Edit to add

Kill Six Billion Demons is my favorite right now. Gorgeous, sprawling, complex artwork from start to finish, philosophically interesting, bordering on pretentious but I love it. I sometimes read this one while wearing my VR headset to properly examine certain pages close up.

Johnny Wander is the homepage for an incredible artist/writer duo. I’ve really been enjoying their latest story Barbarous, but their archives are a bit of a pain to navigate to find the starting point for each story. Worth the pain though.

Octopus Pie has been over for a few years but is always worth returning to. Woman lives in New York, people are weird, and New York has a lot of people. Reading this one will make you feel good, Do Not Skip.

Sleepless Domain is an interesting one, generally a cutesy story with an anime, leaning towards chibi art style but focused around a set of brutal murders that happen towards the front end of the story and the survivor’s guilt that follows.

Gunnerkrigg Court is hard for me to describe but gets a re-read from me every few years. A surreal examination of why we tell stories and The Power Of Friendship? It’s been going so long that I half suspect it’s not going anywhere and is just an excuse to keep chugging for as many years as its author needs it to, and also half suspect it’s imminently ending in the next few months. I don’t think I really have a problem with it either way; it’s written very well.

I also want to add Questionable Content. Someone else mentioned it before but I think it needs linking to. It’s one of the first webcomics I picked up so it’s hard for me to judge it fairly, but even having evolved so much since the early days I think there’s something to love about every stage of its development. It was just easy reading about hipsters listening to music and drinking coffee, and then somewhere along the way it became a sci-fi story too and goodness I love it.

If you actually have a group of peers that consistently challenge each other and have scholarly debate, congrats. You’re in a very small minority. You personally not having a use for arguing online doesn’t mean it’s useless. I know plenty of Americans who have been convinced that gun control is important by things they’ve seen online.

Very few people in this thread are kidding around. It’s worth pointing out that most of the things they are saying are extremely shallow.

It is not a place for nuanced debate.

Why not? Compared to other social media it’s way better equipped for reasoned debate, with an easy-to-read layout designed for mountains of text and ease of linking sources. Maybe c/memes isn’t the right place but considering how serious the rest of this thread is I’m pretty sure my spiel was worth it.

Maybe the people in my social circle are just a lower caliber than yours, but I can’t remember the last time I got asked to source an opinion irl. Most of my friends already agree with me. Hell, offline, most people aren’t willing to discuss politics at all. Even saying you have opinions on politics is basically a faux pas…

I’m gonna say some stuff that most of the people here probably know on some level, but considering this thread, I think it needs to be explicitly said.

Very few of the people who post comments on the internet are highly educated in whatever field they’re making a claim in. Getting challenged by people who know next to nothing and receive all the upvotes anyway is an exhausting experience, so many well-educated people keep their debates private. If they are here, you probably aren’t enough of an expert to recognize them. The simple, easy to understand takes are what get upvoted, and in-depth, nuanced ideas are almost always ignored or ridiculed. Most forums are full of people who know just enough to feel confident in making calls for radical action without any knowledge of how that action could be implemented or would play out.

Look through this comment section. Lots of vague, single-sentence arguments about being “capitalist,” “communist,” or “socialist,” along with “leftist,” “liberal,” or “conservative,” but I don’t see a single one acknowledging that each of those words can individually encompass vast groups of conflicting ideas and have wildly different meanings in different parts of the world; a serious problem considering at least a few of the people posting in this thread aren’t in the US. Very little discussion of substantive ideas like “people should be given a universal basic income of $15 a day,” or “food stamps should be granted without application to anyone under a certain income threshold,” or “social media servers should receive public funding and be administrated by an elected body.” It’s almost never more specific than “universal healthcare,” or “abolish the police,” Those might be the right direction, but when was the last time you saw people discussing things like whether experimental treatments should be covered, or the number and type of professions that should replace the current myriad of roles police are expected to fill? I seriously doubt if you randomly selected two self-described communists (or whatever ideology) on Lemmy and had them start making decisions together, that they would agree with each other on exactly how society should be run even half the time.

I’m not saying these conversations shouldn’t happen, vague as they are. I certainly don’t have the energy to write out long arguments 99% of the time. We all have to make our own way to finding deeper knowledge, and building a knowledge base of buzzwords can be a useful stepping stone. But far too often people stop once they feel they have a sufficient understanding of the buzzwords and then start talking like they know the answers. it’s important to temper the depth of your convictions based on where you’re having the discussion, where you’re getting your knowledge. Are you watching youtube videos and reading unsourced comments, or are you reading research papers from institutions with a history of making accurate claims? Are you reading news articles from ad-supported papers, and if you are, are you checking whether those articles are making sources available for readers check on? Should I have bothered writing several paragraphs under a meme of a glowing red bird, and am I really qualified to tell people to be more careful with their discussions?