I’m not sure it’s “toxic positivity” to say “being passive aggressive/using trite URLs to respond with no intention of actually being helpful is unhelpful.”

My biggest complaint about this site is “no duh” lol I can’t imagine there’s a single person out there who has ever linked lmgtfy that genuinely thought they were being helpful.

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ang_cire 13 hours ago | parent [-]

I think the idea that the only acceptable responses to any given query are helpful ones is absolutely toxic positivity. Not all queries merit helpful responses.

Do unhelpful responses sometimes get leveraged against people genuinely just asking for help? Sure. But people also ask questions in bad faith, and it's a perfectly valid choice to respond in kind.

I've never sent an lmgtfy link to someone asking a technical question, but the "can you actually cite one vaccine that is proven to have saved lives" people get one.

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BolexNOLA 13 hours ago | parent [-]

People like that thrive on being martyred and/or dragging you into a flame war. They want to stand and fight and make a scene. They want to take the example of how they were silenced or whatever and parade it around to their peers. You being passive aggressive/sarcastic with them only plays into their hand 98% of the time. If you want to make a point for other people looking on, then you answer them calmly with a few sources and move on.

Otherwise, the best course of action is the simplest: ignore/downvote/report and move on. You’re better off spending your energy and wit actually helping people who are there in good faith.

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ang_cire 13 hours ago | parent [-]

How about I choose how I spend my energy, and you optimize your own according to your standards?

We don't all have to give a response optimized to be "best".

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BolexNOLA 11 hours ago | parent [-]

No you don’t have to do anything in particular and this isn’t about “optimization” but rather about getting a result you actually want. So if we’re talking about having a legitimate discussion or “the general good,” I believe what I wrote is the better way to operate. If your response to that is simply “I feel like being shitty to people in response to things I find shitty,” then that’s your prerogative. You’re more than allowed to choose that course for yourself, I just don’t think that’s a healthy way to operate.

It all boils down to what you want out of the situation ultimately.

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ang_cire 10 hours ago | parent [-]

> If your response to that is simply “I feel like being shitty to people in response to things I find shitty,” then that’s your prerogative. You’re more than allowed to choose that course for yourself, I just don’t think that’s a healthy way to operate.

I don't think passive aggressiveness rises to the level of "shitty" behavior, and that's my entire point; people have turned anything but HR-approved, company rep-like responses into being shitty behavior.

The elimination of emotion (of which annoyance and exasperation are two kinds) from online discourse as a means to attempt to signify who is more correct is bad.

"Using lmgtfy makes you shitty" is ridiculous levels of tone policing.

	▲	BolexNOLA 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> "Using lmgtfy makes you shitty" is ridiculous levels of tone policing. I guess my question is: what is the point of sending a lmgtfy link? What do you want to happen? I don’t think this is tone policing tbh unless we call any time someone says “stop” tone policing. In which case I’d say I guess I support some light policing.