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Has Online Toxicity Changed Your Internet Usage Habits?
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If i had to deal with raw unfiltered Twitter? Hell no.
Then, I guess, here? Here is nice.
I used to think that making shitty comments in a “look how shitty this viewpoint is, wouldn’t it be hilarious if I were actually like this” manner was clever
Now I realise that it’s pretty much indistinguishable from being an actual shitbag, so I’ve removed that kind of performative irony from my online contributions
I’m still a dick in real life, obviously
I deleted my Facebook and Insta in '15 because I obsessively used both as a means to derive validation, which coupled with severe depression and alcoholism was just about the worst thing to subject myself to. So I pulled the plug and never looked back.
PA Forums are essentially the only form of social media that I participate in. Anything relating to online toxicity I've only read secondhand here. I can't imagine being on Facebook post '16.
That said I don't know if like Pinterest counts because I just use it to get ideas for D&D games. But I can't tell you the number of times that I'm looking at WH40K stuff and up pops a picture or two of a deviant art where dude has a Space Marine or Sister of Battle with white supremacist or nazi symbology on them.
Which fucking sucks because I'm a huge 40K lorewhore. Now I have to be careful about what I look at lest that garbage rears its head
Same here. I still occasionally backslide a little bit into performative irony for (attempted) humorous effect, but I try to avoid that kind of humor for the most part.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I do use twitter which is mostly depressing but I don't read replies too often, try not to be baited, and also have muted the "mainstream" people that make me angry so that even if someone I follow does a reply a retweet with comment, I won't see the original tweet.
the only place where I'd say it was explicitly toxicity more than my own behavior and tendencies that led to me leaving was Reddit. I didn't use it for a long time, then around 2013-4 started reading the Sopranos subreddit daily. about a year ago I branched out and used the site more regularly and found so much fucking anger and arguing and brigading and raging and repetition I actively decided to stop using it altogether within a few months. It doesn't have that much of the type of talk I want (the sopranos was the only reddit of a show I love that was active in that way). I found it intolerable. I'd avoided it since its inception due to reputation, which I only got through people talking about it here. same as 4chan (not to compare the two per se, beyond that I only knew of them by their reputation around here)
so toxicity has definitely dictated the company I've kept. It's very hard to know, if this place was run differently, would I have left or would I have actually become a different person?
Also people who turn off voice chat in team games are the worst. Maybe you wouldn't have died 5 times in lane if you had heard the missing calls.
It's something that's far easier to pull off in a real group of people who know you and you know them, and who can probably tell from your tone of voice that you're not being serious.
Text only communication like forums, twitter, and facebook hides a lot of the necessary subtleties.
"someone on the internet has taken a way better picture of the thing that you're taking a picture of than you will ever take" is something I tell myself that has helped me resist the temptation to get my phone out many times
― Marcus Aurelius
Path of Exile: themightypuck
I think it's not necessarily the size in itself, it's that smaller sizes make it easier to create persistent communities, which (much more so than anonymity or not) is what determines how big of a dick people feel they have license to be.
A persistent identity with a reputation tied to it, in a community small enough that people will recognize you is not in isolation enough to create a nice community but I believe it's a big factor. On top of that it seems you need tight moderation - in principle I could imagine something more laissez-faire but in practice every single well-functioning community I've seen has had moderation ranging from tight to draconian. Just gotta accept that an internet forum isn't some kind of Libertarian pipe-dream techno-republic.
What does bother me is how hardened stances have gotten and how people retreat into spaces that only share the same viewpoint. I can't see how that ends well if it hits a critical mass of people doing it.
PSN: Bizazedo
CFN: Bizazedo (I don't think I suck, add me).
Like, for example, being a perfect breeding ground for radicalization and terrorism. Not like examples are lacking.
Ah, so once they are toxic, that's it. They cannot become more toxic?
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
As Bizazedo said, the early internet was more toxic than today's internet (in some ways, perhaps "differently toxic" would be more accurate? I'd certainly agree that it was more toxic though, as much we might complain about unmoderated spaces on youtube/facebook/twitter, they've got nothing on the wild west that was the early internet). And it seems that no matter the issue there's always some historical precedent, eg, politics scandals seem to be getting worse or more crass nowadays, but then you can look at the past for some truly astounding examples of political scandals that make today's raucous nonsense seem tame. Same with social issues. Yeah, we yell at each other on the internet, but humans have always yelled at each other in one way or another.
Things got nasty about the time newspapers added comment sections.
If anything they've become less toxic. Are politics more toxic than say... the 60s, 70s? The 80s? The 90s? Fuck, the civil war era?
A significant portion of the population isn't claiming the president is behind 9/11 right now so politics is at least less toxic than during the Bush era. Fuck.
Human behavior is immutable. Our children's children will still be dealing with this shit. Things haven't suddenly become more extreme than ever. Things have always been this bad and always will be. Forever.
Your claim that politics right now is less toxic than it was fifteen years ago because of one single data point is less than compelling. I would go so far as to say that I doubt you could find ten five D&D posters who would agree with your assertion that politics are less toxic now than during the Bush era.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Yeah, I'm not getting past that 'single data point'. Let me know when it becomes mainstream again to call our president a literal terrorist.
But anyway, this argument doesn't really have anything to do with the thread. Politics are toxic. It doesn't mater if they were in the past or will be in the future. I'm at a point where I do my best to actively avoid the news. I reached that point about 6-7 years ago.
I would posit that if you believe "a significant portion of the population" believed Bush orchestrated 9/11 you're pretty much out of your fucking mind to begin with. That was not ever the case, regardless of what you believe. Feel free to cite any actual polls to the contrary.
I'm out of my mind? Sorry you either are too young to remember or lived in a fucking cave.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100107092038/http://www.scrippsnews.com/911poll
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