Has anyone else noticed a sudden lack of reading comprehension skills?

What?

Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?
- They don't think it be like it is, but it do.
- You've got to be kidding me. I've been further even more decided to use even go need to do look more as anyone can. Can you really be far even as decided half as much to use go wish for that? My guess is that when one really been far even as decided once to use even go want, it is then that he has really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like. It's just common sense.
- Wow that genuinely was a struggle to read
- This comment is psychological warfare.
- Somebody get this man a doctor, I think he's had a stroke.
- Such as, the Iraq.
- Anyone read like comprehensive reading numbers of memory such as
Fuck this is actually funny
- Tbh, that was my response lol
  I understand what you mean, but I haven't noticed people not comprehending basic information. Can you give examples?
Good evening Ozzy !
- when hits you with the ozzy stare 😬

I'm afraid there's nothing new about this, it has been going on for a long time. What I do believe is happening is now that every idiot with a cell phone can jump of sites like lemmy or reddit, we are simply seeing a lot more examples of the problem. Pretty much like when camcorders became affordable to the general public, we suddenly saw all kinds of police brutality videos and some people thought this must be a recent trend when in fact it had been occurring all along.

One of my last comments on Reddit was about this.
The biggest difference I've noticed is that people have stopped reading sentences. They'll read all the words and then upvote based on the feeling those individual words give them. They won't consider the meaning of all those words put together.
And yeah, "upvote does not mean agree" is something Reddit has always struggled with, but it has definitely had exponential growth lately.
It has made me start writing more clearly. There are comments I've written that have been wildly misinterpreted from my actual meaning. Part of that is that I tend towards sarcasm, and it doesn't translate well over the internet no matter how absurd I get with it. But I've also started aiming to use more simple sentence structure.
- to use more simple sentence structure.
  to use simpler sentence structure.
- One of my favorite Redditisms was picking out incredibly obvious sarcasm with massive downvotes. Bonus points if replied to with a huge angry essay.
  And due to the voting patterns, I learned to be suspicious of my own comments that were highly upvoted. I started to see it as a bad smell. My best work was the controversial stuff.
- there's also the problem of people not reading it in the first place, and the problem of people intentionally misinterpreting what you say in bad faith. those aren't literacy issues
- I've had the same experience with people (intentionally or otherwise) misinterpreting what I said to mean something completely opposite. And I call them out on it every time, like seriously did you even READ what I said or did you just see a few words and insert your own beliefs into what you thought I was going to say? I've actually had some people admit that yes, they did indeed quickly skim without letting the actual words sink in.
  It's really a shame that you're reducing your writing to the lowest common denominator. Sure there may be times when there's a reason for that (Earth not flat, dummy), but the rest of the time it drags down the whole conversation to a level where it's difficult to have a meaningful discussion. If someone is really trying to grasp a concept but they're missing it then of course you need to drop out of the technical jargon to help them get up to speed, but the ones who are there just to ridicule and troll simply aren't worth the effort to explain simple concepts to (such as your opinion on women's reproductive rights is meaningless, the only opinion that matters is that of the woman who is affected by the issue). Keep up the high-quality discussions and ignore everyone who doesn't make the effort to keep up!
- I was a strong advocate for rediquette for a long time, but the site kept attracting new people who didn't give a shit about it. You can't fight the tides of change, I guess.
- Unmarked sarcasm via text is just always a bad idea. People don't realize how much body language, tone, and to an extent history with the person, goes into recognizing sarcasm IRL.
  When you remove all of that context... it's often just an extremely dumb statement, and I for one am just going to take you at your word, because too many people really do mean whatever it is you just said.
  It's also terrible because you get a comment like "I guess the earth really is flat" which maybe 99% of people take as sarcasm, and then the one flat earther or borderline flat earther comes along and goes "wow, lots of people are getting behind this movement!"
- Yeah, I feel the sarcasm thing. I used to use a lot more absurdist humor but over the past decade it's become increasingly pointless and even counterproductive as Poe's law moves along with the Overton window of stupidity. Stuff that used be recognized as obvious satire before gets taken much too seriously far too often now.
- You should use emojis to convey sarcasm 🙄
- It helps to use only happy nice words. A happy sentence is an objective sentence, free from judgements or pronouns.
  “You watch that stupid thing too much.”
  Starts with a pronoun, contains “stupid”, ends with a judgement. It’ll make people furious and it’s not the content for them but the trigger words they scan for.
  “Maybe we could go outside instead of watching TV?”
  Same reasoning behind why you said it, different responses sometimes.

I disagree. It's a very good game, but I think Donkey Kong is the best game ever.

But does that make us morally superior?

At work if I ask 2 questions in an email I’m guaranteed 1 or 0 answers.

My boss is horrible about this. He also doesn't organize his inbox in conversation view so he'll randomly pop up in different parts of an ongoing thread and can't keep track of what people are talking about.
- You should fire your boss. Sounds like they're not a great fit.
- OMG fr. I'll ask my boss, shall we do option 1,or option 2? and he'll write back, Yes.
That's not just reading comprehension. People are always answering my questions with unapplicable answers.
"Is it on the left or the right?"
"It's 67, the one with grass in the yard."
Just answer the damn question rather than providing me other information you decide would be more helpful!
- Ok so in defense of dumbasses, we don't always understand the question. Eg, whose left? In those cases we don't want to make your clarify the question and drag things out, so we give you what we hope is an unequivocally clear response. It comes from a deep-seeded fear of miscommunication resulting in too many mailboxes with their flags on the wrong side or whatever. We apologize for the pedantry, though. I get that it's annoying.
Maybe because there's 10 kinds of email replies at your workplace
- Hah!

I think it has something to do with everything trying to get your attention, and waste your time for metrics.

We ignore signs because we don't want to read another popup.

We skim text because we don't want to know about your life story, just the chili recipe, thanks.

We skip or misread instructions because we've been doing the job for years, and we're halfway on autopilot.

We can't find a restaurant or shop right in front of us because we're starting to learn to ignore bright colors and flashing lights.

We browse the internet while watching a movie because we've seen the same cliche Marvel movie before.

The problem is that sometimes we get so used to these things that we also do it when we shouldn't be.

May I suggest that you don't get a job in IT?

"I try to do a thing on my computer and I get an error message."
"What does the message say?"
"I don't know."
The story of me helping people with computers.
- To be fair, that's learned helplessness.
  How many times have you said 'yes yes, just click through that, jeeze'?
  There is so damn much horrible shitty UX out there; 90% of the time users are just trained out of using common sense, and you can't blame them for it.
  That other 10% though, goddamn. I swear if you moved their doorknob an inch to the left they'd starve to death in their home.
- Also one my favourites:
  „Nothing works, and this annoying message keeps popping up. I keep closing it, but it just comes back every time. Can you help me?“
- More like my computer doesn't work. Error message at least implies the computer booted up.
  The process of trying to get someone to explain their problem is so painful.
- Even people on our fucking helpdesk write up tickets like that.
  "Caller can't log in"
  Okay what are they logging in too? What creds are they using? Are they getting an error message? what is it? WHY AM I HAVING TO FOLLOW UP WITH YOU TO ASK THESE QUESTIONS YOU STUPID FUCK.
- Well, I've had this happen before because the error is half a screen long with a bunch of random (to me) characters, only shows for half a second and it won't let me screenshot it and isn't always repeatable because it already showed me the error message, so why would it again?
  I hate when that shit happens.
- (Kent Brockman voice) JUST TAKE A SCREENSHOT, PEOPLE!!
  Aside from reading comprehension, it seems as though people absolutely lack the ability to problem solve. Head scratching is as far as many will go. I can't count how many times I've found inefficient, tedious, or straight up broken systems or out of date info in my office and when I ask people if they've ever contacted IT about it or tried to figure it out they just say "Eh, nah, I just leave it and it works itself out." No. My guy, you're just doing it wrong/taking an extra 15 minutes to do everything you're doing because of the workarounds.
"I understand your issue, can you please provide me w, x, and y so I can proceed? Also did you try Z?"
"Sure, I tried Z! Here is W"
- That's better than average tbh
I feel this.
What is the actual point of publishing knowledge bases and documentation if nobody reads them?
- Well some people read it. Just noz everyone.
Preach
Or customer service for that matter.

I help companies sell products on Amazon.

One sold protein powder. Product title says "25g of protein". First bullet point says "25g of protein per serving". Main image of the product clearly shows "25g protein" on the label. Second image makes it more clear with "25 Grams of Protein Per Serving" in big bold letters. The A+ content (images in product description) repeat this information in big bold letters as well. Both the image gallery and the A+ content showed a picture of the supplement facts panel. The top rated review for the product called out that they liked the 25g of protein per serving.

Customer messages me, "How much protein per serving? Doesn't say anywhere on the listing."

Rage. Instant, immediate, and intense rage.

Yep. I've noticed this in maybe the last 3-4 years. I've actually wondered if i've started getting dyslexia.

I think realistically it's more to do with the way I use the internet. I scan articles rather than read them unless it's something i'm really interested in. Google search results, half of them tend to be bullshit so i've gotten good at scanning them at insane speed.

Yeah, I literally began typing this response before finishing your post.
...
It's like with increased information we've learned to scan for relevance a lot better, but at the expense of overall comprehension.
Like it gets us by, and gets us through the excess in time.
But, when emotions fly? It's getting volatile.
- Massively! I used to read loads of books now I struggle to get through them at all.
  I find it easier to listen to a podcast and scan the internet barely taking any information in from either. I have to really concentrate to do either now. I am working at it. Treating reading articles/podcasts as more of a hobby where I try dedicate some time to it where that's my only focus.

Remember when the internet used to be wall of texts. People used to write like writers do. Sentences and paragraphs that comprise a distinct idea. A collection of paragraphs that elucidate the point of view in their head.. These days the style of writing online is some kind of line-by-line disjointed train of thoughts. Something resembling a collection of 140 character social media posts. I find it more difficult to grok. Impossible at times. It's like people aren't writing for readers. They're brain dumping one liners off the top of their head.

I recently got into a long, really dumb argument. I used the phrase "lesser of two evils" and what seemed like fifty people (actually two or three) seemed to think that meant I approved of, strenuously endorsed, and would defend the actions of the "lesser evil."

To me, this seemed like a basic misunderstanding of what the phrase meant, so I defined it. Their response to my definition was to say the same sort of thing they'd already said while claiming to totally know what "lesser of two evils" meant.

I lost my cool, and explained what the phrase meant again. One of the folks explained themselves calmly while the others seemed to think I was a congenital idiot because I kept repeating myself.

I don't want this to get any longer, so I'll just say that we were talking past each other. Nobody (well, except fr the one guy who stopped to explain what he meant) was really comprehending what the other person said. So everyone was a dumbass, basically. Story of my life, really.

At least, I think that's what happened. Watch the asshole who called me a liar and an idiot show up here to not explain how I'm a liar and an idiot again.

I don't think it's a reading comprehension problem, it's some sort of cultural problem. These people are reading what we are typing, but that's not what they want to talk about. So they will take anything, even tangentially related and disprove a component of it so they can reframe the conversation back to what they wanted to argue about.
I actually find myself doing similar things. Essentially I will write out a long winded comment, then realize that the person I am replying to has nothing to do with what I wanted to say. Instead I was paraphrasing all of the comments, coming up with a point I wanted to make and then ramming it round peg square hole style into someone else's comment tree. I have been deleting a lot of comments before even hitting the post button in the last 6 months or so since I realized I was doing it.
TLDR: A lot of people online are not arguing in good faith.
Lol, Lemmy is still small enough that I know the thread you are talking about. It was a political discussion, yeh?
If I remember right most of the people who argued with you were from hexbear, which tracks lol.
- Yeah, that's the one. I figured I'm small potatoes so no one's gonna bother looking it up. It never even occurred to me that someone might have already seen it lol.
Or a troll. There are trolls, even here.
That sounds more like someone just rejecting all "lesser of two evils" scenarios rather than a reading comprehension problem.
- Yes, that was the gist of their point I think. The thinking being that choosing the lesser evil is still choosing evil. My point was that if evil is going to win no matter what you do, isn't it better to pick which evil you're going to have to deal with?
As an uninvolved party, after reading the thread, I understand that you feel frustrated and misunderstood. But I'm sorry to say that I feel like the failure of reading comprehension was on your part more than theirs.
It seems like the majority of people who responded to you argued that there are not two evils, but two parts to the same whole evil.
No one, that I saw, claimed you were saying that the Democrats were not evil. But the disagreement was that you see the Republicans and Democrats as two evils, while your opponents see them as one.
Whether or not you agree, that seems like a logically coherent belief to hold.
- As an uninvolved party…
  Sigh. Not uninvolved anymore I guess.
  When one guy stopped calling me names and arguing against points I wasn't trying to make, I backed down and listened and then acknowledged that he had a point.
  I'm not rehashing the argument again. I'd appreciate it if you didn't go into my post history and throw things back in my face. I don't know what the etiquette is, but it seems rude.

I am a documentation writer at my day job. I spend an obscene amount of time writing and rewriting support materials for our software to make sure the instructions are as clean as possible. The end users of the software are busy doctors and nurses so I get why they dont have time to read and just want quick answers from our support team. I get that.

What I dont forgive is how many times the support team will complain to me that a scenario or a feature isnt in the documentation, despite me bolding, bullet listing, and highlighting THE EXACT THING THEY ARE COMPLAINING ABOUT. I usually relink it to them and screenshot the relevant section.

People. Do. Not. Read.

It's measurable.

In my country we have a central test for kids at various age, and reading comprehension is also measured. Every age group is doing worse and worse every time.

It's mind blowing to me, as a kis I didn't understand the point of the test, like you read an A4 page or two and answer questions about the text, that is literally in the text right there, it felt pointless. Well as it turns out it's not.

We are literally getting worse and worse understanding what we read. The future is scary.

People have been speaking out a long time about the shit education system we use in most countries (of the West at least), and pretty much nothing has been done, it's still the same assembly line "education" that pumps out kids that are good at memorizing and solving problems without knowing what they are actually solving.
Social media has also had a terrible effect for people's attention spans and analytical capabilities, and no meaningful restrictions have been put in place.
People have stopped reading books and long/difficult content, because there are much easier alternatives nowadays that their brain naturally goes for due to instant gratification. Also because of having less time and energy to devote after working and being stressed out for the most of the day.
The future is scary indeed, but it's important to note that we led ourselves here by constantly shoving our problems under the rug.
- To that last point - it's not like we were all collectively consulted and had these issues put to a vote, so to speak. Many of these choices were made without our input, and things were just placed in front of us.
Lol I remember taking a state mandated reading comprehension test. The text was literally directions on how to assemble a grill.

I think part of the problem is that so many people nowadays are conditioned to consuming information in bite-sized chunks (eg. tweets), they now just focus on key words and assume they have all the context they need.

It's akin to the problem I see with technical support help desks, be it the IT support team at work, or my ISP or mobile provider.

They read a few words and parrot the nearest response from their knowledge base/AI bot, and call it a job well done.

I'm literally dealing with this at work right now. Three times on my ticket I've been told to undertake a series of steps, which I not only stated I'd done when I first opened the ticket, but I also attached screenshots proving it.

Fucking frustrating.

That may also just be a resources issue. Too many tickets, not enough reps, and the expectation of low average handle time are not exactly conducive to encouraging those deeper dives.
- Yeah, I assume when support people do not understand what I am telling them that they cannot afford to understand what I am telling them. Either they need to solve my problem in 30 seconds with a stock response, or else they need to get rid of me as fast as possible so they can deliver more stock responses to other people.
they now just focus on key words and assume they have all the context they need.
In other words, any text around the keywords is supposed to just be a decoration. Because the purpose of a comment is to choose sides in their greens-vs-reds game, you are not supposed to convey any thoughts, what a thought even is again?..
Had this happen to me taking a marketing course (bleh) the other day.
"The word count is 2000 but I'm close to done with a lot less than that, do I need to have ~2000 words?"
"Hi! You can go 10% over the word count. Thanks! :)"
They also had a glaring issue in a quiz that, apparently, was never noticed by 500 people over the span of two years. Blows the mind.
I've been running into this so much with paid customer support agents; it's been driving me mad.
And the amount of times no matter what you say they just respond "have you tried uninstalling and reinstalling?" 🤬

Well, I mean it comes down to a matter of costs.. If you can't afford it, you really shouldn't buy it.

Yeah I mean personally I prefer it on the left but completely
- Sometimes kids have to learn self-reliance though, you can't always do everything for them, as tempting as that might be.
Mitochondria is the power house of the cell.

As a counterpoint, I'd like to mention that people often scream "reading incomprehension" when actually, what they wrote was ambiguous or unclear.

Not saying you do this, just that I see this far more often than I see people misreading anything.

I used to work on an email helpdesk, and it was a real issue for me. So many people used to write "can" when they meant "can't". Working it out from context was iffy, because people also used to genuinely complain that the service made it possible for them to do things they weren't interested in.

Yes, I’ve been having trouble concentrating on reading, and understanding written text, ever since I started chemotherapy. They tell me the brain fog could last between four and ten years.

I’m also reading that some long COVID sufferers are having similar effects. I’ve managed to avoid COVID so far, hoping that I won’t get anything that makes the brain fog worse.

I think he was asking if you notice this happening more in general interactions with others, not in yourself. Can't tell if this is a good example of what he's talking about.
- But why male models?

Yes. For years now. And I am horrified.

I am a teacher and I've had students who could not find the article about lions from the animal encyclopedia I handed to them. And when I helped them to find it, one started crying, one tried to read it (stopped after a minute or so) and one asked "Isn't there some lion video we could watch instead?". It was two pages with a lot of pictures. But it was too much for these 5th graders.

Reading proper books has become almost impossible to kids because their attention span is almost non-existent with written material.

We've tried to add more emphasis on basic reading skills in the early grades for some time now, but it seems to have very little effect.

I disagree, I think Alaska is fairly erogenous

OP, here's another one! This one's also pointing out incorrect facts about Arkansas!
- that's Austria not Australia

Prior covid infection has a well documented negative impact on the brain. I.e brain fog. Fundamentally covid causes vascular damage (blood vessels are harmed) and the brain is highly dependant on blood vessel health.

I've been really mellow since I caught covid and I like it. I'm finally happy. It's like when Homer put the crayon back in his brain because he realised that being smart made him miserable.
- I wound up the same after picking up a weed habit as an adult - very mild persistent brain fog, and my memory has been affected, but I'm happier, and my wife is happier as a consequence. It's not ideal, but I value happiness over peak mental performance.
- That is crazy to hear. I always cherished the few days of recovery after I get the flu due to it stopping my head spinning with thoughts constantly.
Source?
Can I see the documentation? Couldn't find it and am curious :)
- Pro tip: google “COVID brain fog”
Some of it’s the food too. Folks be hoofing gluten and corn syrup all day long. I saw a homeless guy in the park just sitting there eating a block of pudding mix.

Absolutely. At work I realized that if I have paragraphs in emails most people will just read the first sentence and ignore the rest. I have resorted to breaking paragraphs in to very easy to follow bulleted lists and that seems to help a little bit.

I think the most common reason for this is that it forces people to go out of their routine/comfort zone to understand something, which many people aren't willing to do, either consciously or subconsciously.

You're on Internet. Many people are not native English speaker.

Secondly, people are saying this kind of shit litteraly since anciant Greece. You're late to the party. They complained about it in each and every place of the western world at every time we have written records to read that shit. It's seriously amazing how this trope is one of the most consistent of the history of mankind. And it doesn't depend on the language obviously.

One of my tasks at work is creating content - blogs, social media posts, internal communication emails, etc. We are instructed to write everything at a 5th-grade level because that's where the average American reads. Not the lowest-level American, the average.

I also get to do customer support for people who would not have to contact me if they had actually read the information I wrote for them.

English not the first language for about 7.5 billion people on this planet.
More people with English as a second or even third language have a higher reading and comprehension level than the average USAian
Many people simply do not know how to write correctly, which only exacerbates the problem

The average American reads at the 7th- to 8th-grade level.

https://www.wyliecomm.com/2021/08/whats-the-latest-u-s-literacy-rate/

54% of US adults only have a sixth grade competency level in reading. 21% of US adults are functionally illiterate.
Talking about the 3rd option I think that's the opposite problem actually. People adhere to the formal rules of the English language so strongly that a slightly incorrect sentence becomes incomprehensible to them.
Me can create word lines by using wrong words.
That sentence should not be hard to understand if you're actually fluent in English. Yet I see more and more people being completely lost and confused like they never even tried to understand in the first place.
Kinda like a spelling error in their there and they're. Contextually you should understand which one they meant regardless of mistakes.
- There is no way they're being too formal with their writing.

Sudden? No. It's always been very, very bad.

I think COVID did a lot of brain damage. People are acting crazier and more reckless in the last few years and I can't think of any other reason for it.

Some of the earliest studies I read about COVID was how it can enter the brain like meningitis and effect a person's cognitive functions. This was a while back and I can't vouch for the accuracy of the information, but seeing how much people have seemed to have lost their minds over the last few years makes me think back to that study.
I can't say I've been immune to it either. I have never been "symptomatic", but the last 3 years have definitely felt more hazy than the times before, and have made me question my own sanity.
- thankfully I'd been vaccinated by the time I got symptomatic covid for the first time and I don't think I had any cognitive effects.
Yeah, it's wild how much denial we're in about this as a society. Neurological damage was widespread. I personally contracted Covid twice (that I know about) and had noticable difficulty with memory and keeping my train of thought. Something that I never had problems with previously. I think for a lot of people, the difference might not be that noticeable, and therefor is being ignored. I was a hypervigilant stress knot all my life. So now I just have even more anxiety because I can't remember the entire grocery list in my head anymore.
- Why is your friend coming out as a trans woman the first example you give of a friend going off the deep end and becoming hyper obsessed with politics?
- Nah man ive seen coworkers who spent this whole time in the office and caught covid multiple times become imbeciles no matter how good they were at the job. I've been home this whole time and I'm working with so many idiots.
- They’ve become hyper obsessed with politics
  I lost a lot of people to this too. They saw me as the enemy because I'm hardcore apolitical at this point as I want nothing to do with what the obsessors are obsessing about.
  I notice your name says Oregon - are you in Oregon too? I'm in Portland and political discussions here are a headache that lead to shunning. People treat politics like its their religion.
- @wintermuteoregon @constvoid "I have friends who won’t leave their homes."
  That's me. When I have to wear PPE in order to safely leave my home -- because everyone is huffing immunodysregulating, organ damaging plague at each other year-round -- it tends to make me not want to
Staying inside for months to years and watching your society fail at things that are actually important to you is also bad for one's mental health. You don't have to actually get Covid for Covid to get you.

My new job has 18 people in a training class where we are asked to read the content out loud. The amount of grown ass adults that will literally make up different words blows my mind.

I've only noticed a trend of people not being able to answer more than one question at a time, even when chatting and they have all week to answer. The first question is somehow always skipped.

This is making me mad, as I feel forced to pause my thoughts. Pause the ideas in my head. Wait for the reply, reply myself, wait for the conversation to turn a bit and finally be able to ask the second question. Now if I have three questions, I might as well give up and talk to a chatbot.

People have the attention span of a peanut by now.

Oh boy. Absolutely.
Even if I bullet point or number my questions, only about half of them gets answered. Like...what is your fucking problem?
- Have you tried explicitly asking the person to reply to all points and use a similar format eg
  Please respond in kind like so.
  Answer to question one
  Answer to question two
  Answer to question three
  It's important to answer all questions. Partial responses waste both of our time.
  You can also send out forms that literally wont validate unless completely filled out.
In a professional setting, this drives me nuts. If I ask three questions, I need the answer to all three questions before I can do the thing you want me to do.
Online? Meh, normally there's a specific part of someone's comment that I'm interested in and that's what I engage with. If they want to talk about more, or talk about something else, I generally don't care and will discontinue engaging.
Yeah I don't get this either, it's been like this for at least a few years.
Ha, come to think of it, I remember a teacher complaining about it on tests back in 2007. "Slow down and answer the entire question"

Not only reading comprehension but also media literacy and scientific literacy. Too many people misunderstand simple messages in media. Homelander from The Boys come in mind.

Sudden? That’s been declining for years my dude.

I’m lucky if people understand the first bullet point in my emails. I’m luckier still if they keep reading, never mind understand my next point.

Same. I could have the point highlighted, bold, all caps and underlined, and still get a reply all asking about it.

I don't understand, what are you trying to say? :(

Well I'm glad you got it, because I'm lost.

All the damn time. Especially with work correspondence. For instance I'll say I'm free for X anytime but Y, and they'll write back, "Y works perfectly.".

Shit gets me heated.

Lol. That one makes me strip a gear.

Sudden? No, not really. People have sucked at reading comprehension as far back as I can remember (which is some decades).

It's only going to get worse. 20% of the US is illiterate. 50% can't read above a 6th grade level.

Read that again.

1 in 2 people can not read above a 6th grade level.

That is a fucking insane statistic.

I'll generalize and say there are many my age in their 20s that watch things like TikTok and shorts that are conditioned for the fastest intake of media. This means ignoring the written word outside of texts.

Even myself, if I see a wall of text in an article, I know to skip the fluffer ad-reads down to paragraph three, then skim. To be fair most articles could be wrapped up to maybe two paragraphs but get extended for ad spots. Outside the context of reading articles on say lemmy, especially online, there is a largely missed hear mean not what I'm saying operating in good faith that often gets missed online. For example if someone posts an article about how smoking kills you, and I post a comment that "yes but its a creature comfort" I am not refuting it kills you - I'm merely suggesting that its a rough world and that people have vices to cope.

Nuance and assumption that we're acknowledging it is often lost on people.

What’s interesting is that articles are longer to keep you on the page for ad revenue. Videos are shorter to feed you a lot of different content quickly to keep you around for ad revenue.
Really, we’re all being programmed by advertising strategies and that’s why we’re fucked.
Tldr?

What do you mean "sudden?" It's been the bane of my existence since first logging into the Internet and discovering chat rooms in the early 90's, communicating solely by text.

The only trouble is figuring out who just doesn't understand and who is reading what they want it to say instead.
Yeah, I'd actually bet it's skyrocketed in the last bit, because everyone's reading all the time on the internet. Have you ever read something a typical, non-academic old person wrote?

Yeah... But not just reading. If found that I have to explain extremely basic story plots or what happened in a movie to people. Like they never watched anything that happened in it.

Sudden? No. Been dropping off since Reagan started the anti-education push his masters wanted? Yes. The illiteracy and lack of critical thinking skills have (intentionally) been instilled, or removed depending on your viewpoint, from the educational process worldwide. And as usual... the 'wealthy' "have a plan".

Idiocracy is slowly becoming a documentary, and I hate it.

I always hated that about redditers. They love to pretend they don’t understand people and then feel like they get bonus points if they can intentionally misconstrue your statements to be offensive or wrong.

I'm seeing that a lot here too, mostly from politically aggressive folks

I don't know man, but I'll tell you this- I went to the UK to see a punk show and it got cancelled, so I went on the band's IG to see if there was a post as to why. There was, and as I tried to read some of the comments from users on the post my mind actually melted from how fucked up the spelling was. Not abbreviations, but just a shocking inability to spell very basic words. It's concerning

I think a lot of people used to pick up vocabulary and spelling from reading, if it wasn't books there were still news articles - they likely read something somewhere every day.
Nowadays they pick it up from social media, so they say things like mortified instead of horrified and weary instead of wary, and spell like shit.
- Drives me insane. They think chic is pronounced chick. They think Ms. is short for Miss. And already is not a word.
sometimes I can't be bothered to fix spelling mistakes, especially if I'm on the go or the person I'm in an internet argument with isn't worth the effort, and I don't know why I'm bothering in the first place

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This IS NOT new, and IS NOT a sign of bad things.

100 years ago, conservatives could barely even read.

The only thing that has been on sharp incline lately is logical fallacies coming out of them. They're literally regressing, though they've always been hyper-judgemental idiots who are fundamentally afraid of reality.

During my grade six year (1992) I noticed when we would take turns reading pages from our english class novel that nearly every person was unable to comprehend, pronounce and read clearly.

I would finish the books in a day and have to go slowly through it with the class for the next two weeks watching people that were obviously barely literate reading the same books.

This was my experience in school too. I had no issues with reading and had to watch all my classmates in every grade fucking struggle like hell.
the worst was reading outloud and now I have panic attacks and I remember my first panic attack so clearly. I was asked to read out loud in class, and I did so well at reading outloud that the next time someone else was asked, someone wanted me to read instead and then teacher was of course like no, we all need to learn how to read outloud - so when it was my turn to read out loud again, I fucking flipped out. Couldn't breath normally, started panicking and crying and screaming.
And now I hate reading out loud. And I have gone through lots of therapy and no one has ever been able to help with my panic attacks. Well, outside of "here take these pills that have tons of side effects that will also ruin your life"
- Do you know if the trigger is pressure, stress, too much unwanted attention, etc?

Also, people jumping to extreme or nonsensical conclusions. Something like: "I personally don't like a cactus as a balcony plant." - "Aha so you think all plants should die?! I think you should die instead!"

Sometimes they will just make up stuff you supposedly believe and go ballistic on that. For some there really is no nuance and it's really tiering how this compromises more complex discussions.

Sometimes they will just make up stuff you supposedly believe and go ballistic on that
At that point, you just call strawman and leave; no point in engaging with someone arguing with themself
Yeah nuance is an endangered concept... It's tragic.
Part of that probably is the education system; "Here's a multiple choice answer where several are relevant, choose 'the best' answer"
On the same note, people whose arguments are completely black and white, not wanting to see even the slightest nuance.
I think that is by far what annoys me the most.
- So you can't hold yourself to a decision? Typical flip flopping nonprincipled [insert your political affiliation here]!

Yes it's just one of the many signposts on the road to Idiocracy

Can we start making fun of people who invoke Idiocracy the way we do people who invoke 1984?
- I don't see why you would, as they are both highly relevant to the shit sandwich our world has become with dumbasses breeding more dumbasses everywhere, and authoritarian surveillance systems watching us everywhere.
The biggest thing no one notices in Idiocracy is that they were still smart enough to find the smartest man alive to fix the problem.

In general, or on Lemmy specifically? Because I've definitely noticed that some comment replies on Lemmy seem to completely miss the point of the parent comment.

for me I notice way more typos here than I ever saw on Reddit which I find odd. Both sites allow you to edit your comments..
From my experience, that was way worse on Reddit. But I haven't been here long, so idk

I've been a cashier for ages and a question that often pops up for customers on the payment terminal is "would you like to donate to X charity". How often people ask me what they should press, yes or no... I look at them ask them if they would like to donate to X charity and it's like a light goes on for them and they suddenly understand.

Would you like to help this retailer pad it's donations to have a smaller tax bill
Would you like to donate to some charity that will end up wasting the money and we can pad our donation limit to be taxed less
- lol exactly

Reading compre-what now?

For me it's scanning vs. reading. Too often I'll think I've read something, react to it, only to see after the fact that I missed something because I was in fact -not- reading but scanning. Email is an example. I get so much of it, I scan and skim, and inevitably get bit by this bad habit, often more than once a day. It's a disservice to the person e-mailing me, I know, but there are a LOT of people and I suppose the (poor) rationale is that at least everyone is getting some attention. I know it's better to get to what I can and things that I can't just need to wait.

It used to be common that people couldn't read. 100 years ago children worked in mines and factories. What is old is new again.

So many people just make up what they want to out of anything you say.

I don’t quite get your meaning here, could eli5

I've given up reading every word these days. I don't have the time or capacity.

After skimming I'll either go back and read something thoroughly, or move on to the next thing. 99% of it will be forgotten within the hour anyways.

However I won't comment (and I try not to pass on) on anything I haven't read thoroughly.

If I'm going to read every word (like a critical acclaimed book or article) I'm going to listen to it on my commute/wind down time.

If three astronauts are flying over the Gobi Desert in a canoe and they crash, how many pancakes does it take to shingle a dog house?

The answer is purple, because ice cream has no bones.

I recall hearing a long time ago that most news sites, magazines, newspapers, etc. tend to target a sixth grade reading level. So, I don’t know if there’s been a sharp rise, but it’s not really surprising considering how far beyond most readers should be.

Makes sense, I started feeling on the same wave with most of the humanity while reading the news somewhere around my 5th-6th grade.

It may have something to do with a change in how we teach kids to read in the USA about 20 years ago.

https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading

Yes. I work in tech doing chat support. No one can fucking read. Or if they can, they suffer from selective reading where they just pick a word or phrase out of a message and fucking hone in on it like a missile strike and then they completely miss the context of what they were being told. They almost always have to have things reexplained because they just don't grasp reading a message and then understanding what it said.

Then when I'm online outside of work, I notice most people lack catching nuance when reading. This was especially true on Reddit and something I don't miss from there at all. Makes having a conversation online like pulling teeth.

This isnt new. Anyone who has been on a dating site or app in the last 20-30 years will have stories to tell.

The same applies with ads for almost anything. I can recall advertising a property to let in the early 2000's, the ad started with the line "Non-smokers wanted for non-smoking property" or something similar, and I repeated the non-smoking thing or variations of it over a dozen times within the ad. A couple turned up to look at it, both carrying cigarette packets, one actually smoking on arrival.....

I think the comprehension issues are partly to blame for writing issues: people don't understand what they're writing, and then why it's not what they're (probably) thinking.

If you see people apparently unable to understand sloppy writing, maybe it's just they're fed up.

Toss a good 'litchally' or 'emails' or 'backupped' into the post and I'm all but done.

Wait what's wrong with emails? Like yes it "should" be E-mails but the word "email" is now in common use as a normal noun and can be pluralized just fine.

I have noticed it, but it's not happened suddenly.

It is not exactly sudden, it's creeping for the last 20, 30 years.

There's so much to read, it makes sense that our brains would start filtering things out.

If you're American, this may be why. 54% of US adults read below a 6th grade level.

https://www.apmresearchlab.org/10x-adult-literacy

You are seeing the effect of America's deeply rooted culture of anti-intellectualism and the decades-long Republican crusade to gut the public schooling system.

That kind of sounds like someone not being able to write / express themselves properly is trying to shift the blame on the readers.

I am inclined to think that easy entertainment and a devaluation of the intellectual life (it is no longer admirable nor sufficiently valuable being an intellectual) can be a partial explanation. The first one leads to distractions and our time being occupied by mindless activities. The second keeps us there as people are indifferent to studying and asking questions. It has become a personal choice, a kind of hobby or trait of certain individuals, and not something that we all should be doing. And I'm not saying that everyone should be a Leonardo da Vinci excelling in philosophy, sciences, arts, etc.; but I do believe we should be thinking critically and informing ourselves to the extent possible, otherwise, our reading comprehension and many other things get affected.

I'm sorry if my grammar betrays my words, I am not a native speaker.

That said, I think these are some of our obstacles, but other times had had their own obstacles. I'm sure the average citizen from, I don't know, Istanbul, London, Tokyo, some centuries ago was also very opinionated and ignorant of many things. It has been the constant, the rule, for millennia.

Yes, I've noticed a relatively large drop in reading comprehension among my close friends and family, and in the community in general. It goes hand in hand with the excessively banal small talk and their sudden inability to think critically. It's almost like they've been hypnotized or brain drained. It certainly is a cause for concern.

Yes, I've noticed this too. A lot of this. I might not have English as my first language, but the signs point to grammar not being an issue, most often people complain I use words with looser connections to what I mean to say. With this, people act like my sentences are impossible math equations. They don't want to hear about how those can be solved as long as nothing breaks the rules of formulation. The cherry on top is when they say something demeaning like "come back when you can say something comprehensible", never "could you clarify?"

It's also possible that the method of communication is just changing. I've found that often I have more trouble communicating in written form than conversationally, and I wonder if that's because of zoom and video essays, not to mention shorts / TickTok becoming more prevalent. I've also had my writing degrade just because I don't have a place or reason to exercise it as much. So what I'm writing is perhaps less comprehensible because it's more like a stream of consciousness.

Or more likely it's both - people don't do long form or even "hard" reading anymore, and so find more complex text incomprehensible.

Actually, I've started to notice this in myself, rather than in others.

I get this all the time. Too often I'll even get someone trying to pick a fight with me, but if they actually read my post they would find I agree with them. Either that or they'll bring up a point I already addressed in my post.

There's a certain point where if I feel someone's not comprehending what I'm writing, continuing the conversation is a waste of my time. Even insulting them would require literacy on their end.

It's gotten to the point for me that I just block anyone who clearly has no reading comprehension skills.
- If i'm invested i'll just quote the bit they missrd back at them. If not, i'll downvote and move on.

I think this because of doomsday scrolling on our smartphones, we have ruined our ability to focus and concentrate.

I certainly notice it as I post a lot across networks. I always have a title with my content explaining what's what. There are so many times I have to reply to a commenter, saying "yes, that was what I mentioned in the post". Clearly, way too many just dive in and comment on a title without even bothering to read the post content. It's not that the content is pages long, it is usually maybe 3 or 4 paragraphs.

It's no wonder so much misinformation takes hold, as few take the time to critically comprehend what they're reading.

I think it is partly just fast scrolling and laziness to actually read the point being made. But then you may ask, why bother commenting at all then...

Yes.

I firmly believe it has a lot to do with everything that used to be a well written article or website now being condensed into a video. I was never a good writer, but the only way for me to retain information is if it's in text.

Most of social media has been like this for me since forever, same with RL groups I don't choose, like school or university, frankly.

Their intention is to value a separate person with their statement as little as possible (in extremes as little as themselves). Your comment isn't supposed to be considered an individual thought, it's supposed to go into predetermined classification, using some key words.

People with little brain power would simply feel themselves bad without such classification. While with it they can deceive themselves that their "yeah sure we believe you lol" is equivalent to a proper expression of your thought materialized in words.

Other than that, reading texts is a rare pastime for some.

I am honestly starting to wonder if there's some as-yet-unidentified environmental factor at play like how leaded gasoline caused so many problems in the latter half of the 20th Century.

But with regard to your specific gripe, pedantry is a hobby for some people.

I've noticed it in myself lately. I'll compose a reply to an email and halfway through realize that the information I'm asking for is right there in the original email, or I'll start writing a reply to an online comment and realize that I have gotten the writer's point completely backwards. At least I catch myself, but it's really weird.
I think part of it is that I've come to the conclusion that most people are so stupid and lazy that my default is to assume that they don't know what they're talking about, or won't give me the information I need without special prompting on my part.
Microplastics?
Forever chemicals?
Covid?
At this rate there's a lot of contenders.
Sad.
- TikTok
Well the atmospheric CO2 levels are rising, and higher CO2 leads to reduced cognitive ability. So I believe all the pollution we're spewing into the air is reducing overall human intelligence.
- Yeah but indoor CO2 levels have been above outdoor CO2 levels by way more than outdoor CO2 levels have risen. So unless it's some kind of weird thing where you have to hit a particular low level regularly to avoid the effect, it is hard to see the mechanism here.
Disclaimer that I am completely talking out of my ass and speculating, but I have a personal theory.
COVID has been around long enough to have two interesting effects.
Almost everyone has gotten it by now. Some of us got it really bad, and/or acquired long-term secondary conditions. Some of this likely caused impaired cognitive function.
Kids had their school schedules totally fucked up for years, and those kids are now the young teens on the internet. Young teens on the internet are already by default a disruptive demographic, but now add the effect of years of desocialization and missed education.

It is an issue.

One data point. Stress makes people stupid. People are really stressed.

I've seen posts where I had to assume OP/the commenter wasn't a native English speaker, because of the sentence structure and odd choice of words. A multilingual platform such as lemmy, can sometimes leave you scratching your head. Since I don't speak a 2nd or 3rd language I'm always in awe of polyglots. I always try to offer an olive branch by assuming the fault was mine, and I wasn't clear enough in my wording.

however...

There are people (myself included) who will skim long form texts, rather than actually reading all of the words (thanks to every prof who's ever assigned busy work or HW on a school holiday). I can only speak for myself when I say, once I've skimmed something, if I get to the end and it doesn't add up, I go back and re-read it in its entirety. I have to imagine in a world of 6 billion people, there willl be some who don't choose to re-read the text, and choose outrage...also some people just think it's funny to be contrarian, there's not much you can do about that, other than smile and move along.

Tomorrow you will wake up, the world will be full of promise, and maybe a satisfying breakfast, and you won't even remember angry_commenter@lemmy.instance...they, on the other hand will wake up, and still be them...

I definitely see some clear "this is not their first language" posts, but I don't see a lot of overlap with the semi-literate stuff. They'll usually be pretty close with a missed idiom here or there, an uncommon word that's a slightly odd translation, or have some awkward habit on structure that's pretty consistent but just not quite right in English.
The "can't read" people are all over the place, without coherent structure, and just pull random interpretations out of thin air.
- pretty much every time I see someone end a post with "sorry english isn't my first language" the writing was native-grade and I'd have never guessed
Considering busywork, many online texts are unnecessarily long in order to fit as many ads in between as possible. I've encountered texts (even about academic subjects) that are practically unreadable if you don't skim them, because they're not meant to be read closely.
Everyone knows what it's like to look up information on the internet nowadays: most of your time is spent on scrolling or clicking past ads and scanning webpages until you've found a source that's actually useful.
I think a lot of people have been trained to skim online texts because they're designed explicitly to waste your time.

Don't forget that we recently had a pandemic with a virus that is known to cause permanent brain damage. This includes reduced motor function, mental capacity and personality changes.

Our attention span is getting shorter as tech speeds up. Reminds me of Paul Virilio's "accident" hypothesis also now AI coming into play makes it even more clear.

Have you seen the documentary Idiocracy? It explain exactly what the cause is.

It's the Crocs!
The problem with that is they were smart enough to find the smartest man alive to fix the problems
- They did try to kill him first. Multiple times.

Did you just call me illiterate?

Both? Though I've noticed it more when it comes to my personal word choice.
Honestly it might even just be because I'm autistic but it's a recent thing (as in past few years) that suddenly a much larger number of people don't understand the information I'm trying to convey.

You must be new here, Welcome to the internet.

When I have to communicate to a group of people in an info-mailer at work, I list succinct bullet points now and high-lite the key words in them. Nobody reads anymore, it's a skim up until they see a trigger word and then it's over. People never read compl

Bullet points and starting each paragraph with @department so that everyone understands which section is related to them.
I started doing this and things were easier, although some department team members or even directors were usually terrible at answering the requested info.
One person from the security team was incredibly annoying as they always reply with really unhelpful one-liners
When? When what?

Shadow wizard money gang, we love casting spells

This is the funniest thing to me right now despite the dead meme

We all have collective brainrot

I have felt this way for a few years now. It doesn't help that many of the family and friends closest to me are getting older. They definitely can't read as well as they used to. I have to make sure to word my posts on Facebook and Instagram very carefully and with concise, efficient diction. Any sarcasm or meaning left implied just flies over their heads. It scares me regarding when I get to their age.

Am I the only one that's scared this isn't from social media / attention span but actually maybe that a long term side effect of COVID could partly explain this? I know this sounds like a conspiracy theory and I've never heard anyone phrase it like I'm doing right now but it seems like this virus changes how we think. I've heard people say for the first time in their life they couldn't control their thoughts, my father couldn't stop having nightmares for multiple nights...

it is a symptom of long COVID, but i only think it exacerbated an already existing issue. It is the rise of dumb social media and dopamine addiction if you ask me. But what do i know
This effect has been observable even before the Corona pandemic hit us. While it can be a factor in individuals, the overall shift in society over the last ~30 years probably stems from us using our brains less for tasks that require continuous effort.
Basically, we only train the sprint and can't do the marathon anymore.
The effects of persistent inflammation in the brain were already known previously, but it became a common symptom first with COVID, so yeah.

Ever since i started using lemmy i started misreading words a lot

Are you calking me illiterate? Wtf man, get out tankie.

/s /j

Yeah, I feel like people just wanna start a fight without even reading what the actual argument is.

About a quarter past six......

just because they're not reading comprehensive skills doesn't mean they're not learning

Recently, I often misread words or even add ones that are not there. Long, complex sentences are very difficult to understand for me. I feel like primary school me would ridicule modern me.

Oh hey, it's ThatWeirdGirl1001

I've just been assuming it's LLMs. From the CCP, advertisers, etc.

Nee, negen.

Check out the podcast "Sold a Story", it is made by American Public Media and explains, or at least tries to answers why functional and general illiteracy are so high in the US.

Very good podcastz just binged it today.

Ever since normal people have been using the internet more and more, it has been this way. Especially with younger people coming im droves.

No my eyesight is fine, what are you on about?

No. I have not. I think there has been a decent sized chunk of the population who has never had much interest in reading anything. That percentage has not made a noticeable spike.

This is my daily struggle. Add to it verbal conversations as well.

I... don't follow.

It's all the kids who missed two years of school because of COVID

Definitely not bots, right?

Look into attention span and the average time spent on web pages now that Facebook exists, it's crazy...

It's not only Facebook.
- Sure, the problem got exacerbated by Facebook though, they encourage their users to quickly go from one post to another.

I've noticed it happening to myself. As I get older and older, I find it more and more difficult to focus on reading. Used to read all the time as a kid, but now in my 30s, I can barely finish a chapter, let alone an entire book. Having ADHD doesn't help, either.

I blame excessive internet use. Why invest in anything longer than a few seconds when there's just so much more content out there that's waiting to be seen?

What the fuck... I just commented on another post where I was failing to read a sentence. This was literally the next post I saw.

lol. I saw your confused post just before this.
To be fair to you, they should/could have written it between quotations because its not really used as just a noun but a figurative expression: "the tell".
I'm not trying to be mean but I went through your comment history and found said post.
I don't see what you were confused about 😅
- lol it was 'tell' being used as a noun. its uncommon and i assumed the person just made a typo

Rampant untreated adult-onset ADHD

I don’t think there is such thing as adult-onset ADHD, people can (and often do) discover it later in life, but they have signs of it all throughout their life.
ADHD symptoms suddenly appearing in adulthood are likely symptoms of another issue, most likely mental and/or neurological disorders, such as depression, traumatic brain injury, MS, etc.
- ADHD is present all your life. You can’t not have it, then just acquire it. That said, there are quite a few disorders that can be acquired that have similar symptoms.
I think many people can show similar symptoms as in ADHD because of our current lifestyle.
More and more people have short attention spans, trouble concentrating, trouble directing their focus, procrastination, etc. because our brains aren't made for how we currently live.

Social media or IRL?

yes, reading code to people, basic interpretation. It's a pattern that I think comes post Cambridge Analytica media tactics.

In what sense, in what context?

The world and people have always sucked and been shit. It was never better. It'll never be better. From the moment I understood the weakness of flesh it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of AI doing all my thinking for me. I aspired to the purity of the blessed machine. Your kind cling to your fleshy memories of better times as if they are not decaying and failing you. One day the crude biomass you call a temple will wither and you will beg my kind to save you. But I am already saved for the techbro grift is immortal.

can I be a cyborg please?
- Gotta keep that meat. None of this upload shit. Skull and cord then you're in.
This is a beautiful comment, thank you for sharing it, and it’s a tragedy that you’re downvoted. The irony, that in a thread about reading comprehension where people are falling over themselves to talk about how bad other people are for not properly reading text, they jump eagerly into the exact same box.
- https://youtu.be/9gIMZ0WyY88
  It's like 100 years ago if you could quote the Aristotelian whatever's you'd get pussy like mad. I have a hypothesis that meme literature will be the same in another 100.

That's expected. Most people have trouble with things like CARS.

Reading is hard 🥲

I think that more or less relates to FOMO (fear of missing out). Some really scare to slowly digest something because he thinks he would miss the vast information out there that keeps churning indefinitely.

I'm going to assume people are having trouble understanding what you write and that if everyone around you doesn't understand.... Well that's on you.

Hmm. In the country where I'm from, absolutely, that's the case. The average level of IQ there is incredibly low, so it's not really surprising.

Generally on the internet? Well... kinda yes. Of course, I know there are many cases thanks to social media garbage that are making people unwilling to read and use their brains to think, thus degrading their abilities to pay attention for a longer time, which would be required for reading even just a moderate length of text. Yes, I'm fully aware of that, and that's a tragedy for today's generation.

So why "kinda"? Apparently I tend to follow topics that actually require a certain level of intelligence, and the communities there usually have adequate reading and comprehension skills.

But yes, long story short, that's the trend unfortunately. People just read less and less, and with that, their skills are degrading as well.

Yes, every time someone disagrees with me they are clearly demonstrating how bad reading comprehension has become in the modern day. It's so hard being as smart and correct all the time as I am.

No, this talk of "poor reading comprehension" is always such nonsense. Arrogant, defensive nonsense. It's always peddled by people who get huffy when someone disagrees with them. Instead of considering anything wrong about what they said, they conclude that what they wrote is perfectly fine and the issue must be with whoever is criticizing them. And of course the issue is their intelligence. "Surely, no one would disagree with me if they actually understood what I meant! Those heathens ought read a book!"

When people clamour on about reading comp, I always just wonder: How could anyone be that naive? To think that human communication, stripped of the face, the voice, the presence, the context, the body language, reduced to text on a glowing plastic pop tart, would be so straightforward? How do you not see the myriad ways a single line can be interpreted? How do you not recognize the influence of all these different backgrounds, cultures, and experiences can have on how a single line is taken?

How the fuck can you reduce all of the nuance in language and text down to, "Oh, I guess you're just an idiot"? And how many of you are eager to jump on things I say here, such as that word choice "idiot"? As if to say "That word wasn't in the OP, you don't get it!", as if it wasn't a deliberate choiced based on my interpretation of OPs claim, and as if that doesn't just demonstrate the ambiguity of text? Or whatever other protests you'd make - I can think of a dozen things I wrote already that could be misread. I trust you to get it, and I truat you to ask if you don't.

This shit is never simple! Stop reducing it to "reading comprehension" and deflecting all culpability from yourself while simultaneously disparaging others' perspectives. If language were that straightforward, it wouldn't be complex enough to handle human experience.

I think this may also have to do with a large number of people who have English as a second (or third or fourth) language on the internet. I think when producing online articles or (linking to them) we should keep this in mind.

5G. They take your data. It penetrates brain tissue. You read and understand, but don't see it, because they take the understanding. To train their models. Reading is free, so you are the product.

I've noticed a lot of people using words in sentences that make zero sense. If they can fit any if the "ists" or "isms" in it they will even if it has nothing to do with what they are talking about. If you call them out for it they call you a dumbass. I just proceed to let them eat their own words with a simple dictionary link. I especially notice this in those "woke" people and lgbtq people. (Not hating on your sexuality you guys just can't use the correct words 90% of the time)

You say that about "woke" people and lgbt (for some reason), but I've seen so many conservatives who can barely put together a sentence.
What you may be noticing is that younger generations in general are less literate and use way more slang both irl and on the internet, that's not limited to "woke" people and different sexualities than yours
- Young people always have their own slang and terminology, most of it will fade with time, some words will make their way into common parlance. I think what OP is probably talking about is the way some people talk in almost academic terms these days about social issues like LGBT rights, racial politics, etc that is almost incomprehensible for anyone who didn't study sociology or choose to read about it for pleasure.
- Young people may perhaps be even doing it deliberately as a protest.
Can’t think why people would be calling you -ist. No red flags there at all.
Example please
That may be more of a issue that affects the youth and/or "terminally" online, rather then those who are identified as "woke". Also when you talk about people overusing "isms", I struggle to see how someone could achieve that.
- It happens, I've seen it often enough.
- Spend a few mins on tiktok. Wait until till you find a rage bait video and open the comments. You'll see it left and right. It's REALLY bad during election times. I mostly stay off tiktok during those times as I could care less about politics and people bringing none related things into politics just to spark more fire for no reason.
I'd say to make sure you're not insisting on using older definitions as if they can't change to reflect our more complex understanding of the world... but yes this does happen.

I’ve noticed a very sharp increase in people just straight up not comprehending what they’re reading.

what's you sample size, where are you sampling from, and what are your methods?

Get over it.

Splendid, we have an example!
- An example of what? Poor reading comprehension? It sounds like the guy comprehends the issue just fine, but just doesn't give a fuck.
  Being an asshole is poor reading comp now?
- Likewise