I have had a tendency since my earliest days on social media where I will get halfway or more through a response, and end up just cancelling it. Sometimes I feel like I’m just being to over the top with snark or otherwise don’t want to be that kind of person, but a lot of the time I’ll decide I just really don’t care enough to finish it. Sometimes I just know it’ll be an argument and I know what the person is going to say, and just have no interest in continuing the discussion. I did it on Reddit, I did it on bulletin boards, I even did it in my teens and twenties on Usenet - and I’ll probably go on doing it for as long as I continue using this medium. I probably do it a bit more than half the time. I know that lemmy benefits from more content and I have had some great discussions, but sometimes it’s just not worth it for me.
How about you? Do you hit publish or cancel more often?
I can relate to this so much. I’m active in tech support communities and sometimes there’s so many scenarios involved that being concise, accurate and still trying to sound human is quite difficult.
I’ve been trying to shift my perspective in treating replies as the start of a conversation, where a shorter post with less information or caveats makes more sense to start from so you can narrow down the direction of the comment thread later.
I realize my feelings might be highly specific to support/question threads, but your words really resonated with me regardless.