I saw some guy on social media that I recognized, he was a streamer I really liked more than a decade ago, before streaming video games became popular, at the time he seemed quite sweet and just a fun lovable guy. Checked out his profile to see what he was doing, god damn I regret scrolling through his twitter feed. He's been on there for a while, his first post started in 2012 and was towards the end of his "normal" life, his posts just consist of very standard internet humor stuff from 2012 and lighthearted stuff. Fast forward to his posts now, he's an absolutely deranged reactionary and posts nonstop with almost every post being a reply to some random woman on twitter with a bunch of vicious personal attacks and often encouraging suicide, it was really vile. The saddest part was looking at the posts on how he attempted to reboot his streaming career on twitch and was surprised/fake outraged he got banned after he streamed nothing but himself hate replying to people on twitter. Also he really seems to worship sam hyde in some weird surrogate father figure way, big creepy vibes
anyway the point of this is holy FUCK can the internet fry some people's brains and it sucks bigtime but I'm sure you knew that, just need to vent
also not sure where to put this but its kind of related to video games so yea
As someone who spent too much time on the internet growing up I'm genuinely beginning to think it would be for the best to have it heavily censored and regulated if not outright banned for anything but encyclopedic knowledge. It's really not a healthy way for people to interact, and I say this as a joke a lot but I do on some level believe spending too much time on places like 4chan or even this place gives you some form of actual, physical, LITERAL brain damage.
I guess for every story of the internet being good and teaching people to be better there's a million other stories of the internet radicalizing people into vile ghouls.
The internet was inherently fucked when it went from a repository you could anonymously access to a space where you needed to have a tracked identity (so they could push ads.)
Pet theory of mine but it goes as thus: the majority of the "ills" of the modern internet can be traced back to the way real life identities were incorporated into the internet, and the reason for all of that was so parasite fuckers could sell you more bullshit. Tracking cookies, algorithms, all that shit only works if they can put a tag on you. There would still be ads if the internet was totally anonymous, of course, but they would be closer to highway billboards than the highly personalized bullshit we're dealing with now.
There was a big attempt to scare people from being pro-anonymous internet a few years ago with cyber bullying. Saying things like "these people can't be held accountable".
It was all bullshit.
That sounds like a recipe for people getting harassed irl by random freaks because you didn't like their race realism posts.
When MySpace came out it weirded me the fuck out that people would post real ass pictures of themselves online. You just DIDNT do that before
Targeted ads are old news, but adjusting content so you would engage and become addicted? That’s really what’s juicing the brainworms. They are giving you shit you’ll yell at or like or REACT To just so they can slide a couple extra targeted ads for shoes when you bought a pair last week.
Basically the tech companies did a super insidious version of early TV - do things to make you watch MORE. Even subscription services that don’tserve targeted ads have the mindset that they aren’t competing for your money directly, instead it’s about occupying your brain time.
I mean anonymity just leads to ahit like /pol/ and/b/ so theres no winning
Not inherently. Honestly the vibe here is closest to pre social network internet community I've come across. The shit people do for opsec here was just what you did on the internet, just like how you wouldn't hand out pamphlets of your personal info on the street either, it was just a common sense thing. Things filtered into small communities with some overlap.
twitter is also just an extremely cursed place
greatly reducing my time in that terrible website has honestly been so good, as bad as i feel about this alienating myself from a certain girl i like
Fascism is popular because it appeals to the lowest common denominator.
Thinking for yourself gets you socially ostracized online, might as well join the hive mind and make easy money catering to the opinion of the sheep herd.
