I suspect in a way it wasn't--the differences in opinions and worldviews were always there, for sure, but you had to learn about them face-to-face from actually living, breathing humans and not from a screen, so the polarization wasn't. It's a lot easier to deeply hate someone when that someone isn't really real. Human interaction mitigates the extremes. Social media and Youtube are not human interaction.Quote:
Originally Posted by TaleraRistain
Miss the good old days
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11-14-2025, 02:05 AMAstronis
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11-14-2025, 10:57 AMTaleraRistainThe post mentioned the 2010s. We were online by that point. I was online in the late 90s on message boards and IRC and such and there were others online even before that. There were plenty of differences in those places. But they were limited in their range of effect.Quote:
Originally Posted by Astronis
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11-14-2025, 11:05 AMAstronisIn some ways, the Internet was genuinely a mistake. But yeah, the nonsense started earlier than that, and there were pockets of full-on toxic froth by the 10's...it was, like you said, much more limited in scope. And that was a good thing.Quote:
Originally Posted by TaleraRistain
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11-15-2025, 03:23 AMDrimn
I don't get the reminiscing about the 2010s. The 2010s are when all of this negativity and crowdsourced smear campaigns and attaching politics to everything really took off. It was not a good decade and certainly not a "live or let live" culture like I'm seeing people say. I'd say we're a little closer to a tolerant culture now than we were then, if only due to fatigue.
But you can't go home again. Even 4chan of all places was pretty goofy and carefree in the late '00s. -
11-15-2025, 09:21 AMSKAshe
Believe it or not, the internet did undergo a major change in how it operated in the 2010s, and that's because companies realized that the thing that seems to make us most engaged in their content, and therefore advertisement, is not our enjoyment, but the feeling of strong emotions.
In 2009 Facebook changed how their newsfeed worked. They changed it from reverse chronological order of the people you follow, to trying to predict the amount of engagement a user would spend on a particular post. This resulted in users being much less happy and giving negetive feedback, which was ignored when Facebook realized people were spending double the amount of time they spent on the site, resulting in massively increased revenue for the company.
Ultimately, making money is all corporations care about. This resulted in pretty much every social media site and content hosting platform changing the landing page of their websites from subcription and follow focused, to recommendation algorithm focused. Youtube used to show you the most recent videos of the channels you were subscribed to by default, now it's recommendations. Same with Twitter and all sorts of other websites. Tik Tok is straight up built off of these recommendations.
These recommendations are not designed to make you happy, they're not designed to bring people together, they're not designed to show content that will get you to think, or become a better person, they're not even designed to show you things you will necessarily enjoy. They show you content designed to give you a visceral, emotional, reaction. Hate, schadenfreude, rage, fear, misery, things that our brains evolved to pay attention to more then anything else.
The fact that gamergate and all this other divisiveness happened after that is no coincidence.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11894805/