Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected]
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
This is intentional. When I post to this AskLemmy community I try to frame my questions to fit its description:
I fall back to more specific questions here when I can't find a relevant, active community to post to (or forget to look for one).
This is too broad. It's like asking "what's the best wrench to tighten nuts and bolts?" For some applications that's a torque wrench, some it's a box end, some it's a socket wrench, some it's a crescent wrench, sometimes it's a pair of vice grips and a hammer. Anything that could properly be called a mode of communication has use cases where it's clearer than others.
The OBD code that's unintelligible to the lay person is the clearest way to communicate a discrete engine problem to a mechanic. A graph that plots a particular change over time might perfectly communicate the raw data, while being incapable of communicating narrative context. A meme image or referential quote might perfectly communicate a specific emotional concept to a broad group that gets the reference, while being totally opaque to those who don't.
I follow ya, I have trouble writing these questions to thread the needle between too broad and too narrow. Too broad and understandably, I get responses correctly calling it out as you have, yet too narrow and it doesn't produce the conversation and different responses I'm interested in seeing.
I suggest breaking it down into sub questions based on expertise of the audience and nature of the information: technical, narrative, cultural, emotional, etc.