Welp, woke up this morning, went downstairs, and suddenly my lower back is in agony! Guess I shouldn't have gone foodshopping and filled a backpack on two consecutive days.
@cstross I'm a few years ahead of you, and for me it was my right arm. It started hurting about this time last year, and I eventually went to the physio for a checkup.
It's just about stopped hurting, but the best part of a year has been a pain. Still no idea what caused it, but healing is a very slow process compared to one's teens and twenties
@thattommyhall Sometimes, you really have to wonder what the fuck people are doing on a conversational medium if they don't want responses. Why not just shout at the ocean or talk to the cat instead?
@threedaymonk@thattommyhall Sometimes people just want to vent. Sometimes, people want their friends or fans to know what's going on. None of this requires that the folks reading it offer advice. That's the line.
@timgatewood It's a normal way to respond to someone, and it's exactly how people talk to each other in the real world. Anyone who gets upset about that has lost all sense of perspective.
@threedaymonk in the real world there is loads of other context and cues though, so it's definitely different. But anyway, now we know that some people are sensitive about unsolicited advice on social media we could think how we might be able to change our behaviour if we care about them.
@johnl@threedaymonk this is the real world, it’s still normal for people to give unsolicited advice. If people don’t like it then they can explicitly ask for none or just ignore it, there’s no need to be a dick about it.
@johnl@threedaymonk just because some people don’t like it doesn’t mean it’s something we need to avoid, it just means those people have something to ignore. I’m not risking not being able to help some people just because some people are overly sensitive to it.
@wj so there are really no circumstances in which you'd not offer unsolicited advice to strangers on the internet? Say, what if it turned out >50% of people didn't want to receive such comments without them explicitly asking a question? Would that change your behaviour?
@johnl sure, if someone said they didn’t want to get any. So far in real life, and real life mastodon/twitter, no-one has objected (not that it happens much) though and I’ve not seen any data to suggest that most people don’t like it.
@wj I see people objecting, particularly regarding medical issues or things considered somewhat obvious. I assume that is just the tip of the iceberg so I'm careful offering that kind of advice.
But I don't really know how much of a problem it is so I don't know how much effort to make. But it seems easy enough offer advice mostly when it is asked for in the form of a question, at least with randos!
@wj this is uncharitable but it's funny to see this as you saying your advice is of such immense value that you couldn't possibly risk not giving it hehe
@wj@johnl FWIW, unsolicited medical advice on fedi is generally considered cringe at best, outright rude at worst. It was more acceptable on Twitter, but even then it was a bit 'reply guy'. Unless you personally know who you're replying to and have context, it's not any better than hearing someone at the pub moaning about their back and jumping in to recommend whatever worked for you.
Maybe instead of making other people ignore unwelcome intrusions, it's better to ignore the urge to intrude?
@semanticist yeah agree. I happened to have picked up from somewhere this kind of advice isn't always welcome (not particularly on mastodon, but particularly from strangers), especially if it could be construed as patronising. I wouldn't like for someone to be a dick to me if I replied when it was unwanted, though I'd understand if someone is told the same thing 10 times a week by strangers that their patience would be thin.
@johnl It seems pretty straightforward to me: was it literally a question? If so, fair game! If not, just don’t. To be honest, the ‘always trying to fix/offer advice’ thing is such a reply guy trait that it’s literally a cliche of the bad boyfriend experience and I don’t think it’s any more okay IRL than it is on here, just that people are more likely to be polite and smile and nod IRL.
@semanticist agreed. but I can see why it could be perplexing to the reply guys tho. I don't think I care when people give me unsolicited advice, even if it's super patronising. But I'm willing to accept other people don't feel the same way.
But it does seem important how many people feel that way. If 50%, then I think it's obvious you should change your behaviour. If it's 0.005% of people then maybe it's not reasonable to worry much about them.
@johnl I think for relatively high profile people, I can definitely understand being very defensive about it. The ‘just ignore’ idea doesn’t scale to hundreds of people offering the same, similar, or otherwise unhelpful advice.
@johnl@wj for what it's worth, I showed the original thread to my partner, who is neither a guy, nor a reply guy, nor extremely online, and she thought the "this worked for me" response was perfectly reasonable and the head-biting-off reply a bit much.
But in terms of how did I change my behaviour? Well, having observed the extreme response, I blocked the person I thought was being unreasonable, so that I wouldn't accidentally draw their fire myself. It's worked great!
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