelling skills very early in life after visiting early message boards and chat rooms. But there was a limit to the number of people who could yell at you back then. I look around now and feel things have become a bit out of hand.
And save for common sense legislation, the only way to change the way modern social media operates is to make new brands of media that are both more engaging than existing forms and prioritize health over profits. Humanist social media, which might be a myth, to think that you can match the user retention of existing companies without tuning your algorithms to maximize addiction. But possibly, having a healthy relationship with social media and learning positive things from people online can be addictive in its own way. Maybe in a way that can drive user retention even higher than current systems could ever hope to. But they’ll never know because making a system that gradually dismantles capitalism doesn’t sound profitable. In any case, I think we should try.
Absolutely. I’ve written multiple paragraph responses, and then I realize I may have to argue that or just engage more than I’m willing to at that time and just delete it. I’ve got more important things to do than engage in Internet discourse.
More often this realization comes when I see the reply notification. It’s a “wow, I actually don’t want to participate in that discussion” reaction.
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@[email protected] Once you obtain your answer, you must fulfill the prophesy and delete this entire post yourself.
I’ve deleted posts when I responded to the wrong person, and one time I can think of where I completely missed the mark, but I deleted it within seconds of posting. Past that, I’ll accept what other readers decide. I think there are definitely times where a post has been misunderstood due to bad phrasing, but I don’t ride or die on how a post does. Sometimes when something does bad, I’ll try to have some introspection on why, and if it’s because my views are bad or unpopular, I’ll give it some thought. It’s not often that my views are particularly wrong, but like I mentioned, I just articulated them poorly. Sometimes it is just a bad take, I eat crow, and I try to use that as a learning experience and move on.
I’ve never deleted anything out of shame because my view was unpopular.
95% of the time if I delete a comment it’s because it was either a mistake or I made the comment then I looked through the other comments and realized like half the thread already made the same joke.
No. I take my down votes with pride.
Let’s test that shall we?
Test failed successfully.
Well he seems to be failing but I’m doing pretty good from the looks of it.
I down voted your first comment and upvoted this one to maintain equilibrium.
I mean Lemmy is kind of an echochamber
chamber
chamber
…hamber
amborger
Yes, it is.
I agree.
EDIT: I’m not gonna apologize for this one
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when I delete its usually because I get the impression like ok I misread the room, misunderstood the situation or sometimes rereading it and I think that its not what I think
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I think it’s because we build our identity around our worldview and see conflicting views as a threat.
Because people tend to post judgemental comments / victimblaming, or just overall werent helpful (even if that wasnt the intent) when I’m already at my lowest, and I could already forsee that the post is just gonna get lots of negativity, so I dont even bother.
I see it often here too, humans are humans and no matter if its reddit, discord, or wherever. Honestly I’ve been learning a lot recently. Sometimes you have to self-help because you cannt expect random internet strangers to help you. Lots of people claim hat “we’re just trying to help” but they never actually try, but just to kick you down while you’re already down.
Phrasing is definitely important. I see many posts where it seems more like someone is looking for validation rather than advice. When those people don’t get the responses they want to hear, they get defensive and double down.
Sometimes people just have shitty views with no intent to reflect on their views and get dog piled on. I personally have no problem with this. I think much of the world has gotten to soft of some demographics. For example, as an American (I only say this because it’s becoming more prevalent, but it should be universal), I think anyone that comes out supporting white supremacy and Nazi ideals shouldn’t get the benefit of understanding. They should be lambasted and ridiculed for being terrible people. If the masses quit giving these people credence, maybe they’d just go back into being closeted bigots instead of making everyone else miserable.
