18 ms·

The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet

179 points by razin 7y ago

Jun8 7y ago
On an irrelevant point: do bloggers who use Medium honestly expect people to pay $5/mo to see their content? By comparison NY Times is $1/mo for unlimited articles.
- PhasmaFelis 7y ago
  If you believe content is worth paying for at all, the price of a cup of coffee every month seems perfectly reasonable. The NYT has a different business model, and is still partly supported by advertising in the print edition. The digital content pricing race-to-the-bottom is really unfortunate. It's why we have shitty free-to-play mobile games, for example: people won't pay more than a few dollars for a phone game anymore, so a lot of devs have to find other business models to support development.
  - digitalsushi 7y ago
    or if not advertising inside products, then it rewards walled gardens to grow - the games, blogs, et al end up inside a subsidiary that collects payment for access to all of it together. and the walls grow.
  - wolfgke 7y ago
    > If you believe content is worth paying for at all, the price of a cup of coffee every month seems perfectly reasonable. First: In the USA, a cup of coffee might cost 5$; in other countries, it is much cheaper. Second: Every payment you do in the internet leaves a huge data track since there exists no analogue for cash for paying anonymously in the internet. So in particular if you are skeptical of data krakens like Facebook etc., you should be very cautious to pay in the internet. In particular, for each payment in the internet, you do not only pay with money, but also with lots of sensitive data.
  - nextlevelwizard 7y ago
    With SV salaries that is easy to justify. Normal people wouldn't pay even $3 for a cup of coffee.
    - PhasmaFelis 7y ago
      The popularity of Starbucks suggests otherwise. But if you still don't like the coffee analogy, that's fine. The point is that $5 a month is not a lot of money for the average American. That's much less than the cost of a monthly newspaper subscription, and 20 years ago those were extremely popular.
- digitalsushi 7y ago
  we make things. we make fullstack websites, we make payment processing widgets. we hook them together. a product no one wants, so it doesn't get purchased. imagine if other hobbyists could so easily duct tape a virtual point-of-sale to their display cases. imagine if a gearhead could put a card reader on their front door, try to get the public to wander in for 5 bucks and watch, ask questions. if she could do that as easily as us web geeks could, she'd try it too. but we're the ones with the free access to try it, so we're pioneering this model of a hobbyist product that few will pay for.
  - echelon 7y ago
    The internet I grew up on didn't charge money for IRC, Blogspot, forums, mailing lists, Stack Overflow, etc. I'm now in the 1% due to the skills I've learned from free sources, and I pay it forward as much as I can. I have yet to encounter a "premium" medium article that really made me think or change my views. Their auto-Google login, paywall, and other dark patterns are annoying at best. Given their actions and how I value their content, I think Medium is the worst kind of walled garden. The Medium model is hot garbage, and I hope it dies.
    - PhasmaFelis 7y ago
      > The internet I grew up on didn't charge money for IRC, Blogspot, forums, mailing lists, Stack Overflow, etc. Most of those things were and are maintained by unpaid volunteers, some of them spending their own money every month to keep the servers on. Which is awesome. I applaud anyone who's willing and able to give to the community like that. But a lot of people now act like it's inherently repugnant to want to be paid for your work, like digital content shouldn't exist unless it's a self-funded hobby. I don't think that's reasonable or realistic. Just to be clear, is it just Medium you don't like, or the entire concept of paying for content? I'm seeing both.
    - bitwize 7y ago
      As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your content. Internet access must be paid for, but content is something to share. Who cares if the people who wrote it get paid?
- knolax 7y ago
  IMO the NYT deserves $0. Even blogspam is better than the narrative pushing they do.
- rmsaksida 7y ago
  I have nothing against paying for content (and I do so regularly) but there's no way I'm ever paying for something hosted on Medium. The persistent sharing dickbars, the annoying attempts at getting me to sign up, the ridiculously over-sized header, it all really ticks me off. It's funny how a website that portrays itself as a home for great content consistently displays the utmost disregard for content.
yuy910616 7y ago
Is this a meme? '''Calls out the internet for becoming a 'dark forest' bc of indexed, optimized, and gamified nature...posts on Medium'''
- knolax 7y ago
  You can criticize a system and still participate in it. The author also stated that they only posted on Medium after vetting their ideas with a more private group.
  - joeax 7y ago
    The article is paywalled so they are also profiting from it as well.
- Barrin92 7y ago
  the point of the post is that there's also a danger in withdrawing from participating in the public and that there's a significant downside to the public and oneself when we withdraw from discourse, so I don't think there's a contradiction here at all.
- DesiLurker 7y ago
  I've posted criticisms of FB on FB. What else are you gonna do when there really is no choice. this kind of criticisms really are ad-homenian attacks with little to contribute.
beat 7y ago
As much as I love Cixin Liu's "Dark Forest" concept (I've sung my praises of his novels quite a bit here), I'm not sure this post fully fleshes out the analogy. I think it could be developed further, though. What makes Cixin's dark forest so awful is that new intelligent species are going out into a Universe with other species millions of years more advanced than they are, species that can easily exterminate entire solar systems - or worse (the weapons in Cixin's dark forest make the Death Star look like a drawing of a BB gun). Is that really what we have here, on the internet? When we find our autonomous zones (to steal an anarchist phrase), do Google and Facebook actively exterminate them? No. Not yet, anyway. I think other analogies might be in order for the very real phenomenon of retreating from the corporate internet.
- asplake 7y ago
  Actually that’s a good point. One thing I won’t tolerate in a community I host is its use to conspire against others (or even to attack them behind their backs). I would guess that happens quite a bit even in communities not set up for that purpose.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- persuemeliketh 7y ago
  >do Google and Facebook actively exterminate them populist non-techie people concerend with transhumanism have a niche, its called the "conspiracy theory" community and yes it is actively getting banned or shadowbanned at all significant gradations of intensity by facegoog
- ystrickler 7y ago
  I cut some of this out before hitting publish, but I had originally included more about the emotional and status anxiety of posting publicly, reputation management, and the risks to self posed by the way these platforms work. I ultimately cut those things because I thought they distracted from the overall idea and it's something we already hear so much of. I definitely wouldn't say this analogy is 1:1 with Liu Cixin's original, but I do think there is a real fear to poking your head out online that isn't that far from the original dark forest concept.
lostconfused 7y ago
There are plenty of exclusive communities on the internet because it's just as useful of a tool for any illegal activity as it is for corporations trying to drive more profits.
LiquidSky 7y ago
I'd say the Internet is more like Dante's "dark wood" in that it leads to Hell, but without a Virgil and no road to Paradise (or even Purgatory) waiting at the end.
davesque 7y ago
A bit off-topic, but I've kind of struggled mentally since finishing The Dark Forest. Even though it's science fiction, it actually seems hard to argue with the theory in the book -- that civilizations must act to eliminate each other or they are overwhelmingly likely to be eliminated themselves. I'd like to believe it's not true, but so long as any two civilizations are likely to have dramatically different rates of technological advancement and so long as crossing the gaps in space between civilizations takes sufficiently long due to the laws of physics, it seems hard to deny that there might be strong reasons for civilizations to fear each other.
- empath75 7y ago
  People don’t always or even normally act at the level of civilizations. Why would this apply at the civilization and not the town or the state or country or corporate level.
  - AgentME 7y ago
    Different groups of people get along because we're all still human and very similarly culturally and understand each other's desires and goals. Things start going badly when there's major social and technological differences. Think of how things went for the natives when America was discovered. Now amplify it. Imagine if different countries were isolated from each other for millions of years, evolving into different species, and advancing technology the whole time, lost track of any commonalities between each other, and were then exposed to each other.
- simion314 7y ago
  I also had a similar feeling after finishing the book, this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmCTmgavkrQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmCTmgavkrQ made some good points, mainly finding problems with the axioms so it convinced me that the conclusion in the book is probably wrong since the axioms are probably not true.
- YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
  >> Even though it's science fiction, it actually seems hard to argue with the theory in the book -- that civilizations must act to eliminate each other or they are overwhelmingly likely to be eliminated themselves. This is a great conceit for a sci-fi novel (two, actually) but I wouldn't take it too seriously as a real-life argument. To begin with, it's a theory about essentially evolutionary imperatives. It says that every civilisation, regardless of species, location, or any other condition, will eventually reach the same conclusion about the nature of the universe and the rules defining the co-existence of civilisations inside it. To put it lightly, that is a very long stretch. We have no way to know anything about how a non-human civilisation will think, or even if it will "think" in the same sense that we do (they may be space-faring social insects without a real capacity for conscious thought, say- a classic sci-fi trope). We have no way to know what are the goals and rules that such a civilisation might choose for itself. Some may see it as their duty to protect and help life in the universe, as something unique and irreplaceable. Some might indeed see it as a survival imperative to go out and destroy or conquer other civilisations. Some might choose to develop along a sustainable path that will not end up in them exhausting their local systems' resources (eliminating the second axiom of cosmic sociology). It's a huge universe. There's space for any number of different outlooks on life, the universe and everything. I don't doubt that the Dark Forest theory is one thing that may well have arisen somewhere, somewhen, but to assume that everything that is conscious in the universe will have "developed the hiding gene and the cleansing gene", that's just assuming way, way too much (and first of all- about the way genetic information is transferred). We don't know anything about other technological civilisations. Cautiousness is well advised, but part of that is not assuming that we understand how they will necessarily think.
tamalesfan 7y ago
"Imagine a dark forest at night. It’s deathly quiet. Nothing moves. Nothing stirs. This could lead one to assume that the forest is devoid of life. But of course, it’s not. The dark forest is full of life. It’s quiet because night is when the predators come out. To survive, the animals stay silent." Forests aren't deathly quiet at night. Insects, reptiles and many birds and canines are very loud at night; the forest at night in summer is positively raucous with noise. No one that can hear ever suspects the forest is devoid of life at night. This is the sort of ignorance that can only manifest in a strictly urbanite writer. The rest of the story exhibits more of the same group-thinky urbanite mentality. The traditional gathering places of the Internet are fracturing. Moral panic has gripped the self righteous at the top of mighty Internet platforms and, like all such outraged grandees of the past, they've resorted to the ban hammer. So new platforms emerge to capture the deplatformed. Thankfully the emergence of such alternatives is still possible in some nations.
inflatableDodo 7y ago
Is more a mass of jungle with some old boggy wastelands and an escalating series of slash and burn plantation forestry monocultures all intertwined with unruly canopy vines and invasive fungi.
sylens 7y ago
Wouldn't the "Black Domain" concept introduced in Death's End be a better metaphor here? Communities are choosing to seal themselves off from the greater Internet, even if that means they cannot collaborate/engage with as many other people.
- beat 7y ago
  Only if you actively hide the community from the rest of the internet, rather than passively hide (by not advertising its existence).
  - loteck 7y ago
    So what you're saying is that black domains end in .onion?
- r00fus 7y ago
  Aka Balkanization. This is what I predicted about 5 years ago: every country will get its own version of the Great Firewall.
- jasaloo 7y ago
  yes precisely my thought
X6S1x6Okd1st 7y ago
I feel like there are some really nice ideas in here, but I felt like the metaphor of the dark forest really took a turn when the author started using it to describe the communication channels they felt like were still safe. I'd personally term those burrows or something. Something that is hidden from external observers walking through the dark forest.
- nyolfen 7y ago
  warrens: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/10/27/warrens-plazas-and-the-edge-of-legibility/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/10/27/warrens-plazas-and-the...
- xxandroxygen 7y ago
  I agree, I was pretty confused when dark forests went from "things hiding from predators" to "safe, separate spaces to communicate"
KirinDave 7y ago
I'm not a fan of this metaphor but I definitely feel the phenomenon it's alluding to in my life. I've increasingly enjoyed a relatively obscure social media existence on a small, focused Mastodon community as opposed to the general warfare of Twitter. Similarly I post here out of obligations I have to folks, not because I like it or feel comfortable, welcome, or part of the community. I have smaller, private venues where I feel like I can be myself. And I'm aware sometimes I am a contributor to that attitude of "we are here to pick fights", but there isn't much I can do about it, that's what a lot of tech forums aspire to be.
apotatopot 7y ago
dude's obviously never been to a dark forest.
JohnClark1337 7y ago
I left facebook and twitter after the 2016 election because everyone seemed to go bat-sh*t insane and every post was focused on Trump and how we were all going to die. Just decided to go to my own "dark forest" and let them all burn out screaming "TRUMP!" into the void.
HNLurker2 7y ago
https://outline.com/AMgCJV https://outline.com/AMgCJV

179 points by razin 7y ago

Jun8 7y ago

On an irrelevant point: do bloggers who use Medium honestly expect people to pay $5/mo to see their content? By comparison NY Times is $1/mo for unlimited articles.

PhasmaFelis 7y ago
If you believe content is worth paying for at all, the price of a cup of coffee every month seems perfectly reasonable. The NYT has a different business model, and is still partly supported by advertising in the print edition. The digital content pricing race-to-the-bottom is really unfortunate. It's why we have shitty free-to-play mobile games, for example: people won't pay more than a few dollars for a phone game anymore, so a lot of devs have to find other business models to support development.
- digitalsushi 7y ago
  or if not advertising inside products, then it rewards walled gardens to grow - the games, blogs, et al end up inside a subsidiary that collects payment for access to all of it together. and the walls grow.
- wolfgke 7y ago
  > If you believe content is worth paying for at all, the price of a cup of coffee every month seems perfectly reasonable. First: In the USA, a cup of coffee might cost 5$; in other countries, it is much cheaper. Second: Every payment you do in the internet leaves a huge data track since there exists no analogue for cash for paying anonymously in the internet. So in particular if you are skeptical of data krakens like Facebook etc., you should be very cautious to pay in the internet. In particular, for each payment in the internet, you do not only pay with money, but also with lots of sensitive data.
- nextlevelwizard 7y ago
  With SV salaries that is easy to justify. Normal people wouldn't pay even $3 for a cup of coffee.
  - PhasmaFelis 7y ago
    The popularity of Starbucks suggests otherwise. But if you still don't like the coffee analogy, that's fine. The point is that $5 a month is not a lot of money for the average American. That's much less than the cost of a monthly newspaper subscription, and 20 years ago those were extremely popular.
digitalsushi 7y ago
we make things. we make fullstack websites, we make payment processing widgets. we hook them together. a product no one wants, so it doesn't get purchased. imagine if other hobbyists could so easily duct tape a virtual point-of-sale to their display cases. imagine if a gearhead could put a card reader on their front door, try to get the public to wander in for 5 bucks and watch, ask questions. if she could do that as easily as us web geeks could, she'd try it too. but we're the ones with the free access to try it, so we're pioneering this model of a hobbyist product that few will pay for.
- echelon 7y ago
  The internet I grew up on didn't charge money for IRC, Blogspot, forums, mailing lists, Stack Overflow, etc. I'm now in the 1% due to the skills I've learned from free sources, and I pay it forward as much as I can. I have yet to encounter a "premium" medium article that really made me think or change my views. Their auto-Google login, paywall, and other dark patterns are annoying at best. Given their actions and how I value their content, I think Medium is the worst kind of walled garden. The Medium model is hot garbage, and I hope it dies.
  - PhasmaFelis 7y ago
    > The internet I grew up on didn't charge money for IRC, Blogspot, forums, mailing lists, Stack Overflow, etc. Most of those things were and are maintained by unpaid volunteers, some of them spending their own money every month to keep the servers on. Which is awesome. I applaud anyone who's willing and able to give to the community like that. But a lot of people now act like it's inherently repugnant to want to be paid for your work, like digital content shouldn't exist unless it's a self-funded hobby. I don't think that's reasonable or realistic. Just to be clear, is it just Medium you don't like, or the entire concept of paying for content? I'm seeing both.
  - bitwize 7y ago
    As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your content. Internet access must be paid for, but content is something to share. Who cares if the people who wrote it get paid?
knolax 7y ago
IMO the NYT deserves $0. Even blogspam is better than the narrative pushing they do.
rmsaksida 7y ago
I have nothing against paying for content (and I do so regularly) but there's no way I'm ever paying for something hosted on Medium. The persistent sharing dickbars, the annoying attempts at getting me to sign up, the ridiculously over-sized header, it all really ticks me off. It's funny how a website that portrays itself as a home for great content consistently displays the utmost disregard for content.

yuy910616 7y ago

Is this a meme? '''Calls out the internet for becoming a 'dark forest' bc of indexed, optimized, and gamified nature...posts on Medium'''

knolax 7y ago
You can criticize a system and still participate in it. The author also stated that they only posted on Medium after vetting their ideas with a more private group.
- joeax 7y ago
  The article is paywalled so they are also profiting from it as well.
Barrin92 7y ago
the point of the post is that there's also a danger in withdrawing from participating in the public and that there's a significant downside to the public and oneself when we withdraw from discourse, so I don't think there's a contradiction here at all.
DesiLurker 7y ago
I've posted criticisms of FB on FB. What else are you gonna do when there really is no choice. this kind of criticisms really are ad-homenian attacks with little to contribute.

beat 7y ago

As much as I love Cixin Liu's "Dark Forest" concept (I've sung my praises of his novels quite a bit here), I'm not sure this post fully fleshes out the analogy. I think it could be developed further, though. What makes Cixin's dark forest so awful is that new intelligent species are going out into a Universe with other species millions of years more advanced than they are, species that can easily exterminate entire solar systems - or worse (the weapons in Cixin's dark forest make the Death Star look like a drawing of a BB gun). Is that really what we have here, on the internet? When we find our autonomous zones (to steal an anarchist phrase), do Google and Facebook actively exterminate them? No. Not yet, anyway. I think other analogies might be in order for the very real phenomenon of retreating from the corporate internet.

asplake 7y ago
Actually that’s a good point. One thing I won’t tolerate in a community I host is its use to conspire against others (or even to attack them behind their backs). I would guess that happens quite a bit even in communities not set up for that purpose.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
persuemeliketh 7y ago
>do Google and Facebook actively exterminate them populist non-techie people concerend with transhumanism have a niche, its called the "conspiracy theory" community and yes it is actively getting banned or shadowbanned at all significant gradations of intensity by facegoog
ystrickler 7y ago
I cut some of this out before hitting publish, but I had originally included more about the emotional and status anxiety of posting publicly, reputation management, and the risks to self posed by the way these platforms work. I ultimately cut those things because I thought they distracted from the overall idea and it's something we already hear so much of. I definitely wouldn't say this analogy is 1:1 with Liu Cixin's original, but I do think there is a real fear to poking your head out online that isn't that far from the original dark forest concept.

lostconfused 7y ago

There are plenty of exclusive communities on the internet because it's just as useful of a tool for any illegal activity as it is for corporations trying to drive more profits.

LiquidSky 7y ago

I'd say the Internet is more like Dante's "dark wood" in that it leads to Hell, but without a Virgil and no road to Paradise (or even Purgatory) waiting at the end.

davesque 7y ago

A bit off-topic, but I've kind of struggled mentally since finishing The Dark Forest. Even though it's science fiction, it actually seems hard to argue with the theory in the book -- that civilizations must act to eliminate each other or they are overwhelmingly likely to be eliminated themselves. I'd like to believe it's not true, but so long as any two civilizations are likely to have dramatically different rates of technological advancement and so long as crossing the gaps in space between civilizations takes sufficiently long due to the laws of physics, it seems hard to deny that there might be strong reasons for civilizations to fear each other.

empath75 7y ago
People don’t always or even normally act at the level of civilizations. Why would this apply at the civilization and not the town or the state or country or corporate level.
- AgentME 7y ago
  Different groups of people get along because we're all still human and very similarly culturally and understand each other's desires and goals. Things start going badly when there's major social and technological differences. Think of how things went for the natives when America was discovered. Now amplify it. Imagine if different countries were isolated from each other for millions of years, evolving into different species, and advancing technology the whole time, lost track of any commonalities between each other, and were then exposed to each other.
simion314 7y ago
I also had a similar feeling after finishing the book, this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmCTmgavkrQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmCTmgavkrQ made some good points, mainly finding problems with the axioms so it convinced me that the conclusion in the book is probably wrong since the axioms are probably not true.
YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
>> Even though it's science fiction, it actually seems hard to argue with the theory in the book -- that civilizations must act to eliminate each other or they are overwhelmingly likely to be eliminated themselves. This is a great conceit for a sci-fi novel (two, actually) but I wouldn't take it too seriously as a real-life argument. To begin with, it's a theory about essentially evolutionary imperatives. It says that every civilisation, regardless of species, location, or any other condition, will eventually reach the same conclusion about the nature of the universe and the rules defining the co-existence of civilisations inside it. To put it lightly, that is a very long stretch. We have no way to know anything about how a non-human civilisation will think, or even if it will "think" in the same sense that we do (they may be space-faring social insects without a real capacity for conscious thought, say- a classic sci-fi trope). We have no way to know what are the goals and rules that such a civilisation might choose for itself. Some may see it as their duty to protect and help life in the universe, as something unique and irreplaceable. Some might indeed see it as a survival imperative to go out and destroy or conquer other civilisations. Some might choose to develop along a sustainable path that will not end up in them exhausting their local systems' resources (eliminating the second axiom of cosmic sociology). It's a huge universe. There's space for any number of different outlooks on life, the universe and everything. I don't doubt that the Dark Forest theory is one thing that may well have arisen somewhere, somewhen, but to assume that everything that is conscious in the universe will have "developed the hiding gene and the cleansing gene", that's just assuming way, way too much (and first of all- about the way genetic information is transferred). We don't know anything about other technological civilisations. Cautiousness is well advised, but part of that is not assuming that we understand how they will necessarily think.

tamalesfan 7y ago

"Imagine a dark forest at night. It’s deathly quiet. Nothing moves. Nothing stirs. This could lead one to assume that the forest is devoid of life. But of course, it’s not. The dark forest is full of life. It’s quiet because night is when the predators come out. To survive, the animals stay silent." Forests aren't deathly quiet at night. Insects, reptiles and many birds and canines are very loud at night; the forest at night in summer is positively raucous with noise. No one that can hear ever suspects the forest is devoid of life at night. This is the sort of ignorance that can only manifest in a strictly urbanite writer. The rest of the story exhibits more of the same group-thinky urbanite mentality. The traditional gathering places of the Internet are fracturing. Moral panic has gripped the self righteous at the top of mighty Internet platforms and, like all such outraged grandees of the past, they've resorted to the ban hammer. So new platforms emerge to capture the deplatformed. Thankfully the emergence of such alternatives is still possible in some nations.

inflatableDodo 7y ago

Is more a mass of jungle with some old boggy wastelands and an escalating series of slash and burn plantation forestry monocultures all intertwined with unruly canopy vines and invasive fungi.

sylens 7y ago

Wouldn't the "Black Domain" concept introduced in Death's End be a better metaphor here? Communities are choosing to seal themselves off from the greater Internet, even if that means they cannot collaborate/engage with as many other people.

beat 7y ago
Only if you actively hide the community from the rest of the internet, rather than passively hide (by not advertising its existence).
- loteck 7y ago
  So what you're saying is that black domains end in .onion?
r00fus 7y ago
Aka Balkanization. This is what I predicted about 5 years ago: every country will get its own version of the Great Firewall.
jasaloo 7y ago
yes precisely my thought

X6S1x6Okd1st 7y ago

I feel like there are some really nice ideas in here, but I felt like the metaphor of the dark forest really took a turn when the author started using it to describe the communication channels they felt like were still safe. I'd personally term those burrows or something. Something that is hidden from external observers walking through the dark forest.

nyolfen 7y ago
warrens: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/10/27/warrens-plazas-and-the-edge-of-legibility/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/10/27/warrens-plazas-and-the...
xxandroxygen 7y ago
I agree, I was pretty confused when dark forests went from "things hiding from predators" to "safe, separate spaces to communicate"

KirinDave 7y ago

I'm not a fan of this metaphor but I definitely feel the phenomenon it's alluding to in my life. I've increasingly enjoyed a relatively obscure social media existence on a small, focused Mastodon community as opposed to the general warfare of Twitter. Similarly I post here out of obligations I have to folks, not because I like it or feel comfortable, welcome, or part of the community. I have smaller, private venues where I feel like I can be myself. And I'm aware sometimes I am a contributor to that attitude of "we are here to pick fights", but there isn't much I can do about it, that's what a lot of tech forums aspire to be.

apotatopot 7y ago

dude's obviously never been to a dark forest.

JohnClark1337 7y ago

I left facebook and twitter after the 2016 election because everyone seemed to go bat-sh*t insane and every post was focused on Trump and how we were all going to die. Just decided to go to my own "dark forest" and let them all burn out screaming "TRUMP!" into the void.

HNLurker2 7y ago

https://outline.com/AMgCJV https://outline.com/AMgCJV