yeah, I’ve probably fried my brain thinking too hard about it fs, just in general.

A lot of it is up to figuring out who’s going to be the best person to engage with, which I think is pretty easily done just by looking at post length. Longer posts require higher effort, = this person will be more likely to engage in good faith. Trolls tend to leave little quips, rather than large spiels.

Also, lemmy, just like reddit, also tends to be, if not an echo chamber, then certainly, a place where you can see who’s popular, and who’s unpopular. Who holds the most mainstream “lemmy” opinion. I think it’s generally better a lot of the time to engage with people who get a lot of downvotes, but seem to be acting in good faith otherwise, cause they have interesting opinions, and I think interrogating them is a good way to help them build their case, when otherwise it would just kinda be left to shit a lot of the time. The exception are political posts where you’re going to have to uproot someone’s whole worldview in order to make them see the light.

Weirdly counterintuitive, right, because you would expect most people to be more combative after going through the ringer of downvote oblivion, but it has been my experience that if you show them a modicum of sympathy they will respond to you oftentimes much better than a more popularly opinioned user might. I don’t really know why this is, maybe it’s because people perceive themselves to have some amount of power, or maybe it’s just because users are more likely to respond to, and upvote, short quips, as we’ve seen kind of infect reddit, and obviously those people are not worth bothering 90% of the time.

I dunno, that’s the only thing that strikes me maybe about your post pattern in this thread specifically, to do a better psychic reading I’d have to look at your other posts and I’m too lazy to do that rn. Hope any of what I said helps, though.