Classic joke, but what I find interesting is that the people who say it with conviction. Tend to be the kind of people who are into knights, swords and things like that. And they’re so invested in not being wrong, that they literally don’t consider the whole “forging metal with coal” aspect.

Indeed, the vast majority on any social media platform does not engage. And when they do it’s mostly just liking content and not even replying. You see it on lemmy as well, with news articles often having few comments. And when they do it’s one or two top comments and a bunch of replies.

Over the years the only thing I can imagine is to add another anonymizing layer, where people can send in questions and the “best ones” are posted by a general/bot account. But that is something people much smarter than me have tried to figure out for years, so I have no idea how it would be implemented.

Is there a way to encourage people to post more? Because the main problem seems to be getting actual posts, not replies to them.

For example “nostupidquestions” only has a few questions a day, but there are 40k subscribers and 1500 people or so checking in every day. It has 4.2k posts and 170k comments.

“asklemmy” has more posts, fewers subscribers, and over 2k a day check in. 6k posts and 317k comments.