Ask Lemmy

Anecdotally I'll say I feel like I used to be in the habit of typing out responses to posts daily when I first started using the internet. It feels like that was slowly trained out of me as the content and the responses got worse and worse (especially with the advent of LLMs). Trying to change that on Lemmy.

The answer is Lemmy culture.

I had seen people posting long form content on Reddit even after it's enshittification.

The reason why a lot of people here don't post their thoughts here is that there is a good chance they will get downvoted to oblivion with no comments.

I personally never suffered from this, but I had seen it in multiple places here on Lemmy and I personally think that as more users join Lemmy there will be a naturalization of this culture which will make most users think that they are accepted here and that will make them comfortable enough to write long form thoughts here.

I see a fair number of posts that are diatribes or questions. I upvote all questions to help raise visibility to help get more answers. There are fewer people here, for sure.

Of course that depends where you read and post on Lemmy. I don't really agree with the premise of your question, so I can't give you a good answer except to say look around. Depending on the topic, you can find people who are going into great detail about their own thoughts and presenting arguments and facts and whatnot, all as might be appropriate to the topic at hand. I'm not really sure what you're looking for. It sounds like maybe you want to start a blog, and if you want to start a blog, go start one. You can even post the links here, for an extra touch of irony.

Most of the threads I've started (on other accounts) have been about ideas rather than events or people and they've reliably made it to the front page, so there's definitely demand for it. There's probably several reasons for why threads like that are so rare, but I'd imagine a big one is fear. The reception on Lemmy to a post like that can, and usually will be quite hostile. People do have opinions and they're quick to hop in and tell you're wrong about something but at the same time they'll think twice before putting their own ideas under public scrutiny.

you should check out tildes or metafilter both are link aggregators that are highly curated to foster discussion

Because it's an echo chamber. Not a forum.

Lemmy's format just kind of sucks for discussions and visibility. If you comment on a post from a year ago, you can expect that to not been seen by anyone ever.

Lemmy is primarily a link aggregator, just like Reddit. It also happens to somewhat work for Q&A and help forums, but fundamentally Lemmy is more oriented towards new content.

The more classic forum format is better for discussions because replies bump the thread up to bring new attention to it.

Also a lot of people just don't give a shit about random people's random thoughts, that's why I'm not on Mastodon and never really used Twitter either. I don't know why people feel the need to dump all their thoughts on the Internet, like I care that a celebrity is on a plane or enjoying a nice meal.

Lemmy is about topics, not people, that's what I like about it. I don't care about people.

I think its just down to the lack of users, and esspecially lack of creators. There just isn't many people who care enough about a subject to write multiple paragraphs on it, nonetheless to an audience of half-a-dozen users, who likely also have an extreme aversion to monitization of said content given Lemmy's culture. For most users, there isn't even karma to act as an incentive to post.