Why is the majority of the internet just angry kids now that throw one liners? No more posts with decent length to get into discussions.

submitted by [deleted] from self.technology

Before 2015 you could get reasonable people to talk with though I wasn't interested until all you could get is politics now as back then it was a lot easier to get away from it all. Now it's in all our entertainment and right in your face. I feel sorry for those with a smartphone trying to get away from it.

Now people are ready to name call or the left said likes to say 'Take your meds' and ignores anything else. I can't help but wonder if the majority of these are bots that look at keywords of what you right and if you say something so off the wall it confuses the AI so 'take your meds' is a self correcting response when it can't think of what to put you down with? Otherwise it feels like a lot of arguments are scripted with very little variations.

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[–][deleted] 9 insightful - 1 fun9 insightful - 0 fun10 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Partially it's the rose colored glasses effect, because trust me, 2015 was no threshold for when internet discussions began sucking. We just tend to forget the bad stuff.

Also, in '15 whatever platform you used may have grown, the more people there are in one place the more a mob mentality pops up.

And the social media system trains us essentially. Write a long, thoughtful comment that took an hour to write, and nobody reads it, nobody likes it. Write a witty zinger or echo the prevailing mob's sentiment, something that takes seconds, and people love it.

[–][deleted] 5 insightful - 3 fun5 insightful - 2 fun6 insightful - 3 fun -  (0 children)

You make a stupid quote or a lame joke it gets 100 + upvotes. Ask an unusual question that requires thought about the lore you get ignored.

[–]bobbobbybob 4 insightful - 2 fun4 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

Write a witty zinger or echo the prevailing mob's sentiment, something that takes seconds, and people love it.

N

being the chan example. The cringe reddit cascades being the normie one

[–]bobbobbybob 7 insightful - 2 fun7 insightful - 1 fun8 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

I think people are genuinely retarded. Dip fed dopamine hits by careful programming, turned into mindless yes-men by MSM. Psychological science has advanced to the extent that programming people to behave in predictable ways is now an engineering exercise.

In old fashioned debate, the idea wasn't to 'win', but to come to a deeper understanding of the issue. People would regularly argue the opposite position to the one they held, just to see where it took them. That's a method I take to heart, and I try and see / understand issues from many points of view. The end result is I become hyper aware of the flaws in any argument, the 'holes' in data or logic that I instinctively avoid when arguing the point.

But that's not what we are taught anymore. We are taught to shout down, to quote the talking heads and to gang up. Whoever shouts the approved ideas the loudest wins.

So tiresome, and the death of our civilisation, as it infests science.

But rewind to 1995 and you are about right. When Unis were on Karen and Janet, and AoL hadn't yet made the 'net accessible by any fuckwit

[–]magnora7 4 insightful - 2 fun4 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

Yeah it's kind of like society decided that the gish gallop was the ultimate comeback about 25 years ago, and debate and reason has suffered for it ever since.

[–]jet199 3 insightful - 4 fun3 insightful - 3 fun4 insightful - 4 fun -  (0 children)

You got old.

[–]fschmidt 4 insightful - 2 fun4 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 2 fun -  (3 children)

Because they are morons. It's that simple. Western intelligence peaked around 1800, started going into serious decline in the 1920s, and was mostly lost by 2000. Since 2000, intelligence has been in free fall.

[–][deleted]  (2 children)

[deleted]

    [–]fschmidt 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

    I never said that. Are you lying because you are stupid or because you are evil?

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

    People post at the level to which their presumed target audience has awareness. This doesn't require great dialogue or profundity. And as I see it, social media has exposed us all to so many ideas and expressions that we all have a deck of pre-loaded comments. They used to say that brevity is the soul of wit, but today, brevity is dealing from the short stack of pre-learned sound bites.

    [–]hennaojichan 2 insightful - 3 fun2 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 3 fun -  (1 child)

    I'm not an angry kid; I'm an angry adult.

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

    Not really much difference there eh? :/

    [–]magnora7 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (2 children)

    Rise of troll bots, it's easy to run an AI farm now that almost comes across as human.

    Then if you want to destroy a forum, you just post a lot of random talk about literal nonsense, and make it super emotional, and then all the normal people are driven away, thus destroying the forum.

    This seems to have been repeated around the entire internet, and now it's a communication wasteland.

    Also the fact that the average age of an internet user is probably the youngest it's ever been, and ever will be.

    [–][deleted] 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

    What happened to the older folks that has more common sense? You used to have a healthy ratio now we have narrow spaces where when you squeeze too much liquid in a narrow tube...........

    [–]magnora7 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

    I think those older folks see what a trainwreck most social media is, and realize they have better ways to spend their time. But that's just a guess

    [–]PencilPusher55 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

    I guess because that's all it takes. If you automatically assume that your ideology is on "The right side of history", should that not be sufficient?