People really do seem worse online than in person

submitted by trident765 from self.nonmorons

The internet seems to be packed with extremely authoritarian assholes who derive pleasure from knowing that the government is tyrannizing regular people going about their day. People online masturbate to the idea of the government passing more pointless safety regulations to create more pretexts to ruin harmless people's lives. "Safety" is their idol, and they view violators of this idol to be blasphemers, and ironically they hate these blasphemers to the point of wanting them dead. They will find some way to tie it back to "tax dollars" in order to mask their hypocrisy (e.g. "people should be forced via draconian punishments to get the vaccine, because otherwise they might get hospitalized which I don't want my tax dollars to pay for").

But for some reason, I don't find people I know in person to be such giant assholes when it comes to issues like safety. Most people I know in real life will just ignore pointless safety rules, and forget about them. They might even criticize them.

I don't know what the reason is for this discrepancy, because you would expect the views of redditors and the average American to be roughly similar, since Reddit is one of the most widely used websites.

Perhaps it is generational? Maybe redditors are young, whereas the people I interact with at work for example tend to be older. Is Gen-Z authoritarian? - I don't know much about this generation.

Also, at work people are more educated and therefore probably more intelligent than average. Maybe their intelligence is what makes it possible for them to recognize what makes so many safety regulations so stupid and invasive. And why it is draconian, moronic, and unreasonable for the government to, for example, cite someone with a misdemeanor for not equipping his inflatable kayak with lifejackets.

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[–]DirewolfGhost 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Bots, they only question is whether they are made of metal or meat.

[–]soundsituation 3 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

Is Gen-Z authoritarian?

Yes, but I still think you'd find that in person they're much more laid back than they are online. Most of them anyway. The internet tends to make people performative.

[–]fschmidt 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

Every single day of my life that I am forced to deal with people is a miserable experience. I will just discuss Friday, 2 days ago.

The email credentials that I use for sending email were in my public repos. I figured it didn't matter since no one uses my code, so no one will notice. But someone did find this and used to it send spam, so I got a warning from my SMTP service. So I disabled the credentials that sent spam and made new credentials and replied to the SMTP service. After that, the new credentials didn't work and the spam just kept getting delivered. Knowing that customer service no longer works in the modern world, I just created a whole new account and I use that to send email now. And of course I changed my code to hide the credentials.

I had shut down a real estate business and sold the properties. I had a bank account with multiple sub-accounts, one for each property. So I went to the bank to close this. I got one cashier's check for each sub-account. My personal bank (different bank) used to allow deposits by mail but now requires an app. I tried using the app to deposit the checks but got an error that the checks are too large. My bank has no branches where I currently live. My wife called them and they said to go to a branch in some other city which basically requires a flight. So I went back to the bank that issued the cashier's checks and got them to exchange the checks for multiple checks of smaller amounts so that I can deposit them.

This is typical of my life. People are just incompetent scum. I hate dealing with them.

[–]trident765[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Another thing that came to mind is that I have heard of people hiring personal assistants to bear the burden of interacting with scum. For my relocation my workplace did it through a relocation assistance company, whose only job was to talk to the moving company and talk to the apartment for my temporary housing. I thought it was stupid at first that they hired a company to do just this. But after interacting with the rude staff of the apartment myself, I was extremely grateful that my interaction with them was minimized. I wonder if there is a company like this but for life in general, so that you can hire them and never have to interact with scum again.

[–]trident765[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

I had shut down a real estate business and sold the properties. I had a bank account with multiple sub-accounts, one for each property. So I went to the bank to close this. I got one cashier's check for each sub-account. My personal bank (different bank) used to allow deposits by mail but now requires an app. I tried using the app to deposit the checks but got an error that the checks are too large. My bank has no branches where I currently live. My wife called them and they said to go to a branch in some other city which basically requires a flight. So I went back to the bank that issued the cashier's checks and got them to exchange the checks for multiple checks of smaller amounts so that I can deposit them.

Something similar happened with my prescription for my glasses. I moved out of state and the optometrist (which is part of a big corporation) wouldn't mail me or email me my prescription, saying they do fax or in-person only. And since the cost of a plane ticket or a fax machine make obtaining the prescription prohibitively difficult, since they would be more than the cost of getting another eye exam done, I left them a 1-star review saying they are witholding my prescription (which is illegal). After this they called me to apologize, informing me that they would mail me my prescription, so I deleted the review. I hate that this is the world we live in, but market forces seem to no longer work, and businesses aren't willing to lift a finger to make things more convenient for their customers. The only thing anyone seems to respond to is the force of government.

[–]fschmidt 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

I guess my point is that all of my experiences are like this. The only place outside my home where I meet people who I don't feel like killing are in a mosque or Mennonite church.

These coworkers of yours, do they recognize that Git and other modern software are horrible? I don't see any difference between Git and any other senseless bureaucracy described in this thread.

[–]trident765[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

They use git but I don't know them well enough yet to know their views on git. At my previous workplace though, they hated git and used mercurial for years, using an internal mercurial server, until finally last year they were forced by upper management to switch to git. This happened after another group of modern scum programmers convinced upper management to turn everything to shit and persecute the good programmers. This is why I left (and it worked out because I got a decent pay increase as well).