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Yes. Out of habit sometimes I log in to read movie reviews. The last few weeks I would check out the Succession sub to see what people are saying. The comments are the absolute lowest tier garbage of any platform. Messages are typically under 200 characters, repeating lines of dialogue, cheering on a character, or the most basic observations you could imagine. Zero insightful or thoughtful replies. Twitter and YouTube comments are significantly more interesting.
It’s sad how far the internet has fallen.
Don't go to the Letterkenny subreddit. 98% of the comments are just people quoting lines of the show to each other. It Kinda makes a fella wonder.
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>DAE not enjoy Greg’s character anymore after the TikTok allegations against Nicholas Braun?
>Unpopular opinion: Shiv gets too much hate due to misogyny
>Just a Mr. Darcy appreciation post 🥰
>Hot take: Maddsen is not some supergenius playing 4D chess, he’s just some awkward douchey techbro who got lucky like Musk/Zuckerberg/Bezos
>ATN = Fox News and Mencken = Nazi Fascist, amirite? updoots to the left
>YSK that Mencken and Roman are closetly gay for each other
>J.Smith-Kellman being beautiful 💕
>DAE hope Willa wins it all? Best line in the show when she clapsback at Tom
>Reminder that Logan, Ken, and Roman are terrible people
>CMV: Every company IRL has too many Karl and Franks, old white males in suits who’ve failed upwards
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The internet became normalized not in the sense that it was taken over by "normies" but in the sense that it ceased to require effort and investment to post anything.
At the risk of being that old man shaking his cane while he breathily shouts "back in my day..."
What happened was that ability to jump into a forum and comment on anything became routine, and from that moment the net as it had been was fucked. Reddit sucks for the same reason government housing projects suck. When people start taking something for granted, they stop taking care of it, and it descends into a vicious spiral. People who actually give a shit about their health and their environment don't want to live in a space that no one cares about so they get out, leaving only the shitbags and the truly destitute who have no other options.
Being one of the few guys here who is old enough (if only just) to remember the before times I feel like I've always had a conception of what an internet account is and how it ought to work from most others here, including the mod team. On one hand a key feature of the internet from its' inception was anonymity (or more accurately the divorce of the online presence from the physical). As the old Steiner comic says, "on the internet nobody knows you're a dog". On the other hand, true anonymity is fundamentally incompatible with accountability and extremely socially corrosive. From my perspective the development of user handles was sort of work around or compromise to address this.
The thing about a post from an anonymous user is that it could be literally anyone. That is after all, what "anonymous" means. There is no way to tit-for-tat an anonymous user and thus no incentive for them not to turn into total fuckwads. The only way to escape this trap is to have an identity/voice that persists through multiple encounters. An identity that can both gain and lose reputation.
The handle @HlynkaCG is a little over a decade old now. I started using it in 2012. It's obviously not my first handle nor is it my only active handle, (though it is the only one I use here). To the degree that anyone here knows or has an opinion of me it is through this handle. And to the degree that this handle holds any value as the voice of an actual human being it is through its years of established history. I could delete this account and start a new one tomorrow but while it might be me (the individual in meat-space) it would not be @HlynkaCG. This is one of the core disagreements I always had with @ZorbaTHut, he would say that you can't just assume that in the absence of an established history that a user is a bot troll or sock-puppet where I would counter that in the absence of an established history you can't assume that they aren't. What value an internet handle has as a human being is in it's history, and a Handle with no history has no rights.
So TheMotte is the Singapore of internet forums?
There are good forums that are primarily anonymous, such as 4chan. (Yes, 4chan can be good, depending on the topic.) What matters is the website's culture.
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That's a part of it, but it doesn't explain everything. Even post-Eternal September forums' level was way above the social media of nowadays. My money is on centralization. Getting a whole bunch of people together originally provides loads of benefits like one-stop-shopping or crowd-curating, but it also seems to be a huge temptation to whoever is running the services. Sooner or later they're no longer satisfied with merely providing a service, and want to start shaping their audience, and their sheer size protects them from user rebellions.
Don't forget smartphones! They helped to completely ruin the internet by lowering the barrier to entry to zero (everybody has a smartphone and a data plan now). Turns out, democratizing internet access by letting billions of poor, technologically illiterate people online was not a good thing.
How much would you pay (in money or time) to access the patrician internet where only intelligent nerds can post?
IIRC there are a few places out there (Gemini, and maybe Urbit?) where you need to invest some time upfront to get hooked into the network and to navigate it. Anyone know of any others?
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Anonymity, as opposed to the pseudonymity we enjoy here, also has the ability to turn people into esoteric erudite dicks who find common ground in the faceless teasible enjoyment of whatever it is they enjoy.
Back in 2010, I became a “ponyfag,” a /co/mics&cartoons poster who was surprised to find himself a My Little Pony fan. (“Brony” was our epithet toward those guys who enjoyed it because of the pastel colors and happy songs, instead of in spite of them.) I watched something great (and profitable) arise because of the protection of anonymity.
We advised each other to “hide your power levels” because of the potential for instant status reduction we saw people earning daily through public declarations of love of the show.
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Sure, but are you attributing to ideological malice an effect that could just as easily be explained by more third-worlders getting Internet access?
Reddit's userbase might have become retarded not due to purging rightists, but due to welcoming people from, uhh, regions of the Earth with less than stellar education systems. In this way, the lower quality of posts represents MORE profitability, not less: you can profit off selling a stupid Brazilian e-advertised tat just as well (probably better) than an intelligent American.
I think that a third worlder who could write well in English and cared to post on online forums would probably be of above average intelligence. I think it's just the smartphone and centralization of internet combining to allow any Anglosphere knuckledragger to effortlessly spam the web with every inane, low-effort, status-seeking comment that pops into their heads.
I can look around at my own family members -- they're all online and participating in social media and online discussions nowadays, when 15 years ago less than half would have been, and 25 years ago, when I first began posting, close to zero would have been. As much as I love my family most of them probably engage in the shitty uninteresting low quality posting people are complaining about here.
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And these uneducated Third Worlders speak fluent English?
Your proposed explanation seems implausible. There are more than enough native English speakers who enjoy low-effort rubbish. To confirm this, just check a local US subreddit. How many Brazilians do you think are posting on /r/portland? And I don't think even the best education systems teach people how to post thoughtful media analysis on the internet.
The problem is that repeating a line of dialogue and similarly vapid comments are much easier to make compared to something meaningful, yet they get upvoted just as much, if not more because they are more accessible. It's the Gresham's law of internet forums: bad posts drive out good. A subreddit that doesn't ban image posts will eventually come to be dominated by them, because a picture is much easier to make and much easier to consume than a long text post. This can be prevented only with strict moderation.
On the face of it: this is good evidence against my thesis.
More subtly: "Portland is home to one of the largest immigrant and refugee populations in Oregon", hmmmm, what a twist.
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I’m not sure. From what I’ve heard on forums with people who have left mainstream subreddits, it seems to be due to moderator actions. Particularly on subreddits dedicated to franchises that have lost popularity. Moderators tend to remove negative comments and since the shows themselves aren’t well-liked, only neutral or positive comments remain.
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