Unpopular Opinion
Welcome to the Unpopular Opinion community!
How voting works:
Vote the opposite of the norm.
If you agree that the opinion is unpopular give it an arrow up. If it's something that's widely accepted, give it an arrow down.
Guidelines:
Tag your post, if possible (not required)
- If your post is a "General" unpopular opinion, start the subject with [GENERAL].
- If it is a Lemmy-specific unpopular opinion, start it with [LEMMY].
Rules:
1. NO POLITICS
Politics is everywhere. Let's make this about [general] and [lemmy] - specific topics, and keep politics out of it.
2. Be civil.
Disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally attack others. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Please also refrain from gatekeeping others' opinions.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Shitposts and memes are allowed but...
Only until they prove to be a problem. They can and will be removed at moderator discretion.
5. No trolling.
This shouldn't need an explanation. If your post or comment is made just to get a rise with no real value, it will be removed. You do this too often, you will get a vacation to touch grass, away from this community for 1 or more days. Repeat offenses will result in a perma-ban.
Instance-wide rules always apply. https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
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The genre is much older than this. The market is huge (something like 10-15 billion $USD) with about 50k different self help titles being published every year. Obviously no bookstore is going to stock 50k different self help titles (except maybe Amazon). But much of this market is served by special interest bookstores, like religious bookstores attached to churches or whatever. And those have existed forever!
I'm old enough to remember the 1980s and the parenting advice books that told my parents to beat me with a wooden spoon -- that they purchased from their church. It biases me against the genre somewhat ;)
Self help books tend to be part of a radicalization pipeline, where the authors are considered "experts" because they have a published book. Once you're in the pipeline, like youtube conspiracy videos, eventually you'll end up buying into antivaxx and other woo.