Just as the title asks I’ve noticed a very sharp increase in people just straight up not comprehending what they’re reading.

They’ll read it and despite all the information being there, if it’s even slightly out of line from the most straightforward sentence structure, they act like it’s complete gibberish or indecipherable.

Has anyone else noticed this? Because honestly it’s making me lose my fucking mind.

  • Shdwdrgn@mander.xyzEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    I’m afraid there’s nothing new about this, it has been going on for a long time. What I do believe is happening is now that every idiot with a cell phone can jump of sites like lemmy or reddit, we are simply seeing a lot more examples of the problem. Pretty much like when camcorders became affordable to the general public, we suddenly saw all kinds of police brutality videos and some people thought this must be a recent trend when in fact it had been occurring all along.

    • Serinus@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      One of my last comments on Reddit was about this.

      The biggest difference I’ve noticed is that people have stopped reading sentences. They’ll read all the words and then upvote based on the feeling those individual words give them. They won’t consider the meaning of all those words put together.

      And yeah, “upvote does not mean agree” is something Reddit has always struggled with, but it has definitely had exponential growth lately.

      It has made me start writing more clearly. There are comments I’ve written that have been wildly misinterpreted from my actual meaning. Part of that is that I tend towards sarcasm, and it doesn’t translate well over the internet no matter how absurd I get with it. But I’ve also started aiming to use more simple sentence structure.

      • dreadgoat@kbin.social
        1·
        1 year ago

        One of my favorite Redditisms was picking out incredibly obvious sarcasm with massive downvotes. Bonus points if replied to with a huge angry essay.

        And due to the voting patterns, I learned to be suspicious of my own comments that were highly upvoted. I started to see it as a bad smell. My best work was the controversial stuff.