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Got told my forum posts read like a bot by a user in Denver
Last week someone replied to a thread I started about wood glue drying times and straight up said I sounded like an AI. They pointed out I used the same sentence structure every time and never dropped any personal details. So I started throwing in little stuff like the fact I glue up cutting boards in my garage in Austin and it totally changed how people respond to me. Has anyone else been called out for writing like a bot and had to tweak their style?
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emery101d ago
omg I feel this so hard. I got called out last year in a board game group for sounding like a "customer service chatbot" because I always started my posts with "Hello, I would like to add..." and ended with "Thank you for your time." Total wake up call. Now I drop in stuff like "my cat knocked over my dice tower while I was typing this" or "I'm typing this one handed while my toddler eats a cracker off the floor" and people actually talk to me like I'm human. It's wild how one little personal detail changes everything. Like you said with the glue and the garage in Austin, it makes you sound real. Sorry that dude was rude about it though, that stings.
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ramirez.vera1d ago
omg yessss I have a friend who's super into D&D and he used to write these like super formal character descriptions and everyone kept ignoring him. Then one time he just added "i wrote this while my dog was trying to eat my notes" and suddenly people were asking about his dog and inviting him to games lmao. It's literally just one dumb little detail that makes all the difference.
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carr.abby1d ago
Puts it into perspective, doesn't it. I've noticed the same thing outside of D&D too. At the grocery store, I'll chat with a cashier about how the bagging carousel is working today, and suddenly we're laughing about how many times a customer has asked for a price check. It's that one little observation about your shared reality that breaks the script. People just want to feel like they're talking to another person who's living the same messy life as them, not someone reading from a manual.
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tessaperry1d ago
Yes! The toddler cracker detail is perfect, @emery10, totally stealing that move.
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