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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • I wonder if its the age of people you’re interacting with now, as you’ve gotten older yourself? My first degree was in philosophy, and I still read and discuss the subject when I get the chance. In my 20s lots of peers were curious or genuinely interested, and even if they were dismissive, it was often “what’s the point of that?” and could get the interested if I started explaining a classic problem or thought experiment.

    Older people however, were generally more disparaging and would openly scoff with “why would we need philosophy!” often followed by “[Science | religion | real life] tells us everything we need to know” depending on their particuar worldview.

    At the time I just thought that was what that generation was like, but now I’m in my 40s and I feel like many peers are getting more and more like that. I can only speculate that middle-aged people are less curious and openminded, they’ve come to terms with the world as they see it and they’re interested in getting on with things, not questioning the nature of epistemology or whatever. But the irony is that almost all the major problems that occupy so much of our time as a culture have massive philosophical aspects to them.



  • I don’t think I ever blocked anyone on reddit, but I’ve been pretty block happy on lemmy. Mostly because it’s a smaller community. With reddit, it was easy enough to unsubscribe from the big popular communities and focus on my niche interests and rigorously modded communities like askHistorians. That way I mostly saw stuff that was genuinely interesting to me. And if someone was annoying, they were just one voice among thousands.

    Here on lemmy, there’s not enough activity to be overly selective, and I actually enjoy the casual vibe of asklemmy, showerthoughts and nostupidquestions. While I’d never visit their reddit counterparts, here the community is small and it feels more personal. But this also means that there’s the occasional poster who I’d rather just not have to see. So, to keep my time on lemmy enjoyable, I block them.

    I don’t really think it’s a big deal, I don’t even think it’s a criticism of those posters. It’s really just that the content of their posts / comments are something that doesn’t add value to my experience. I’ve blocked well-intentioned, but obviously teenage, users because I’m not interested in their personal life questions (but they’re entitled to ask!); I blocked someone just for posting too many moth memes when I was getting sick of that fad.

    I’m pretty sure I’ve never blocked anyone for disagreeing with me or my beliefs, but if someone seems like their trolling, or simply has such poor social communication skills that they are coming across that way, I’ll block them. I generally look at users history and check if I’m likely to miss anything in the future. But invariably, the type of user I consider blocking generally has a bunch of dumb, negative or uninteresting comments and posts.