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I've noticed an increasing amount of chatter from both sides about dropping out of society -- to build a homestead, or to buy a house in some foreign, isolated part of the planet. Of course, "I want to live rural!" guys have been around for years, and actually living rural in 2024 is a pretty raw deal for most. But it's telling so many have made the leap from, "I want to live small", to "I want to live completely alone (with spouse/kid/dog)". I'm sure much of this springs from a genuine love for sustainable living, the quiet life, the country and all of its joys. But the vibe I get is a subtle rising tide of misanthropy, of decreasing faith in the common man possibly regardless of one's leaning. As someone else put it,
My question is: Have you noticed this too? Maybe my circle's blowing this out of proportion, but maybe not.
If so, what's going on here?
I've got a personal theory for what's happening. See, I'm not much of a gamer, but I play two games regularly: Fortnite and PUBG. Really they're just for stimulation while I chill out and listen to music/podcasts, but something pretty damn annoying happens almost every time. I'll be relaxing in-game, looking for loot at a calm pace, when some absolute beast of a player flies in out of nowhere and shreds my health before I can blink. Every time it feels like bullshit because I'm not even trying to compete at that level. All multiplayer games have separate queues for "casual" and "ranked", but inescapably there's a handful of sweat lords who've memorized the meta, who know exactly where the best guns and vehicles are, who throw their weight around in casual games and ruin the experience for everyone else.
And when this happens, my natural reaction isn't "This game's matchmaking has failed", it's "I'm tired of these dickheads, I should play single player games instead". In other words, this is an organizational failure. Humans are naturally excellent at organizing themselves into the right groups -- you throw hundreds of kids into the same school, and very quickly the correct circles will form. There's bound to be a lot of kids with nothing in common, but this is obvious to both parties, so they simply avoid interaction. All groups are autonomous and self-organized, and it works really well.
Online groups in 2024 are algorithm-organized. The internet has taken on a kind of 1800s-Manchester-factory-worker housing feel where everyone's crammed into the same tiny spaces despite our differences. We are now constantly aware of how the other half lives, what they are saying. It's like your teacher forcing you to let the annoying kid play kickball with your group, to sit at your lunch table, etc. Going online feels abrasive in a way it really didn't back then. In 2009 you'd hop on some forum and it felt exactly like hanging out with friends, a 100% positive and chill experience. Going online now is like hanging out with everybody. Sometimes it's good, but a lot of the time it sucks. I don't want to know what the guys I hated in high school think of politics, or movies, or anything. But now I'm going to hear it, over and over and over.
Maybe I'm nostalgic, right? 2009 was a long time ago, I was basically a kid...
But probably not. Because I have a solid point of comparison: I understand Japanese, and spend a ton of time on the Japanese web. What inspired this post is actually a single website, which is 5channel. It's the largest anonymous bulletin board on earth, but more accurately it's a collection of around 1000 bulletin boards with virtually zero moderation. You can post wherever you want, say whatever you want, and... it works. Not because the Japanese are polite or something -- they can get wild -- but because if you just let humans organize themselves, things work out. This echoes my own time as an internet moderator, where I first believed that I could shape the board through my actions, but later realized the board's quality was beyond my control, it's an autonomous process that you have little say in.
I pay $4 a month to post on 5channel. I've made hundreds of posts there, and yet no one's realized I'm a white foreigner. Despite the language barrier, I post there because it's sorta like the English web was back in 2009. There's none of the bullshit, it's a site for nerds to make dumb jokes and chat about nerd stuff. When I browse reddit or twitter or 4chan, there's a lingering unpleasant feeling, but when I go to 5ch it's just dumb fun. It's exactly like the net I grew up with. You compare the two, and the English web just feels... sick.
I'm 100% ready to believe this pessimism in the air comes from our inability to self-organize. We are locked in with people we do not like 24/7, reading their crappy opinions, we can't just splinter off and make a new community and so we live with a slight psychological chip on our shoulder but we're not sure why. What's funny is my narcissistic tendencies fade the more I use 5channel. When you're stuck around people that challenge your identity all the time, you get defensive and sorta retreat back into yourself. But when you're around people who aren't going to constantly irritate you or challenge who you are, you start to relax and open up. You may even turn into a bit of an optimist. Conversely, it's this constant feeling of "Someone's gonna try and screw with me" that sorta defines how English web feels now, why everyone's so antsy and defensive and unwilling to let their irony shield down.
Human groups are naturally pretty small. In nature, whenever any major divide happens, tribes just split off and go separate ways. Being forced into a semi-permanent state of clash really can't be good for us, despite how "normal" this has become.
Filter bubbles are still a thing, but they mostly filter by ideology, not by obnoxiousness.
I think a large point of it is that many online interactions are one-off. In the non-iterated prisoner's dilemma, defection is a viable strategy.
If you had a constant group below Dunbar's number, then everyone would learn who the main assholes are and employ any number of strategies (server bans, teaming up vs them, dropping out of games when they join, teamkilling them) against them to effectively push them out of the group.
I predict that for most casual games, there should be an obvious solution: fill the game with bots. Most of the chat is nothing which LLMs could not manage, and training a neural net to play like a noob or mid-level player should not be very hard. Or you could try to use machine learning (or even plain old statistical analysis) to figure out which players are mostly causing others to drop out of the game and then put them into matches with similar players instead.
They're already filled with bots. The AI sucks though.
Games like Overwatch 2 are fairly punishing to "toxic" players, and they'll deliver a million slaps on the wrist + an eventual account ban, but this fails to solve the human organization problem here, which is: Assholes deserve to play games too. I don't want to play baseball with someone I hate, but he should still have the freedom to play baseball in his own way -- just with someone who's not me.
Overwatch, League of Legends, CS2, none of these games understand this. They're trying to enforce a universal standard of politeness onto online games, which is ridiculous, because for some people mic spamming and shouting slurs is why it's fun. Society should not be telling us, "If you can't have fun in the exact way I tell you to, you're not allowed to have fun."
CS2 has something called "Trust factor", which is an invisible metric that determines how likely you are to cheat. Matchmaking sorts players by trust factor, so if you have a low trust factor, you're getting a game full of cheaters. The question is -- why don't we do this with "toxic" players? Instead of banning them for using the gamer word, just lower their niceness score and match them into the in-game equivalent of 4chan. We created this problem with algorithms, so let's solve it with them too.
Dota 2 already does. There is what's colloquially called "hidden pools". If you get reported for flaming in chat or being obnoxious you start getting preferentially matchmaked with other such people until your hidden metric for obnoxiousness/abuse improves.
I know this because I pretty consistently play in a team with a hothead who just can't help himself but start flaming in all chat, usually the following few games we get matched next are also with people like that. When I que solo, it's fine. When we que together and he has been "a good boy [tm]" the matchmaking is fine also, until he starts talking shit again in all chat. Then it's back to the hidden pool.
I was under the impression that the low priority pool is not "hidden", but very explicit - when you go there, when you're on a premade team with someone who goes there and when your report sends someone there. Or do you mean to claim that there's a separate hidden pool on top of the explicit LP pool? Why'd they do that?
Oh there definitely is an explicit low priority pool, but before you get slapped with that one, you can be assigned a hidden pool where it just ques you with other people who are getting excessive reports be it for verbal abuse or griefing. To this day the hidden pools remain unacknowledged by valve publicly.
While they did say they have "hidden pools" for hackers and voice/text abuse in CSgo/CS2 they have not admitted to the same in Dota2. Both games are running on the same base engine and both games also are part of valve's Overwatch pseudo AI moderation system.
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