Quote:
Originally Posted by Yamer
I think it has a lot to do with how people engage across the Internet today. Any popular social media site is lousy with hyperbolic and aggressive replies. It's a very different place than when I first started using it.
Even something like Facebook, which started as a fun tool to keep in touch and share your personality, has devolved into tribal warfare and incendiary posting to generate engagement.
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Now this is a comment that's probably going to upset someone (already expecting criticism from Corsi), but I think Facebook and just social media in general has in the last 5-10 years kind of decisively demonstrated that the classical liberal ideal of "free speech" is in practice an absolutely terrible idea.
It's refreshing to hear all kinds of opinions for a little while, but over time all it leads to is everyone having to listen to opinions they hate all the damned time, and all discussions eventually degenerating into fights where those who can most effectively weaponize anger, ridicule or shame win... because that's how you drive people away from discussions, and in general the most effective way to win debates is to quickly become the only one left talking.
The marketplace of ideas is, in practice, just a deathmatch of wits.
(I'm actually pretty damned good at being an absolute s***head that can just shame, anger and ridicule people into submission if I want to, because that's frankly how I was brought up.)
So yeah, social medias are a terrible place to talk about anything anymore and they just make everyone feel like crap a lot of the time, and while I don't think CP is really part of that culture because we do have actual moderation here, we're not insulated from the effects of it. I think most people are kind of exhausted of the internet, I don't think it's just me.
It's also all those goddamned copypasted talking points. Everyone these days comes armed with the same deck of arguments and counter-arguments that they're copying from other discussions on this platform or that, until every argument in every discussion is perfectly crafted to be just the right amount of obnoxious to still pass as "conversation", while also being just un-debunkable enough to seem reasonable while actually being impossible to engage with.
I've had many really good argumentative discussions on this forum over the years, but my experiences in other corners of the internet have really just killed my interest in debating
anything anymore. I don't post much anymore (which also has a lot to do with my complete lack of interest in what the Flames are doing right now), and whenever I post something that I think might be somewhat unpopular, I typically just blast a wall of text and get out before the replies so I don't have to deal with it. Not because I expect the comments are terrible (although they often are unnecessarily acerbic), I just feel like it's self preservation and wisdom to not get bogged down in debate anymore.
And I'm guessing I'm not alone in these feelings. The internet just overall sucks as a place to talk now.
My real-life friends were early adopters of irc and now we're mostly just on Discord, which is really just irc with some more bells and whistles. It's a closed environment with no "engagement" mechanics, no way to measure the popularity of a comment, and only (or mostly) people I know from other contexts. It's very old school, and it also feels like the only thing I can put up with anymore.
I also think kindness is the only way out of this crap.