I am pretty sure that the people who downvote me on Reddit or elsewhere are the people I would have the most interesting and illuminating discussions with but we rarely ever get to that point, and that's 100% down to the voting system. It didn't used to be like this on the old message boards in the 90s and early 00s.
Honestly, it was mostly flame wars and 1000 post threads of two people just fucking savaging each other. I am not suffering from some nostalgia where I'm reminiscing about the good old days of online boards. They were just as shit as online discourse is now. But you didn't have this universal expectation that everyone is supposed to have good manners to each other. The mods in those days were Nazis but they'd only step in when the flame war was about to turn into an actual fistfight IRL, or when it just got too annoying for them to handle. There's a space in-between a good old-fashioned throwdown fight and people just being shitheads online that's gone missing in the last ten years or so.
I am pretty sure that the people who downvote me on Reddit or elsewhere are the people I would have the most interesting and illuminating discussions with but we rarely ever get to that point, and that's 100% down to the voting system. It didn't used to be like this on the old message boards in the 90s and early 00s.
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Honestly, it was mostly flame wars and 1000 post threads of two people just fucking savaging each other. I am not suffering from some nostalgia where I'm reminiscing about the good old days of online boards. They were just as shit as online discourse is now. But you didn't have this universal expectation that everyone is supposed to have good manners to each other. The mods in those days were Nazis but they'd only step in when the flame war was about to turn into an actual fistfight IRL, or when it just got too annoying for them to handle. There's a space in-between a good old-fashioned throwdown fight and people just being shitheads online that's gone missing in the last ten years or so.