What sort of post or comment gets you downvoted the most? Especially if you don’t think it’s bad behavior in the first place, or don’t care. Does not have to be on Lemmy, but we are here…
One of the good things about Lemmy IMO is that it’s small enough to see the posts that are unpopular. If you do “Top Day” on most channels, you cash reach the bottom, see what people here don’t like.
As far as comments, attempting to rebut the person who is telling me my post sucks, is what gets me into negative numbers most often. The OP is going to voite it down, of course, and nobody else cares, usually.
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Either nuance in a topic people are very black and white about or not being able to figure out how people can read things as the opposite of what I wrote.
Only happened a couple of times, no regrets.
Asking people to see nuance here and the rest of the web is the worst. You’re either left or right. Urban or not. Up or down. There is no in between, partial solutions are useless. Drives me bonkers
If you call both sides right/wrong when both sides are right/wrong, both sides downvote you.
Mention a third option, middle ground, or reasonable compromise is a downvoting.
Tell them to chill, you might have well stuck a hornets nest up you ass. There’s a reason you occasionally see people just admitting they were wrong or changing their mind get sent to the front page, its just rare.
I reckon it’s the issue of pseudo-anonymity combined with the lack of tone in a text post. If you’re talking IRL it’s much clearer that you’re making a joke or whatever, but all that gets lost in text. Also you generally know who you’re talking to IRL, whereas online you don’t know if that comment was written by a professor of ethics or a teenager who watched a single video on the topic and is parroting opinions they are now convinced are correct.
That’s why I really like the /s marker, unfortunately it gets a lot of hate.
What a constrictive outlook on human dynamic and expression.
What’s interesting is that the language allows multiple meanings. The commenter above can either be driven bonkers by presence of nuance or the lack of it and both interpretations are correct.
The first sentence can be seen as being against nuance or it can be seen as being against the online experience of asking for nuance.
The next sentences can be seen as arguments against nuance or examples of behaviour encountered when asking for it.
And the final bonkers can either be against the use of nuance or the repeated responses to it use.So without further clarification, we can’t really be sure which stance the commenter implies.
With only these two situations presented, it’s a 50/50, left or right choice, so I’ll go ahead and presume it’s the latter, since that seems to be more likely encountered in online chats.If the commenter meant that a black/white mindset drives them nuts, then I redirect my comment, in the sense that:
- I agree, it’s nuts.
- My comment applies to people with that mindset.
Yep, I still make the misstake from time to yime and try and give a resonable take on a rant post when I feel like they are too unfair.
Latst time was a few days ago when I responed to a person in a Linux community ranting about how Windows 11 sucks because he didn’t know how to use it properly and that it had the audacity to not include drivers for 20 year old equipment.
I got massively downvoted and after I explained that I was an IT tech that didn’t run Linux on my main machine, I was weirdly called out and some idiot claimed that you can’t be an IT tech if you are not running Linux as your main computer OS.
It was kinda funny, I was bashed contiously by the open community for a minor disagreement, while I believe that I stayed polite throughout the conversation
Linux users drive me crazy. They clearly see that Windows users try to use Linux like it’s Windows and encounter problems. Why can’t they see that trying to use Windows like it’s Linux will have the same issues?
You can be an IT technician with Windows on your main machine. Whether you should be is a different question.
If my needs were better served by Linux on my main machine, then yeah, I’d go Linux, but since Windows better suit my needs at the moment I don’t.
I did run Linux as my main OS for about two years, but then my needs changed and I went back to Windows.
Heh, I get down votes from both sides a fair bit. In one part I am supportive of views, but raise obvious issues in other areas. This makes the For team upset. The Against team hates me too because my stance is on the For team’s side. The result is an inbox full of fine examples of how in-fighting destroys the grass while the other side of the fence has no idea they’re apathetically winning.
Almost all of this comes down to people attempting to express their self-assessed virtuosity as superior to others, or they are driven by a manipulative fallacy—argumentun ad populum is a big one in echo chambers—causing them to easily sway closer to extremes with little critical thought first.
This is why we are supposed to discuss and not argue, remaining constantly open to exploring and contemplating new information. It is not about who is right or wrong, rather the discourse and learning from it. But that’s not the default setting in many Lemmy communities.
The older I get the less patience I have for actual morons. if someone wants to put words in my mouth I don’t have to be there for it. I just block and move on.
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I agree, but it’s also very easy for this mindset to lead people to equate two very different-in-magnitude evils as “the same”.
That first one is where I feel I’ve seen myself and others get downvoted more than anything else listed here. Maybe it is recency bias from that one thread the other day lol.
Honestly though in all actuality there are very few topics where nuance does exist like with guns for example: it’s a very nuanced issue and calls for bans without acknowledging the reality that for many in America relying on the justice and police systems is not always a good or even safe option when it comes to personal safety, but at the end of the day you either ban them or you don’t and any extra asterisks are minutiae, so people don’t really care about your personal reasons they just want to know what side you fall on in the conflict.
So often nuance-enjoyers come off as effectively saying “what if we rape but only sometimes?” on the topic of whether rape should be a crime in society.
Every topic has nuance.
Every. Single. Topic.
There is even nuance when talking about nazis. Like the fact that they rose to power by giving people economic solutions prior to speed running pure evil. That doesn’t anything that they did was good, because the nuance is in how they implemented those economic actions. The small details that made it work so they could rise to power at that point point time in that location.
Nuance doesn’t mean good or evil, just complexity and more details than most people think about. Sometimes it isn’t super relevant, and can be used to distract from the high level details, but it is still there. Nuance with racial disparity is keeping in mind that a lot of racism is implemented in different ways regionally, while still being racism.
So often nuance-enjoyers come off as effectively saying “what if we rape but only sometimes?” on the topic of whether rape should be a crime in society.
That isn’t nuance. That is weaponized compromise.
The fiddly details about consent and coercion in relation to rape would be about nuance.
Asking why you’re getting downvoted is usually the easiest way to get downvotes.
But I often wish I would get a comment about downvotes. It’s easy enough to see why I’m getting downvoted when I post stupid shit, but sometimes I feel like even the most uncontroversial post or comment will get at least one downvote. I want to know when I’m wrong, so I can learn!
Like, the other day there was a post getting downvoted to oblivion and nobody told OP anything. I commented my reason and OP actually seemed to be learning from that, edited the post and the downvotes stopped accumulating.
I had a conversation with someone about one of my downvotes posts, which helped to understand yet another stupid derailing tactic that terrible people use to stifle conversation. I really appreciated their feedback, even if I didn’t see any way to avoid the misunderstanding.
I’ve seen completely normal and innocuous statements heavily downvoted here. Some people seem to just downvote everything and other people seem to downvote anything that already has downvotes. But one thing is for certain, it’s treated as a like/dislike button, not as a meter for content that does or doesn’t contribute to the subject.
I don’t think either of the popular behavior descriptions of “upvote if it contributes” or “upvote if you like it” really describe why most people upvote/downvote. My personal downvote criteria is more of a checklist:
- Is it unnecessarily cruel?
- Is it misinformation, or significantly misleading?
- Is it something so tired and overused that I don’t think it should be posted?
- Is it completely nonsensical?
- Etc.
If any of those are true, depending on the severity I’ll leave it be or downvote. I’d imagine most people are similar.
Those are all reasons I downvote too, but I’d lump them all into the “doesn’t contribute to the conversation/community” category. I’ll also report something if it’s dangerous misinformation, or very hostile towards an individual.
Anything slightly “feminist”. You know, like pointing out that women do the majority of unpaid care work. Or saying it’s not nice to objectify women. Or sometimes mentioning the word women will do it.
Lemmy has a much, much, much better crowd than reddit, but it definitely still got the “not all men”, “I only ever comment on stories about extremely rare false rape accusations” crowd.
I remember on Reddit once I commented a very vague description of a very personal experience I had with SA. Not fucking joking, people were defending this person they knew literally nothing about, except for the fact that I had said “oh yeah, I’ve experienced SA”.
I haven’t seen anything that bad on Lemmy yet so hopefully it stays chill.
I’m so sorry to hear that. Anyone with a shred of integrity approaching the issue will see that the statistics do not point to some pervasive false accusation culture, but rather a systemic issue of SA perpetuated primarily toward women for almost all of human history. It doesn’t mean that any other types of issues should be discarded, but reddit would have you think that every other rape accusation is false, and that all the true ones are against men.
It’s just an obvious bias on their part that is continually perpetuated by men dominating the platform on the mainstream subs. Lemmy has been better in that regard, because I think folks here are a little better about checking their biases for better discussion.
The problem is that this topic is very complex and very opinionated, and any opinion has very dangerous logical consequences if it’s even slightly wrong. So you get people arguing tiny semantics against people with traumatic personal experiences, which is not a good recipe.
It’s better, but very far away from good. My comment and the other one mentioning the same thing are already the ones with the most downvotes in this thread. So thanks to the downvoters for proving my point, I guess.
I’m guilty of this because I genuinely don’t see why “not all men” is bad. As an example, I see a concerning amount of women who emotionally abuse their husbands or boyfriends publicly in subtle ways, but there isn’t a huge culture around avoiding all women. As a dude, saying that “not all men” is negative doesn’t seem that different from saying “I’m not racist, but…” or “I’m not sexist, but…” because the conversation never seems to be about men with red flags or the people in power who don’t do anything when SA is reported.
What am I missing or not getting?
Let’s leave aside the labels (sexist, racist, etc) for a moment, because these conversations tend toward applying/avoiding those and it just loses a lot of nuance.
Let’s metaphor this, because I think that helps. Is it possible for someone with millions of dollars to have a truly bad day? Of course it is. Is it possible for them to be hurt by someone with way less money than them? Obviously, yes. Positions of privilege never fully insulate anyone from hurt or harm, and those in worse positions can perpetuate harm. That’s fully understood and accepted.
I don’t think anyone with integrity would say that women are in a position of power relative to men. Women have been systemically and systematically oppressed for virtually all of human history. A woman even being able to talk back to a man without severe physical consequences is an insanely recent development at scale in our world. There are still dozens of countries that are not letting women wear what they choose, marry who they choose, go to school. Men (as a group) have never been subjected to anything remotely close to anything like this, and in fact have perpetuated it for all time.
Now, there are some whackos out there who hate all men because of that. They’re super, super rare, and they’re wrong. Most women are indeed wary about random men, especially if they have experienced assault or harassment, but that is a far cry from hating all men.
To boil it down, there’s a huge historical and modern difference in the way the genders/sexes are treated, and that cannot be ignored just so we can try to achieve the utopian world of no distinction. We have work to do as a society, as genders, and as individuals to repair this gap together. Good men belong right next to us, doing that work. And every good man I’ve ever met has willingly done so. Instead of asking “why are you avoiding me?”, they give us space and support. Instead of asking “why not men?”, they do the work to support fellow men instead of asking women to do it for them. Instead of saying “not all men”, they actively engage in not being those men and are content in that.
While I don’t think what you said is wrong (though I have some semantic disagreements; I don’t think men are privileged but do think that women are disprivileged), I don’t think it’s that relevant. Power dynamics are far more complex than what you’re describing. While you can conclude that women on average have less power than men on average, that doesn’t mean there aren’t a huge amount of men subordinate to other men, women subordinate to other women, or men subordinate to women. In all of those cases, some higher figure is abusing their power, whether it’s by SA, violence, manipulation, or especially not holding someone else accountable.
The way I see it is that by making blanket statements implying that men are the problem, you’re distracting yourself from the root problem while alienating a good chunk of people who would support your cause, including male SA victims. It (anecdotally) seems like the pool of vocal SA victims is in actuality limited to just women who have been assaulted by a man. That division seems unnecessary. It’s the same way of thinking that alienates women who have Autism or adults who have ADHD; people only talk about the biggest or most substantial sub-group rather than the group as a whole.
I’m with you. I spent a LOT of time in r/TwoXChromosomes before moving to lemmy to try and understand that commmunity, and their arguments for why “not all men” is bad basically boiled down to “we’re tired of having to include that at the bottom of every post, just let us rant.” Which like, okay… but you’re spreading information and culture by making a public rant post. If you refer to “men”, that by default means “men in general”, not “some men”. So yes, you really should specify which ones you’re talking about every time. The exception is if you do specify a subset of men or even singular man, in which case, yes, “not all men” comments are unnecessary at worst.
to kind of sum it up, I think “not all men” tends to be kind of a red flag in the same vein as “all lives matter”. Not quite as bad, and obviously it’s contextually different as “not all men” refers to feminism rather than race relations, but I think it kind of makes the point as a metaphor.
You’d think a niche social media network populated by tech obsessed weirdos would be a bit more inclusive.
I pointed out that it was silly how Barbie made Ryan Gosling more of a star at the Oscars than any woman and got downvoted for it.
Anything that’s true but people don’t like.
It’s very misused as the disagree button rather than the not relevant button.
It is neither. It is just a downvote button. It may be “misuse” to you, but to others maybe not.
Just talk about how you genuinely enjoy Microsoft Windows as an operating system.
Saying something centrist instead of left-wing. I feel like I’m left of center in most places, but right of center here. Stuff like “we should try to just have a well regulated capitalist system instead of going full on socialist, because as bad as capitalism is, socialism has been shown to be worse,” would get me downvoted into oblivion.
socialism has been shown to be worse,
uh…
One issue is that socialism means different things depending on who you ask.
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what is pure socialism?
If you make a comment like that on the wrong instance, that happens, but it’s not like that on every instance. Commie instances are filled with tankies and they have always been very dogmatic, just exhibiting nuance and historical awareness will get you those massive downvotes. Also deeper comment chains on more neutral instances can be weird, but that’s probably small sample bias because few people will dig down that deep.
Posting for the sake of intelligent discussion; Philosophy.
Nobody understands the term “Devils Advocate” on lemmy. It’s just “TROLL”. I can’t possibly discuss a viewpoint online, that I don’t personally believe without instantly being labeled a troll.
I don’t brain like most people brain. I like to explore and discover the aspect of things which made us land on those decisions or opinions. Turns out, most people don’t like that.
It’s fine to argue devil’s advocate, but you should clearly mark it as such so people don’t think it’s your true opinion - tone is hard enough as it is to get through text, never mind outright devil’s advocacy.
Devil’s Advocate = Russian Nazi Capitalist Shrill in Filipino Putin propaganda farm.
See, this guy gets it.
“Why are you advocating for the devil? He has enough advocates!” /s
I certainly do like that! Is there anything you want to have a discussion about? Feel free to reply to this comment if you do…
Wrong politics. Too dry of satire. Too absurd of memes. Pictures of Charles III.
EDIT: Oh, and cigar posts. Some small handful of shit pieces downvote me everytime I post in the Cigar/Tobacco community.
I can’t imagine going out of your way to downvote people like that. I don’t have an interest in cigars so I just ignore those communities. If I went around downvoting post in communities I have a problem with, I’d be doing that all day.
Right? If you don’t like the subject matter, just block the community. No point in pissing on every post in a very small, niche, mostly harmless community.
Should see my blocked communities list. Granted 80% is extremely niche porn or non-English speaking, it’s still very easy to not care and tap three dots, tap Block Community. A really big part of Reddit actually being good was curating the feed and Lemmy is no different. Why wouldn’t someone want to see only stuff they care about when going on Lemmy? Way more effort to downvote lol
I wish Lemmy had a “reduce posts from this community” option. We have scaled sort at least.
AI isn’t stealing your art. Text to image stable diffusion literally can’t output a copy of your work.
And if you post your art online for free, you have no expectation of anyone not using your work to the extent that fair use allows. AI looking at your work for training is the same as a human looking at your work for inspiration.
I thought we saw instances recently of AI outputting verbatim snippets of its text input? It’s not impossible, I mean the well-known problem of overfitting is a simple example of how it can happen.
That’s true, but I was only talking about art and stable diffusion. I know it’s more of a problem with LLMs but AFAIK every time someone finds a way to get it to quote something copyrighted verbatim, it’ll just cease to function. The most I’ve ever been able to get it to do are things they’ve already been pretty much agreed to be fair use, like summaries and criticisms.
And yeah over fitting is a problem in some models, but the ones taking your money like Dall-E have systems in place to mitigate it. I think it’s only considered theft as much as when a comedian hears a joke way in the past and forgets that it was already used in someone else’s routine. It’s not really a problem until the entire routine is just someone else’s routine.
I agree, for some reason majority opinion on this website hates AI.
Here is an essay I did on AI, by the way:
People have long said that new technology only creates more jobs. To those people, I would like to direct your attention to the cart-horse. Around a hundred years ago, before electric cars, people used to go around on horses, or in carts and wagons pulled by horses. Horses were an integral part of the transport system, and most horses were employed as such, even being bred specifically to cope with higher demand on people needing to go places. With the advent of the car, large swathes of the horse population became unnecessary, and the population dwindled to a new equilibrium as fewer horses were needed in transport, but fewer horses were also bred. Compared to the busy, hard life horses had to put up with only a few decades ago, most horses nowadays, although there a fewer of them, live a life of comparative luxury, living in fields most of the day where they are free to graze, are given good food by their owners that care about them, and are only occasionally ridden by humans, and even when they are, it is far more relaxed and more of an enjoyable activity than horse-riding was when it was the only way to get somewhere, and done on a daily basis.
Humans often have this idea that they are special. That they are the only ones that can weave cloth – until it is automated. That they are the only ones who can make pottery – until it is automated. That human labour is the only way to get power – until power production is automated with the advent of electricity. That they are the only ones can be ‘creative’, who can write stories, make art, play music – until that is automated too. True, in all those cases, humans were still involved in the process to some extent, mostly for quality control and maintenance, but far fewer humans are needed to create the same amount of stuff – whether physical goods or more ‘idea-like’ stuff such as art – than before. In fact, recent progress has shown video games that were even tested and quality controlled by AI, as well as being programmed by AI and using AI generated assets, doing away with the need for humans entirely. This is analogous to the true scenario that I outlined in the first paragraph, and is not necessarily a bad thing.
It is quite likely that, in an impossible to predict timespan (it may be 20 years, it may be much more), humans will have developed technology with the capacity to completely create all the things we need, and more – good food, comfortable shelter, entertainment, and so on. Some will argue that this cessation of the need for humans to work will results in economic collapse and mass hardships, but this is a small minded perspective, often viewed through a capitalistic lens. The horses didn’t have a population explosion and lack of resources due to their work being gone, on the contrary, their numbers dwindled – which is not a bad thing, as long as it is through natural means, which it was, it just means that every individual has more attention and resources – and their lives improved, since they no longer had to endure hard labour every day just to survive. It is certainly attainable for the same thing to happen to us. Population growth is already falling in developed countries, and only people who are unable to image a world without human labour see this as a bad thing. If less humans work every year, and more AIs do their jobs, it balances out, and is a way to ease into a world where there is very little to no human labour, and all our needs and most of our wants are produced by AI.
As much as many people dislike the sentiment, this would not work in a capitalistic world where what someone gets is dependent on what they contribute to society, for self-evident reasons (those being that no one would need to contribute anything to society if it is all being done by robots), and therefore in a world where all necessary labour is done by AI, we would have to move to a system where everyone gets resources simply by dint of existing, rather than needing to contribute anything themselves. You can call this socialism if you want, it doesn’t really matter what you call it. This system would have the benefit of reducing stress caused by the feeling that you are obligated to do something, while not removing the ability to contribute something if you want – after all, it is necessary labour that has been abolished, not all labour, and just as horses are still used as a novelty and entertainment today, and many people value hand-made pottery, food, etc., over manufactured counterparts, there is likely to still be a desire for art, objects, and stories made by humans even in such a world where all necessary labour has been abolished.
This also deals with the counterpoint made by many that people will struggle for a sense of meaning and purpose in a world where there is no necessary labour – first of all, people struggle for meaning and purpose even when they do work necessarily, and second of all, as mentioned above, they can still do unnecessary, but still valued labour, and get the same meaning and purpose from that.
Some people, myself included, think that although the above scenario may work in theory, in practise it would be difficult to get the billionaires and billionaires’ puppets in government to agree to such a sensible system when the huge benefit to everyone may come at a small cost to themselves – even if the cost is just ego, even if they could still keep all their material resources. I admit, I don’t see a good solution to this problem myself, but, in conclusion, I hope we can think of one together, as this is a world many, including myself, would like to live in.
The meta bit is that specifically here, it’s sort of a derail of the main topic. Some downvotes I’m sure are for that. As for why this essay might generally attract downvotes? I’ll follow your locomotive off the track.
I mean, 1. It’s a frickin’ essay. 2. Comes off as a little cold and sorta “I know better than you do”, and 3. seems to completely miss the point of what I interpret as most folks dislike of AI in the current incarnations we are seeing (which isn’t a real sci-fi type general AI that gets society to the end point of your essay). I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone worrying about “what will I do to find purpose in a fully-automated-gay-space-luxury-communism?” (overemphasis mine of course). It’s now and the next so many years, not some far off future that (I interpret) folks seem to be worrying about. It’s income stability now, careers to go into now, disinformation now, degradation of the internet and media now. I think the zeitgeist here is that it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets any better. I don’t think anyone on Lemmy really has high hopes for major players in current economic systems to use AI-as-it-exists-now to make anything better of the world in aggregate. It ain’t the tools, it’s those who wield them.
When I reply to a comment with a laugh or what have you. I like them too know I laughed but since I’m not adding to the conversation I guess I’m getting voted down. I do it anyway.
I wish either in addition to or in place of votes, we could tag a post or comment with a small fixed selection of emojis. To signify it was funny, cool, thoughtful, etc.
And then maybe even filter or sort posts based upon the metrics that arise from the above.
You go back to Facebook damn you. ;)
I’d be down with that for sure!
Anything mentioning furry. Which is a shame, because I hoped the internet had outgrown such immaturity.
Although, looking through my history, apparently anything that criticizes Windows or AI, which is odd considering the demographics here.
That would be weird, I would think you’d be downvoted for, on the contrary, liking Windows. But the AI thing I have seen, even if I don’t understand it.
I actually expressed my views on AI in another comment.
Haven’t had many experiences like here, most people seem either positive or indifferent (both furry stuff and femboy/gnc). It doesn’t come up as much here though so it’s possible I just missed it.
Furries belong in their containment zones. I don’t force my fetish down your throat so don’t do it to me.
And yeah, there’s always random comments like this where people make out of the blue offensive comments towards furries. And they get a disturbing number of upvotes.
My understanding is that it’s just those folks who used to make homophobic comments but can’t anymore because attitudes towards homosexuality have changed.
The furry fandom spawned as a counter to homophobia in anime cons back in the day and is made up of mostly lgbt folks. It’s a good proxy for people to be homophobic towards without appearing so.
Take this comment for example, it’s very similar to the whole “I’m fine with gays, but I wish they didn’t shove it down my throat” rhetoric when a man mentions he has a boyfriend.
Asking for support with questions that others think are really easy to solve. Was a big problem on reddit as well.
Saying something positive about the United States, or something negative about CCP.
Oh yeah. I’m pretty new to all of this but just mentioning the fact that the CCP is doing raunchy stuff got me downvoted to hell. Even when those replies were provided with links to articles and facts I am being called racist.
That’s just lemmy.ml. Most other users on Lemmy are not like that. I would strongly consider changing instances of you are not too invested in your current one.
It’s not going to work if the instances determine what behaviour is acceptable on Lemmy.
I’m not exactly sure what you mean by this but there are many different instances with many different rules. I’m sure you can find one that is close to your viewpoints.
Personally I don’t think it’s important to be exactly in line with your instance but I do find a subset of Lemmy.ml users noxious enough that I try to minimize my interactions with their instance.
“Racist” is over used so much now that it’s losing its impact, which is horrible, since it needs to remain an ugly word.
Deviating from the group narrative is the major one.
The content of your post doesn’t really matter if you’re making the right sounding noises. As long as you somehow indicate that you’re “one of us” then you’re probably safe. If you talk shit about Facebook/AI/Elon Musk/Capitalism/Police etc. it doesn’t really matter if what you’re saying is literally true. If you’re speaking to the right audience you’re going to get pats on the back nevertheless. Conversely when someone like me then comes and points out that no, Elon Musk actually did not turn off Starlink in Crimea to prevent the Ukrainian attack I’m guranteed to get downvoted for it despite the fact that I’m correct.
I’m guessing the two mains reasons people downvote comments like that are cognitive dissonance; refusal to accept new information that goes against your prior beliefs and alternatively the false assumption that if someone is in any way defending an unpopular person/idea they then must be one of the “other” and thus we can dissmiss what they say without even considering it.
What sort of post or comment gets you downvoted the most?
Whenever I say that America is a continent instead of a country, and similar things.
Fun fact: as I discovered, “continents” are defined differently depending on which country you’re in, they are not the same worldwide. In Europe, America is a big continent and includes both north and south, and the continent including Australia is called “Oceania”. In “America” (USA), there’s North and South America as separate continents, and the continent including Australia is called … Australia… and yes, the USA is just America, because, yeah.
Yes, “continent” is a cultural category, and as such, definitions will vary across cultures. So if Europe considers America, north and south, to be one big continent, though they are connected by only a narrow strip of land, how is it that Europe and Asia are different continents, and nobody can quite agree where one becomes the other? They’re not even on different tectonic plates, like North and South America are!
I’ve never heard people in an online forum go “I’m European” only to have someone argue back “Well ackchyually it’s Afro-Eurasia!” And yet this pedantic argument is constantly made for the Americas.
What is it about these particular words that frazzles people’s brains and makes them forget that homonyms exist? The two continents are collectively called “America”, and “United States of America” gets shortened to “America”. Like all other homonyms in human language, these two pronouns are distinguished by context.
It must really confuse the hell out of people that the America’s Cup isn’t named after the Americas, or the United States of America. The America’s Cup is named after a racing yacht, which was named after the nickname for the United States of America, which was named for its location. So, I say America is not a continent, or a country. It’s a boat.
Seriously, though, I’m guessing the downvotes for saying that are for pedantry.
Thank you for being a voice of reason here. I’ve never understood this argument, yes the same word can refer to two different things and both sides can simultaneously be right (and wrong) about the usage of the word.
It’s like no one has ever met two people who share the same name, most reasonable people don’t argue with random people “You can’t be Joe! My friend is named Joe and you aren’t him!”.
And to compound the fact I’ve noticed that people’s native languages and place of birth tend to determine where they fall on the argument. You guys realize that words can sound and be spelled similar and mean something different things in different languages and cultures, right?
Don’t you know? They rewrote history and geography so they get to be the only Americans, while the continent is divided into North and South. Forget all the maps, documents, letters, and stuff that referred to the New Word as “America” for centuries. Forget about the first national documents in countries like Mexico referring to themselves as Americans. Nope. They get to steal the name because #power.
So now it’s time to read the “but ‘United Mexican States’ is Mexico, so ‘United States of America’ deserves to be America”, ignoring the fact that Mexico derives from the native name of a portion of Mexico City, so it’s not remotely the same (see first paragraph).
This comment answers the AskLemmy about things that annoy me…
That’s the secret real reason for the Panama Canal. Divide and conquer baby.
