Are people reading articles before posting them?

fer0n@lemm.ee to Technology@beehaw.org – 312 points –
Too Damn High
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No. There are studies about that, see e.g. https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/misinformation-desk/202212/study-few-people-read-what-they-share for a more recent one. That's also why Facebook, Twitter & Co at various times implemented various features trying to push you reading the stuff you post.

On Lemmy people don’t really share, but they might upvote stuff as long as the headline supports their personal biases, so I guess that’s reasonably similar to what’s going on in Facebook and Xitter.

Old habits die hard from reddit of coming for the comments than the article.

Occasionally I bump into a BS article that totally deserves a million downvotes. However, the comments are really good, and they deserve twice the number of upvotes. People with a PhD in the subject matter are there tearing the article into tiny shreds and wiping the floor with the resulting mush. Reading stuff like that can be entertaining and educational, so do I upvote or downvote the article? First world problems again…

Isn't Lemmy primarily a link sharing network?

Isn’t there like 99-1 rule or something like that? So the idea is the vast majority of users don’t share links, write posts, draw pictures or anything like that. Instead, they just read the posts and comments. Some of them upvote or maybe even drop a comment here and there. The action of upvoting contributes to certain ideas spreading on the internet.

I would suppose that on FB/X vast majority just read the posts and occasionally also share them. Sharing over there is about as easy as upvoting is in here, so I guess there’s plenty of that type of sharing going on.

Crafting an original post or making a post about a particular link requires little more than a single click, so I don’t think that many people actually share that way. Anyway, Lemmy is indeed a link sharing platform, but now we’re talking a second type of sharing. These things should have clearer names.