I'm not really sure why, maybe this concept is overloading my weakbaby social capabilities. But looking at a circular owl profile pic shitposting loudly, or a username venting about something in main, and making the connection that those words were said by an entire human being with a life of their own hundreds or thousands of miles away is just sort of short circuiting my brain. Obviously I have intellectually, logically known that you're all people, because you say things, but actually conceptualising it...
That is a huge amount of person by volume for such a little bear website.
It's tough to visualise, like even for a small hexagonal bear post, if every profile pic and username is an actual person, (THEY ARE) then there are more of them than could comfortably fit in my living room. That many entire real people, in one place, badposting. Being gay(and more), saying 'Death to Amerikkka', sharing heartfelt support for people and movements, yeah that's too many people, this is definitely short circuiting my brain.
May update when I figure out how to make my grey matter stop having a panic attack.
The relatively small userbase of this website contributes to this effect, I feel. I'd rarely ever notice a username multiple times on reddit, and too often there I'll see an insightful (or terrible) comment, and go to a user's page only to find out it's yet another karma farming bot, trying to gain imaginary capitalist Internet points. Here, it's likely that an account does represent an actual person's genuine thoughts and feelings, and that's heavy.
REAL
Reddit users in general are such a faceless mass. I recognise more than half of the people in this thread...
And even those I don't recognize, thanks to site culture, if I start flipping through their comment history I'll eventually have that moment of, "OMG, they piss too! Relatable."