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I am suspicious that there is a disproportionately-high-to-society-at-large ratio of people who have clinical depression on here.
I've never run into as many people in any group, in real life or in online communities, who show up and persistently take bleak outlooks on damned near everything. It's not just "the glass is half empty", but "the glass is half empty and probably what water is there is contaminated and it's going to dry up and if I drink it I'll probably choke to death and..."
I live in a city full of wealthy progressive liberals who talk like that non stop. Everything is awful all the time and if you don't agree you're awful too. if you point out annoying good happening they will tell you how awful it is or it's colonialism or imperialism.
their second favorite topic is what smart geniuses they are and how everyone else should be like them. and nobody else has had a harder or more difficult life than than did, because their parents only made 500K a year! and now they only make 200K a year! they are living in poverty!!
i have lived here 20 years and 10 years ago it wasn't like this... because it was more diverse and people were not so self absorbed.
I can't speak as to all areas, but I'm in the San Francisco Bay Area, which is pretty wealthy and progressive, and if anything, I'd call people in the area generally upbeat relative to people I've run into elsewhere. Certainly nothing like the kind of "everything is awful or probably will be, doom doom doom" stuff that I'd say I see a disproportionate level of on the Threadiverse.
I have wondered before whether maybe it's correlation with some of the userbase.
I'd say that there are probably more furries on here than I run into elsewhere, but I don't really notice the pawb.social home instance being attached to downbeat comments.
Ditto for Linux users, but I've been on a lot of Linux-oriented online forums, and that doesn't normally seem to be a particularly depressed or negative crowd elsewhere.
The Threadiverse is more European than most groups I've run into, and maybe I could buy some correlation there—there is correlation between less sunlight and depression, and Europe is home to the world's biggest concentration of people who get less sunlight—but I'm confident that the continent as a whole can't be this negative. I also spent a lot of time on /r/Europe prior to moving to the Threadiverse, and it was nothing like this.
There's a higher concentration of far-left users than anywhere else I've been. Maybe I could buy that. Like, if your life is heavily-focused on wanting The Revolution to come and private industry dissolved and all that, okay, the world, which isn't doing that, is maybe a disappointing place to be in.
I'm pretty sure that there's a higher concentration of transexual users than on any other group that I've spent a lot of time around. Maybe if you figure that a disproportionately high percentage of trans people are unhappy with their body, that could really be weighing on people, making them unhappy. Or maybe from medication...hormones can affect mood, and maybe hormone replacement treatment can cause negative moods?
searches
It sounds like maybe HRT can be a factor in depression: https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/comments/9g68zm/is_depression_a_possible_side_effect_of_hrt/
EDIT: I have seen articles that show correlation between social media use in general and depression, and obviously everyone here is a social media user. Maybe that could explain some difference between real-world groups, but that doesn't explain the discrepancy with the many other online forums I've been on.