10 ms·

Saw a meme on mastodon the other day contrasting people of the '90s going online to escape from offline reality, and people of the '20s going offline to escape

Saw a meme on mastodon the other day contrasting people of the '90s going online to escape from offline reality, and people of the '20s going offline to escape from online reality. There's something to that. I think a big part of it is just how incredibly toxic the web has become. If you spend any time online, as most tech workers do, you have exceptional resiliency if you're able to stay sane and level headed. Going online it's like everyone is really angry and tired and sad all the time, and it's getting worse every year. This really took a nosedive during the pandemic, but looking back this had been going on for several years before. Every election cycle makes things worse too. It's just been spiraling in a very dark direction for a long time. You have these blackpill depression cirklejerks everywhere. Astroturfing is getting worse every year. Like what Bannon did with gamer gate is an amateurish precursor to what everyone with is doing everywhere now. With AI you can even run these campaigns with a very small budget. All the news is just outrage porn and non-stop predictions of impending doom. Used to be more tabloid territory but now I don't know if anywhere is spared. A lot of the focus now is on AI, but when it isn't the world is burning in some other fashion. Reading the news, we've been in a permanent state of crisis for years now. This information diet just isn't good for your mental health. It isn't just tech workers, but they're probably more exposed than most. Candide's closing remarks spring to mind. Tend your garden.

rob74 2mo ago
If you also consider that many of us, via the companies we work for, actively contribute to making the Internet (and by extension, the world) a worse place, the question in the article's title kind of answers itself. It also makes "quiet quitting" seem almost the right thing to do: doing only the least possible to advance your company's goals while keeping both your job and your sanity, hoping that you will one day be offered a buyout package and then maybe find something more fulfilling...
- marginalia_nu 2mo ago
  A counterpoint would be that you don't really ever see investment bankers reacting in this fashion.
  - Gud 2mo ago
    Because engineers and investment bankers are wired differently.
    - marginalia_nu 2mo ago
      There's much more overlap than you'd think. Quants generally have a STEM background, and stay in the field much for the same sort of reasons tech workers stick around building torment nexuses for FAANG.
      - pastel8739 2mo ago
        Aren’t quants and what you would usually refer to as “investment bankers” pretty different groups of people?
        asdff 2mo ago
        Absolutely. The quants have legitimate skills. The ibs mostly just got lucky with the big internship junior year that set themselves up for life.
        brewdad 2mo ago
        They didn’t get lucky except to the extent they were born into a fourth generation Ivy League family.
    - consensus1 2mo ago
      Having done both I would say not by much
    - seb1204 2mo ago
      Because they chose to not doom scroll?
  - pseudalopex 2mo ago
    You don't really ever see investment bankers reacting how?
- Lammy 2mo ago
  > If you also consider that many of us, via the companies we work for, actively contribute to making the Internet (and by extension, the world) a worse place “Night must fall, now! Darker! — darker!”
MarkusQ 2mo ago
"It's just been spiraling in a very dark direction for a long time. You have these blackpill depression cirklejerks everywhere. Astroturfing is getting worse every year." Agreed. From TFA: "This disillusionment is infectious." I would suggest it is in part being spread by articles like this one. If you look at the press surrounding earlier advances, it was largely neutral to positive. Nowadays, as you note, it's doom stew everywhere, and the beacons of solace are pieces like this one driving home to anyone who's missed it how demoralized their peers are.
- consensus1 2mo ago
  I remember reading a theory on this that basically it is a symptom of the decline of the news media industry. The positive attitude in the industry lined up with good times for them until around 2000 when their revenue peaked: https://compote.slate.com/images/42207fae-3603-4fe5-b4fe-a658eb4f7181.jpg https://compote.slate.com/images/42207fae-3603-4fe5-b4fe-a65... For them it really is doom and gloom, and they spread it to the rest of society like a contagion by their writing much like the the banking crisis in 2008 poisoned the entire economy. I'm not sure if it's true, but it makes a lot of sense to me.
  - watwut 2mo ago
    Except that journals pump one super positive article after another. It is everywhere else people get annoyed ... including at journalists that pretends tech is better then it is.
  - mrguyorama 2mo ago
    "If it bleeds, it leads" is older than society. A news org can put out a perfect spread of articles that cover a whole spectrum of positive to negative, and social media and normal human beings will only attract to and focus on the negative. Social media has been enhancing that effect, because they figured out that rage bait is more effective than even the most positive message you can come up with, because we are animals. If you want to maximize "Engagement", which these companies explicitly do, then you WILL maximize rage and doom and gloom. They drive engagement more than anything else.
Multicomp 2mo ago
TL;DR: We won't stay here in blackpill-as-entertainment long term, tech/HN will proxy the way forward, but it will take time and will be messy. I think you make a strong point here. I will add a note of hope. In my opinion, besides the 'this too shall pass' nature of life meaning this outrage-focused moment, we on HN have hope here. I've been a lurker for a while around here, IDK when this account was made and I don't care, I feel confident that I've been watching the great techies of our era and HN celebrities and dang and other mods presiding over it all for at least a decade. It's probably my own media bubble bias, but I have noticed this trend where HN is discussing a given subject that the general public is not aware of, and it after years filters into the greater consciousness. I don't think HN is necessarily magically head of the curve, but I do think it concentrates where curious and possibly-open-minded people's thoughts are at, before internet-point-seeking/popularity echo chamber communities like Reddit/FB/Twitter or algorithm-driven hivemind homogenziers like YT/Reels/TikTok/Periscope all become aware of something. HN saw the centralization of control with the SOPA/PIPA/encryption in public fight, that has been ongoing since the clipper chip and before, but in this modern form with end-users not needing PGP and friends and just getting to have e2ee with Signal, HN was talking about and using Signal for years before now our government figures and traditional + social media companies have talked about Signal. Similarly, the broader privacy questions, turning off Google Location History was happening on HN (and XDA back when custom android ROMs were more popular) as soon as Google Reader was axed, people only now have learned to fear 'the internet' because of how many more egregious things have happened across all powerful web platforms. And of course we can't ignore HN playing with cleverbot and that dall-e precursor who's name I forget, ML models and markov chains and tech beyond my ability to teach about, before OAI ever released a single product like ChatGPT. HN still has heavyweights of each industry and titans of tech who pop by on occasion to grace us mere plebians, pushing back the Eternal September for just a few happy moments (looking at you BWK, Walter Bright, and other famous names I can't rattle off) to share with us what happened 'in the room'. Just the other day someone posted 'I was the guy who controlled the rollout for Apple MacOS X Snow Leopard, it was a bugfix only release no really' ... only on HN by the power of the internet do we get that, we don't get that on a TikTok. So HN has still got 'it' at least for now, and therefore I can make a broad observation. If the HN being directionally appropriate even if getting particulars wrong is true, I'm seeing future trends that will lead us out of this populist/blackpill moment. People will get emotionally overwhelmed/numbed to overwrought angry moments, they will want to move forward. Americans tend to be keen as a people, whatever the 'thing' is. 90s tech utopia optimism was a keen-thing. Support for or opposition to the Iraq War was a keen-thing, whatever we Americans do, we do with gusto. So right now, we are all in on outraged doom/gloom/anxiety/this sux!! feelings. I'm hopeful that perhaps we as a people go with a decision to move in what a figure from my current media bubble named Aaaron Renn says where there are New Constructivists, who are intellectuals on all sides of American political aisles looking to revitalize and create new institutions. I'm fearful that we will have to fall down hard to learn our lessons first and/or learn the wrong lessons where we decide the fix to ennui is to blame 'those' people over there (whoever that happens to be). The fix to the fear and ennui won't come from us fighting with our families, community members, internet strangers, or political opponents, it will come from us choosing to change our media diets away from garbage in/garbage out (I Know, I know, you who read this and disagree with everything I say and my media diet sources want me to change my media diet, that may very well be true) that is focused on emotional inflammation (didn't we used to ban people from our forums for flaming?) instead of genuine debate and encouragement and online civility. It's boring and its lame, but circling all the way back to the parent comment: the web used to be a homogenous unified place made up of professionals and nerds and group think. We need more diverse opinions than that, but what has happened is that the internet (and its mobile app/web/private chat mediums) has become a borderless place where people who never encounter each other have diametrically opposed views constantly, and so retreat into echochambers and don't get the media literacy experience needed to peacefully coexist with the rest of the online anglosphere without constant acrimony. Grifters feed the flames for likes/subscribes/patreon subs/etc.
pseudalopex 2mo ago
> All the news is just outrage porn and non-stop predictions of impending doom. No. And this shallow dismissal builds the mood you complained about.
- marginalia_nu 2mo ago
  As an experiment, completely stop consuming news and social media for a few weeks. People have lived their entire lives without these information streams, you'll survive unplugging a bit. Now I can't tell you what you will experience if you go through with this, but I can promise it's very enlightening.
  - autoexec 2mo ago
    I'm sure that ignoring all of the very real problems we have and the ways we're being harmed can make some people feel better, but burying your head in the sand doesn't make any of it actually go away. You can pretty safely ignore a lot of irrelevant rage bait, but by remaining ignorant to what's going on around you you also risk losing a lot of useful, actionable, information and being blindsided by things that could have been avoided. I know that if I were corporation hurting and exploiting people for profit or a corrupt politician screwing over the public I'd be very happy to encourage people to "unplug" and stop stressing about things.
    - ianbutler 2mo ago
      What are you doing to fix the issues though? Has the knowledge of the issues increased your agency in a meaningful way such that you've taken actions to improve things or are you just enjoying living in a perpetually outraged state for the sake of it? If your martyrdom isn't doing anything to help fix the problem you're just hurting yourself and stopping yourself from potentially being in a space to ever actually do anything.
      - lazyasciiart 2mo ago
        And what are you doing with the happy mental space you have carved out?
m463 2mo ago
> '90s going online ... '20s going offline It feels to me like the change from: - old: going downtown to the restaurants and shops of your small village to enjoy a relaxing evening. - new: downtown is a crowded confusing mishmash of unregulated blaring music, over-the-top blinking flashing signs, intrusive people accosting you and dangerous thieves lurking everywhere. don't go. there's no "regulated" that makes thing better for anyone, it just gets morphed into oppression of the vistors making them more vulnerable without fixing any problems.
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- leptons 2mo ago
  There have been many times throughout the past when going "downtown" elicited a "don't go" response. And yet there were times when going "downtown" was a fun thing to do. Somehow we got from past "don't go" to future "downtown is fun" back to what we have now. Things will change if people stop going. And then they'll change again.
arjie 2mo ago
I live in San Francisco and life is quite nice. There are many obvious ways that this city is shitty that I’ve noticed other civilizations don’t have a problem with but also I’d say the overall experience is positive. Neither offline nor online reality is defacto unpleasant. As far as the disillusionment sense, I think that’s an active selection bias. I think people (including me) like to feel angry and so we go out there looking for and finding people who will give us that. The key, for me, is to curate one’s feed. On HN, for instance, I usually block the majority of repetitive boring posters using a chrome extension. The majority of these people have very low context sensitivity which annoys me. There are also abrasive people or generally sad people, both groups of which are safely blockable because they have a comment style where P(token|context) = P(token). There is no surfeit of humans on the Internet and no surfeit of interesting information. Almost all humans can be safely excluded from my feed and I can still get information. By the way, I know you from your search engine. This might be an out there question but do you offer your search index as a downloadable structure? If so, how much does that cost?
- marginalia_nu 2mo ago
  > By the way, I know you from your search engine. This might be an out there question but do you offer your search index as a downloadable structure? If so, how much does that cost? Shoot me an email and we can discuss, but the index is somewhere in the ballpark of 20 TB, so there are some quite significant logistical obstacles.
  - arjie 2mo ago
    Thank you. Emailed!
- johnnyanmac 2mo ago
  >I think that’s an active selection bias. I think people (including me) like to feel angry and so we go out there looking for and finding people who will give us that. Well, it's subjective so I can't speak for you. But personally I want to try and find the good in people and in life. And I see a lot of good. But that doesn't mean I'm blissfully unaware and won't notice (and call out) the fact that jobs are on the down and down in my country, we're looking at a generation who cannot get their foot in the door whatsoever, that leadership in the country is actively taking a wrecking ball to society, that prices for everyone working is rising faster than their paychecks, and so much more. I personally don't actively look for misery. I just can't keep ignoring being punched in the face constantly, even if I'm not going to blame any one person for the punch. Especially after 3 years of trying to find full time career placement in times where I would at worst spend 3 months job searching.
andai 2mo ago
Well it used to be that the government's job was to keep morale high. At some point that seems to have inverted. The coalition-of-Molochs appears to be finding it much more profitable to make everyone want to kill themselves. (Not sure if that's a great long-term strategy, but they seem to have thought this through.)
- andai 2mo ago
  I assume it had to do with the Malthusian panic (which was very effective, and remains a sticky meme, although for slightly different reasons now).
- johnnyanmac 2mo ago
  > but they seem to have thought this through If there's one thing I'm confident of in my government, it's that they certainly did not think this through. Thus highlighting the core issue.
deadbabe 2mo ago
I can’t prove it, but my gut tells me a large amount of people on the web are basically just LARPing extremist takes or depressions as some kind of fun outlet. Why take the web seriously? It’s more fun to be some ridiculous person. Of course, some people are genuine and this kind of behavior chews them up when they take it seriously.
- cindyllm 2mo ago
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hellohello2 2mo ago
Yeah I'm not sure what happened but Reddit in particular is beyond saving, and I'm not saying it was ever great. I think we simply don't know how to create online communities that make any sense yet. I'd rather have second hand smoke than any more algorithmic "engagement" maximization at this point.
- rootusrootus 2mo ago
  I feel like we're probably going to have to give up something, most probably anonymity, to get back to anything like sanity. We'll see communities that are militantly anti-AI where it's hard to get in and easy to get kicked out, and it will probably cost money and require you to divulge who you really are. It could still be semi-anonymous at the user level but not at the administrative level. I'd like to see something like that take off, because I'd be willing to give it a try. I also think the communities should be limited. Maybe have several sizes and see how it plays. Something that never grows beyond 250. Never past 1000. Something along those lines. Relatedly, I'm just about on board with the idea of a modern day Compuserve or Prodigy. Pay to play, but in return you get no ads, no malware, no algorithms, no AI. A gated community for the Internet.
  - parpfish 2mo ago
    Those plans might work to give a nice sane internet experience to the folks that are willing to put in some money and effort. But most people will still opt to stay on the slop-filled web because it’s free and because they like being angry. And as long as they stay the societal problems that stem from the toxic internet will live on.
    - rootusrootus 2mo ago
      I agree, it will filter for a certain kind of person, and most probably the people who are not a problem on today's Internet. If we cannot tamp down the filth that comes along with emphatic anonymity, then at least we can create some places without it. I'm getting to the point where I may pull the plug on my Internet as soon as I retire. Kinda hate to do that, because I remember when it didn't suck (at least not everywhere). IMO once upon a time Facebook could have been that place, though maybe that ship has sailed now. There was a time when I thought they could choose to offer a premium experience for anyone willing to pay and there would have been a small but real subset of users who would go for it. Charge $25/mo (which I believe is approximately what they make off a normal US user) in return for zero ads, zero algorithm, complete control over the experience. Add another level above that which includes actively moderated members-only discussion forums.
willis936 2mo ago
I recommend It Came From Something Awful. It's short and the thesis is that corporate co-option of counter culture pushed the internet over the precipice.
Karrot_Kream 2mo ago
Many folks have talked about optimizing for engagement and while I do think this is a factor, I don't think this is the cause. HN has a pretty simple set of algorithms and yet it's largely followed the same trend of negativity and despair. I'm partial to what I call the "doomer effect". If you feel sad or disenfranchised you're just much more likely to spend time online talking. A person with a fulfilling social life and a job they feel satisfied with is going to spend time socializing with friends and working on their job. They may read online feeds, they may write very occasionally, but that will be the extent of most interactions. On the other hand the folks that feel the most negative tend to spend inordinate amounts of time online posting about how sad and angry they are. In a real life conversation when a depressed friend gets on their soapbox most folks give the friend a subtle clue that it's time to move on. If that clue isn't heeded the friend often gets targeted 1:1 offers for help and can eventually just be shut out of the group altogether for being too negative. Nothing like this happens offline. If you're in a bad place, as long as a forum will have your posts you can post to your heart's content. And oh boy is it finally the time to let your hair down and tell everyone how f-ed everything is on the inside. Constantly. This makes a flywheel. People who want to avoid negativity start avoiding negative online spaces. People who are fine with it or feel similarly keep reading. Eventually negativity becomes the default. "Misery loves company" is much older than the Internet. There's no doubt to me that the net makes it that much worse.
- JohnMakin 2mo ago
  I’m sorry if I am being uncharitable, but are you saying the solution to depression is that people’s friends groups (which the depressed person may not have access to to begin with) is to just like, bully them out of it? lol? Tell me you’ve never had a depressive episode without telling me. hint: the people with support groups in the first place are less vulnerable and bullying depression doesn’t really help, I could point you to a ton of studies, but this post makes me a bit nauseous. I dont disagree that depressive online spaces breed more depressive cycles, but good lord, what you seem to be implying is even worse. You can’t just brute force “hey cheer up” no matter the group structure. like particularly this: > If that clue isn't heeded the friend often gets targeted 1:1 offers for help and can eventually just be shut out of the group altogether for being too negative. Is not ever helping a clinically depressed person. especially when offers of “help” are often quite victim blamey and threatening like the tone of your post here - stop bringing the vibe down, or we’ll make you feel even more isolated! good lord. Try bringing them a meal or giving them a compliment first? holy shit.
josh_p 2mo ago
You mention the election cycle and things getting worse. I live in the US and I’ve watched in real time every sad, terrible decision made by the current administration and every sad terrible decision by what’s supposed to be the opposition party. It all makes me want to scream. And then I’m offline and my life carries on because none it has really affected my white privileged middle class tech worker butt. It all feels wrong.
- Foobar8568 2mo ago
  I don't live in the US, I live in Switzerland, and what happens in the US and Iran affects the world. And when I see this kind of shit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJ58s4bwzG0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJ58s4bwzG0 ( bbc Donald Trump dons 'Trump 2028' hat and jokes about 'fourth term' ), I am like, what the fuck? Europeans as a whole didn't have much a great opinions of republicans but I don't even understand how a republican voter can vote for a russian asset who is using the constitution as toilet paper. At this stage, just turn directly to a fascist state and stop pretending.
  - josh_p 2mo ago
    The Republican Party is very good at propaganda. And the Democratic Party (the currently elected one, not the one the American people actually want), is happy to go along with a lot of it as long as they get to stay in power. We’re good at political theatre and pedantry here. All that and a steady diet of “American Exceptionalism” started as early as kindergarten in our public schools deludes whole swaths of the country into thinking that all of this is somehow good for them. I grew up going to public schools in the 90s and 2000s in a “blue” part of the country. As I’ve grown up into adulthood with kids, I’ve become so disappointed with my own education. It hasn’t gotten better and it’s worse in a lot of ways. We homeschool our kids and don’t whitewash our history.
- johnnyanmac 2mo ago
  Just gotta stay safe and count your blessings. S178 probably did a good part in driving tech to be the canary in the coalmine of the new "forever layoff" model. That was a political decision that affected a lot of us. even if that wasn't, I'm sure you were hit by higher prices for everything We're all being hit, it just depends on a bit of luck and how financially ready we are to buffer the storm. Most people unfortunately aren't.
purplemoonx 2mo ago
The fact you say "on mastodon" proves it's effectively centralized, just pointing that out
- bazodedo 2mo ago
  To be fair, saying "overheard an argument at the pub" wouldn't imply that theres but a single pub in the world.
  - orangeberrytea 2mo ago
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- marginalia_nu 2mo ago
  Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, not really something I spend much time thinking about. I'm on a ton of different social media because I run a business and need to be where people are discussing my work.
- whstl 2mo ago
  Unpopular opinion, but Mastodon is part of the problem as much as Twitter or Facebook, unfortunately. It's just another riff at something toxic, with the difference it's open source.
- zahlman 2mo ago
  As much as I'd like to endorse the decentralization model of Mastodon, it's annoying that I'm constantly shown Mastodon messages from new, often very suspicious looking domains that then want me to enable JavaScript yet again in order to run the same damn Mastodon app. This problem is not inherent to the task. Nitter instances can do almost everything without JS.
barrenko 2mo ago
Our public offline lives are also miserable. If you live in a westernish society, you know exactly what are the problems, and if you are 40 something you can see that for your whole life no one has ever attempted to solve it. We just live with extreme negligence. Like child of permissive parents. And we're all, each and every single one of us both the children and the parents!
BloondAndDoom 2mo ago
As someone who has been in the industry over 25+ hands down this is the worst period of being online. There has always been that programmer who wanted to quit and run a restaurant, but tech world lost its original soul. We were making people’s lives better, now we are just creating more wealth gap. Majority of the industry is hostile, online communities are extremely hard to get into and very exclusive, if you are new you cannot get in. Majority of the content somewhere between bots, fake news, propaganda and rage bait. Almost all good things about tech and the internet were killed one by one. Don’t get me wrong there are very exciting things from pure nerd perspective in this AI age but nothing is fulfilling as it used to.
- deleted 2mo ago
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- pardon_me 2mo ago
  For me this culminated to a deep belief that technology =/= progress. This has shaken my core to re-evaluate who will ever be allowed to benefit from my skills and time, but ruined a lot of my genuine enjoyment and enthusiasm.
  - scotty79 2mo ago
    > For me this culminated to a deep belief that technology =/= progress. I landed on the opposite conclusion. People don't progress in any domain if technology doesn't force them. Sometimes the ride might be bumpy and it might be taking them forwards kicking and screaming, but without new technology no progress happens on any issue. Science drives technology, technology drives economy and technology and economy drive culture and science. That's the virtuous feedback loop that drives itself and everything human as a side effect.
    - pardon_me 2mo ago
      I agree that both individual and progress of humanity relies on technology. Considering the state of the planet currently, it's essential to support the population count. To clarify, "=/=" is to denote "not equivalent", in that not all technology or advancement is progress. I used to be naive and use/recommend things I now wish never existed. Not because they aren't useful or a potential future, but because of who owns and controls them now. As time goes on, it's clear how dangerous certain tools can be in the wrong hands. If we aren't careful, the feedback loop can end up destroying us and/or limiting our freedoms. Unfortunately it appears this is the current road we are on. On this forum, it's likely that the power we have starts with careful analysis of what we are building and who can use it in (unintended) negative ways.
sneak 2mo ago
I don’t experience this. I love the internet more these days than ever. There are so many cool people doing cool things. I think a lot of this perception that everything is bad and everybody is sad is projection because people consume mass media which makes them feel doomed and hopeless so they continue to consume that sort of content and they project it on to everyone. The world is much better than it has ever been.
elias1233 2mo ago
Almost misread as ”outage porn” which would check out here on HN with all the recent outage posts
Gooblebrai 2mo ago
> how incredibly toxic the web has become A reflection of human nature at scale?
nz 2mo ago
I've heard someone say that this has been going on since 2012, because that is the year that 60% of all Americans (and probably most industrialized countries), owned a smartphone. This is qualitatively different from 60% of all Americans owning a computer (the smartphone and tablet, IMHO, is one of the greatest embarrassments of the tech industry: it is a practically sci-fi device that does _less_ than the clunky desktop computers, _by design_, even though they could probably do _more_[0]). The tech companies are feeding people misleading, enraging, and toxic content because this creates a strong emotional reaction, which is the first step to selling advertised products. For example, nobody will buy a thing they can't rationally justify, unless they can justify it emotionally[1]. [0]: For example, you can create pretty decent art on the wacom tablets, but that is such a niche use case. There are probably other use cases that are unrealized, because it might distract the precious users from their push notifications and doom-scrolling. [1]: Which for the most part is _reactive_. It used to be that companies would invest in industrial design (or visual design) to make an aesthetically appealing product. The problem, is that this is very expensive, and difficult to repeat, because there is not exactly a science of aesthetics (nothing beyond philosophy of phenomenology and also some eastern philosophies). And so, companies use the only strategy that can scale: rage-bait, doomerism, etc. Somehow, I do not think that the executives and shareholders of these companies consume the same information diet (how many cigarette company shareholders and executives are chain smokers?). Maybe alignment requires that the people who sell a product are legally required to integrate it into their lifestyle (I wonder how many sex-toy-company executives and shareholders would abandon ship).
bhk 2mo ago
Blackpill depression post complaining about "blackpill depression circklejerks"...
zahlman 2mo ago
> a big part of it is just how incredibly toxic the web has become.... Like what [person in my ideological group] did [allegedly, with no explanation or description] with [thing that happened online]... [this comment made online] I see. You complain of astroturfing, but you seem unaware of things that you have come to believe because of it.
- marginalia_nu 2mo ago
  Steve Bannon's involvement in promoting Gamer Gate and co-opting it into a (what would become MAGA) recruitment funnel is fairly well documented[1]. There's absolutely nothing "allegedly" about it, he proudly spells it out himself[2]. Everyone is running this playbook now. The far left, the alt right, IS, Hamas, IDF. Russia was an early player in the space too but seems to have lost a lot of that ability when Prigozhin fell out of a window. [1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Gamergate-campaign https://www.britannica.com/topic/Gamergate-campaign [2] https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2017/07/18/steve-bannon-learned-harness-troll-army-world-warcraft/489713001/ https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2017/07/18/st...
cpill 2mo ago
yeah, most ppl I know just don't go on social media. but they are grown-ups now... life is fine without it.
scotty79 2mo ago
> Going online it's like everyone is really angry and tired and sad all the time, and it's getting worse every year. Oh my. You need to step up shepherding the algorithms that decide what to put in front of your eyes. If you reject content that contains angry, tired and sad people it stops showing up. And you are left with content by cool people, energetically and optimistically doing awesome things.

rob74 2mo ago

If you also consider that many of us, via the companies we work for, actively contribute to making the Internet (and by extension, the world) a worse place, the question in the article's title kind of answers itself. It also makes "quiet quitting" seem almost the right thing to do: doing only the least possible to advance your company's goals while keeping both your job and your sanity, hoping that you will one day be offered a buyout package and then maybe find something more fulfilling...

marginalia_nu 2mo ago
A counterpoint would be that you don't really ever see investment bankers reacting in this fashion.
- Gud 2mo ago
  Because engineers and investment bankers are wired differently.
  - marginalia_nu 2mo ago
    There's much more overlap than you'd think. Quants generally have a STEM background, and stay in the field much for the same sort of reasons tech workers stick around building torment nexuses for FAANG.
    - pastel8739 2mo ago
      Aren’t quants and what you would usually refer to as “investment bankers” pretty different groups of people?
      - asdff 2mo ago
        Absolutely. The quants have legitimate skills. The ibs mostly just got lucky with the big internship junior year that set themselves up for life.
        brewdad 2mo ago
        They didn’t get lucky except to the extent they were born into a fourth generation Ivy League family.
  - consensus1 2mo ago
    Having done both I would say not by much
  - seb1204 2mo ago
    Because they chose to not doom scroll?
- pseudalopex 2mo ago
  You don't really ever see investment bankers reacting how?
Lammy 2mo ago
> If you also consider that many of us, via the companies we work for, actively contribute to making the Internet (and by extension, the world) a worse place “Night must fall, now! Darker! — darker!”

MarkusQ 2mo ago

"It's just been spiraling in a very dark direction for a long time. You have these blackpill depression cirklejerks everywhere. Astroturfing is getting worse every year." Agreed. From TFA: "This disillusionment is infectious." I would suggest it is in part being spread by articles like this one. If you look at the press surrounding earlier advances, it was largely neutral to positive. Nowadays, as you note, it's doom stew everywhere, and the beacons of solace are pieces like this one driving home to anyone who's missed it how demoralized their peers are.

consensus1 2mo ago
I remember reading a theory on this that basically it is a symptom of the decline of the news media industry. The positive attitude in the industry lined up with good times for them until around 2000 when their revenue peaked: https://compote.slate.com/images/42207fae-3603-4fe5-b4fe-a658eb4f7181.jpg https://compote.slate.com/images/42207fae-3603-4fe5-b4fe-a65... For them it really is doom and gloom, and they spread it to the rest of society like a contagion by their writing much like the the banking crisis in 2008 poisoned the entire economy. I'm not sure if it's true, but it makes a lot of sense to me.
- watwut 2mo ago
  Except that journals pump one super positive article after another. It is everywhere else people get annoyed ... including at journalists that pretends tech is better then it is.
- mrguyorama 2mo ago
  "If it bleeds, it leads" is older than society. A news org can put out a perfect spread of articles that cover a whole spectrum of positive to negative, and social media and normal human beings will only attract to and focus on the negative. Social media has been enhancing that effect, because they figured out that rage bait is more effective than even the most positive message you can come up with, because we are animals. If you want to maximize "Engagement", which these companies explicitly do, then you WILL maximize rage and doom and gloom. They drive engagement more than anything else.

Multicomp 2mo ago

TL;DR: We won't stay here in blackpill-as-entertainment long term, tech/HN will proxy the way forward, but it will take time and will be messy. I think you make a strong point here. I will add a note of hope. In my opinion, besides the 'this too shall pass' nature of life meaning this outrage-focused moment, we on HN have hope here. I've been a lurker for a while around here, IDK when this account was made and I don't care, I feel confident that I've been watching the great techies of our era and HN celebrities and dang and other mods presiding over it all for at least a decade. It's probably my own media bubble bias, but I have noticed this trend where HN is discussing a given subject that the general public is not aware of, and it after years filters into the greater consciousness. I don't think HN is necessarily magically head of the curve, but I do think it concentrates where curious and possibly-open-minded people's thoughts are at, before internet-point-seeking/popularity echo chamber communities like Reddit/FB/Twitter or algorithm-driven hivemind homogenziers like YT/Reels/TikTok/Periscope all become aware of something. HN saw the centralization of control with the SOPA/PIPA/encryption in public fight, that has been ongoing since the clipper chip and before, but in this modern form with end-users not needing PGP and friends and just getting to have e2ee with Signal, HN was talking about and using Signal for years before now our government figures and traditional + social media companies have talked about Signal. Similarly, the broader privacy questions, turning off Google Location History was happening on HN (and XDA back when custom android ROMs were more popular) as soon as Google Reader was axed, people only now have learned to fear 'the internet' because of how many more egregious things have happened across all powerful web platforms. And of course we can't ignore HN playing with cleverbot and that dall-e precursor who's name I forget, ML models and markov chains and tech beyond my ability to teach about, before OAI ever released a single product like ChatGPT. HN still has heavyweights of each industry and titans of tech who pop by on occasion to grace us mere plebians, pushing back the Eternal September for just a few happy moments (looking at you BWK, Walter Bright, and other famous names I can't rattle off) to share with us what happened 'in the room'. Just the other day someone posted 'I was the guy who controlled the rollout for Apple MacOS X Snow Leopard, it was a bugfix only release no really' ... only on HN by the power of the internet do we get that, we don't get that on a TikTok. So HN has still got 'it' at least for now, and therefore I can make a broad observation. If the HN being directionally appropriate even if getting particulars wrong is true, I'm seeing future trends that will lead us out of this populist/blackpill moment. People will get emotionally overwhelmed/numbed to overwrought angry moments, they will want to move forward. Americans tend to be keen as a people, whatever the 'thing' is. 90s tech utopia optimism was a keen-thing. Support for or opposition to the Iraq War was a keen-thing, whatever we Americans do, we do with gusto. So right now, we are all in on outraged doom/gloom/anxiety/this sux!! feelings. I'm hopeful that perhaps we as a people go with a decision to move in what a figure from my current media bubble named Aaaron Renn says where there are New Constructivists, who are intellectuals on all sides of American political aisles looking to revitalize and create new institutions. I'm fearful that we will have to fall down hard to learn our lessons first and/or learn the wrong lessons where we decide the fix to ennui is to blame 'those' people over there (whoever that happens to be). The fix to the fear and ennui won't come from us fighting with our families, community members, internet strangers, or political opponents, it will come from us choosing to change our media diets away from garbage in/garbage out (I Know, I know, you who read this and disagree with everything I say and my media diet sources want me to change my media diet, that may very well be true) that is focused on emotional inflammation (didn't we used to ban people from our forums for flaming?) instead of genuine debate and encouragement and online civility. It's boring and its lame, but circling all the way back to the parent comment: the web used to be a homogenous unified place made up of professionals and nerds and group think. We need more diverse opinions than that, but what has happened is that the internet (and its mobile app/web/private chat mediums) has become a borderless place where people who never encounter each other have diametrically opposed views constantly, and so retreat into echochambers and don't get the media literacy experience needed to peacefully coexist with the rest of the online anglosphere without constant acrimony. Grifters feed the flames for likes/subscribes/patreon subs/etc.

pseudalopex 2mo ago

> All the news is just outrage porn and non-stop predictions of impending doom. No. And this shallow dismissal builds the mood you complained about.

marginalia_nu 2mo ago
As an experiment, completely stop consuming news and social media for a few weeks. People have lived their entire lives without these information streams, you'll survive unplugging a bit. Now I can't tell you what you will experience if you go through with this, but I can promise it's very enlightening.
- autoexec 2mo ago
  I'm sure that ignoring all of the very real problems we have and the ways we're being harmed can make some people feel better, but burying your head in the sand doesn't make any of it actually go away. You can pretty safely ignore a lot of irrelevant rage bait, but by remaining ignorant to what's going on around you you also risk losing a lot of useful, actionable, information and being blindsided by things that could have been avoided. I know that if I were corporation hurting and exploiting people for profit or a corrupt politician screwing over the public I'd be very happy to encourage people to "unplug" and stop stressing about things.
  - ianbutler 2mo ago
    What are you doing to fix the issues though? Has the knowledge of the issues increased your agency in a meaningful way such that you've taken actions to improve things or are you just enjoying living in a perpetually outraged state for the sake of it? If your martyrdom isn't doing anything to help fix the problem you're just hurting yourself and stopping yourself from potentially being in a space to ever actually do anything.
    - lazyasciiart 2mo ago
      And what are you doing with the happy mental space you have carved out?

m463 2mo ago

> '90s going online ... '20s going offline It feels to me like the change from: - old: going downtown to the restaurants and shops of your small village to enjoy a relaxing evening. - new: downtown is a crowded confusing mishmash of unregulated blaring music, over-the-top blinking flashing signs, intrusive people accosting you and dangerous thieves lurking everywhere. don't go. there's no "regulated" that makes thing better for anyone, it just gets morphed into oppression of the vistors making them more vulnerable without fixing any problems.

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leptons 2mo ago
There have been many times throughout the past when going "downtown" elicited a "don't go" response. And yet there were times when going "downtown" was a fun thing to do. Somehow we got from past "don't go" to future "downtown is fun" back to what we have now. Things will change if people stop going. And then they'll change again.

arjie 2mo ago

I live in San Francisco and life is quite nice. There are many obvious ways that this city is shitty that I’ve noticed other civilizations don’t have a problem with but also I’d say the overall experience is positive. Neither offline nor online reality is defacto unpleasant. As far as the disillusionment sense, I think that’s an active selection bias. I think people (including me) like to feel angry and so we go out there looking for and finding people who will give us that. The key, for me, is to curate one’s feed. On HN, for instance, I usually block the majority of repetitive boring posters using a chrome extension. The majority of these people have very low context sensitivity which annoys me. There are also abrasive people or generally sad people, both groups of which are safely blockable because they have a comment style where P(token|context) = P(token). There is no surfeit of humans on the Internet and no surfeit of interesting information. Almost all humans can be safely excluded from my feed and I can still get information. By the way, I know you from your search engine. This might be an out there question but do you offer your search index as a downloadable structure? If so, how much does that cost?

marginalia_nu 2mo ago
> By the way, I know you from your search engine. This might be an out there question but do you offer your search index as a downloadable structure? If so, how much does that cost? Shoot me an email and we can discuss, but the index is somewhere in the ballpark of 20 TB, so there are some quite significant logistical obstacles.
- arjie 2mo ago
  Thank you. Emailed!
johnnyanmac 2mo ago
>I think that’s an active selection bias. I think people (including me) like to feel angry and so we go out there looking for and finding people who will give us that. Well, it's subjective so I can't speak for you. But personally I want to try and find the good in people and in life. And I see a lot of good. But that doesn't mean I'm blissfully unaware and won't notice (and call out) the fact that jobs are on the down and down in my country, we're looking at a generation who cannot get their foot in the door whatsoever, that leadership in the country is actively taking a wrecking ball to society, that prices for everyone working is rising faster than their paychecks, and so much more. I personally don't actively look for misery. I just can't keep ignoring being punched in the face constantly, even if I'm not going to blame any one person for the punch. Especially after 3 years of trying to find full time career placement in times where I would at worst spend 3 months job searching.

andai 2mo ago

Well it used to be that the government's job was to keep morale high. At some point that seems to have inverted. The coalition-of-Molochs appears to be finding it much more profitable to make everyone want to kill themselves. (Not sure if that's a great long-term strategy, but they seem to have thought this through.)

andai 2mo ago
I assume it had to do with the Malthusian panic (which was very effective, and remains a sticky meme, although for slightly different reasons now).
johnnyanmac 2mo ago
> but they seem to have thought this through If there's one thing I'm confident of in my government, it's that they certainly did not think this through. Thus highlighting the core issue.

deadbabe 2mo ago

I can’t prove it, but my gut tells me a large amount of people on the web are basically just LARPing extremist takes or depressions as some kind of fun outlet. Why take the web seriously? It’s more fun to be some ridiculous person. Of course, some people are genuine and this kind of behavior chews them up when they take it seriously.

cindyllm 2mo ago
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hellohello2 2mo ago

Yeah I'm not sure what happened but Reddit in particular is beyond saving, and I'm not saying it was ever great. I think we simply don't know how to create online communities that make any sense yet. I'd rather have second hand smoke than any more algorithmic "engagement" maximization at this point.

rootusrootus 2mo ago
I feel like we're probably going to have to give up something, most probably anonymity, to get back to anything like sanity. We'll see communities that are militantly anti-AI where it's hard to get in and easy to get kicked out, and it will probably cost money and require you to divulge who you really are. It could still be semi-anonymous at the user level but not at the administrative level. I'd like to see something like that take off, because I'd be willing to give it a try. I also think the communities should be limited. Maybe have several sizes and see how it plays. Something that never grows beyond 250. Never past 1000. Something along those lines. Relatedly, I'm just about on board with the idea of a modern day Compuserve or Prodigy. Pay to play, but in return you get no ads, no malware, no algorithms, no AI. A gated community for the Internet.
- parpfish 2mo ago
  Those plans might work to give a nice sane internet experience to the folks that are willing to put in some money and effort. But most people will still opt to stay on the slop-filled web because it’s free and because they like being angry. And as long as they stay the societal problems that stem from the toxic internet will live on.
  - rootusrootus 2mo ago
    I agree, it will filter for a certain kind of person, and most probably the people who are not a problem on today's Internet. If we cannot tamp down the filth that comes along with emphatic anonymity, then at least we can create some places without it. I'm getting to the point where I may pull the plug on my Internet as soon as I retire. Kinda hate to do that, because I remember when it didn't suck (at least not everywhere). IMO once upon a time Facebook could have been that place, though maybe that ship has sailed now. There was a time when I thought they could choose to offer a premium experience for anyone willing to pay and there would have been a small but real subset of users who would go for it. Charge $25/mo (which I believe is approximately what they make off a normal US user) in return for zero ads, zero algorithm, complete control over the experience. Add another level above that which includes actively moderated members-only discussion forums.

willis936 2mo ago

I recommend It Came From Something Awful. It's short and the thesis is that corporate co-option of counter culture pushed the internet over the precipice.

Karrot_Kream 2mo ago

Many folks have talked about optimizing for engagement and while I do think this is a factor, I don't think this is the cause. HN has a pretty simple set of algorithms and yet it's largely followed the same trend of negativity and despair. I'm partial to what I call the "doomer effect". If you feel sad or disenfranchised you're just much more likely to spend time online talking. A person with a fulfilling social life and a job they feel satisfied with is going to spend time socializing with friends and working on their job. They may read online feeds, they may write very occasionally, but that will be the extent of most interactions. On the other hand the folks that feel the most negative tend to spend inordinate amounts of time online posting about how sad and angry they are. In a real life conversation when a depressed friend gets on their soapbox most folks give the friend a subtle clue that it's time to move on. If that clue isn't heeded the friend often gets targeted 1:1 offers for help and can eventually just be shut out of the group altogether for being too negative. Nothing like this happens offline. If you're in a bad place, as long as a forum will have your posts you can post to your heart's content. And oh boy is it finally the time to let your hair down and tell everyone how f-ed everything is on the inside. Constantly. This makes a flywheel. People who want to avoid negativity start avoiding negative online spaces. People who are fine with it or feel similarly keep reading. Eventually negativity becomes the default. "Misery loves company" is much older than the Internet. There's no doubt to me that the net makes it that much worse.

JohnMakin 2mo ago
I’m sorry if I am being uncharitable, but are you saying the solution to depression is that people’s friends groups (which the depressed person may not have access to to begin with) is to just like, bully them out of it? lol? Tell me you’ve never had a depressive episode without telling me. hint: the people with support groups in the first place are less vulnerable and bullying depression doesn’t really help, I could point you to a ton of studies, but this post makes me a bit nauseous. I dont disagree that depressive online spaces breed more depressive cycles, but good lord, what you seem to be implying is even worse. You can’t just brute force “hey cheer up” no matter the group structure. like particularly this: > If that clue isn't heeded the friend often gets targeted 1:1 offers for help and can eventually just be shut out of the group altogether for being too negative. Is not ever helping a clinically depressed person. especially when offers of “help” are often quite victim blamey and threatening like the tone of your post here - stop bringing the vibe down, or we’ll make you feel even more isolated! good lord. Try bringing them a meal or giving them a compliment first? holy shit.

josh_p 2mo ago

You mention the election cycle and things getting worse. I live in the US and I’ve watched in real time every sad, terrible decision made by the current administration and every sad terrible decision by what’s supposed to be the opposition party. It all makes me want to scream. And then I’m offline and my life carries on because none it has really affected my white privileged middle class tech worker butt. It all feels wrong.

Foobar8568 2mo ago
I don't live in the US, I live in Switzerland, and what happens in the US and Iran affects the world. And when I see this kind of shit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJ58s4bwzG0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJ58s4bwzG0 ( bbc Donald Trump dons 'Trump 2028' hat and jokes about 'fourth term' ), I am like, what the fuck? Europeans as a whole didn't have much a great opinions of republicans but I don't even understand how a republican voter can vote for a russian asset who is using the constitution as toilet paper. At this stage, just turn directly to a fascist state and stop pretending.
- josh_p 2mo ago
  The Republican Party is very good at propaganda. And the Democratic Party (the currently elected one, not the one the American people actually want), is happy to go along with a lot of it as long as they get to stay in power. We’re good at political theatre and pedantry here. All that and a steady diet of “American Exceptionalism” started as early as kindergarten in our public schools deludes whole swaths of the country into thinking that all of this is somehow good for them. I grew up going to public schools in the 90s and 2000s in a “blue” part of the country. As I’ve grown up into adulthood with kids, I’ve become so disappointed with my own education. It hasn’t gotten better and it’s worse in a lot of ways. We homeschool our kids and don’t whitewash our history.
johnnyanmac 2mo ago
Just gotta stay safe and count your blessings. S178 probably did a good part in driving tech to be the canary in the coalmine of the new "forever layoff" model. That was a political decision that affected a lot of us. even if that wasn't, I'm sure you were hit by higher prices for everything We're all being hit, it just depends on a bit of luck and how financially ready we are to buffer the storm. Most people unfortunately aren't.

purplemoonx 2mo ago

The fact you say "on mastodon" proves it's effectively centralized, just pointing that out

bazodedo 2mo ago
To be fair, saying "overheard an argument at the pub" wouldn't imply that theres but a single pub in the world.
- orangeberrytea 2mo ago
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marginalia_nu 2mo ago
Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, not really something I spend much time thinking about. I'm on a ton of different social media because I run a business and need to be where people are discussing my work.
whstl 2mo ago
Unpopular opinion, but Mastodon is part of the problem as much as Twitter or Facebook, unfortunately. It's just another riff at something toxic, with the difference it's open source.
zahlman 2mo ago
As much as I'd like to endorse the decentralization model of Mastodon, it's annoying that I'm constantly shown Mastodon messages from new, often very suspicious looking domains that then want me to enable JavaScript yet again in order to run the same damn Mastodon app. This problem is not inherent to the task. Nitter instances can do almost everything without JS.

barrenko 2mo ago

Our public offline lives are also miserable. If you live in a westernish society, you know exactly what are the problems, and if you are 40 something you can see that for your whole life no one has ever attempted to solve it. We just live with extreme negligence. Like child of permissive parents. And we're all, each and every single one of us both the children and the parents!

BloondAndDoom 2mo ago

As someone who has been in the industry over 25+ hands down this is the worst period of being online. There has always been that programmer who wanted to quit and run a restaurant, but tech world lost its original soul. We were making people’s lives better, now we are just creating more wealth gap. Majority of the industry is hostile, online communities are extremely hard to get into and very exclusive, if you are new you cannot get in. Majority of the content somewhere between bots, fake news, propaganda and rage bait. Almost all good things about tech and the internet were killed one by one. Don’t get me wrong there are very exciting things from pure nerd perspective in this AI age but nothing is fulfilling as it used to.

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pardon_me 2mo ago
For me this culminated to a deep belief that technology =/= progress. This has shaken my core to re-evaluate who will ever be allowed to benefit from my skills and time, but ruined a lot of my genuine enjoyment and enthusiasm.
- scotty79 2mo ago
  > For me this culminated to a deep belief that technology =/= progress. I landed on the opposite conclusion. People don't progress in any domain if technology doesn't force them. Sometimes the ride might be bumpy and it might be taking them forwards kicking and screaming, but without new technology no progress happens on any issue. Science drives technology, technology drives economy and technology and economy drive culture and science. That's the virtuous feedback loop that drives itself and everything human as a side effect.
  - pardon_me 2mo ago
    I agree that both individual and progress of humanity relies on technology. Considering the state of the planet currently, it's essential to support the population count. To clarify, "=/=" is to denote "not equivalent", in that not all technology or advancement is progress. I used to be naive and use/recommend things I now wish never existed. Not because they aren't useful or a potential future, but because of who owns and controls them now. As time goes on, it's clear how dangerous certain tools can be in the wrong hands. If we aren't careful, the feedback loop can end up destroying us and/or limiting our freedoms. Unfortunately it appears this is the current road we are on. On this forum, it's likely that the power we have starts with careful analysis of what we are building and who can use it in (unintended) negative ways.

sneak 2mo ago

I don’t experience this. I love the internet more these days than ever. There are so many cool people doing cool things. I think a lot of this perception that everything is bad and everybody is sad is projection because people consume mass media which makes them feel doomed and hopeless so they continue to consume that sort of content and they project it on to everyone. The world is much better than it has ever been.

elias1233 2mo ago

Almost misread as ”outage porn” which would check out here on HN with all the recent outage posts

Gooblebrai 2mo ago

> how incredibly toxic the web has become A reflection of human nature at scale?

nz 2mo ago

I've heard someone say that this has been going on since 2012, because that is the year that 60% of all Americans (and probably most industrialized countries), owned a smartphone. This is qualitatively different from 60% of all Americans owning a computer (the smartphone and tablet, IMHO, is one of the greatest embarrassments of the tech industry: it is a practically sci-fi device that does _less_ than the clunky desktop computers, _by design_, even though they could probably do _more_[0]). The tech companies are feeding people misleading, enraging, and toxic content because this creates a strong emotional reaction, which is the first step to selling advertised products. For example, nobody will buy a thing they can't rationally justify, unless they can justify it emotionally[1]. [0]: For example, you can create pretty decent art on the wacom tablets, but that is such a niche use case. There are probably other use cases that are unrealized, because it might distract the precious users from their push notifications and doom-scrolling. [1]: Which for the most part is _reactive_. It used to be that companies would invest in industrial design (or visual design) to make an aesthetically appealing product. The problem, is that this is very expensive, and difficult to repeat, because there is not exactly a science of aesthetics (nothing beyond philosophy of phenomenology and also some eastern philosophies). And so, companies use the only strategy that can scale: rage-bait, doomerism, etc. Somehow, I do not think that the executives and shareholders of these companies consume the same information diet (how many cigarette company shareholders and executives are chain smokers?). Maybe alignment requires that the people who sell a product are legally required to integrate it into their lifestyle (I wonder how many sex-toy-company executives and shareholders would abandon ship).

bhk 2mo ago

Blackpill depression post complaining about "blackpill depression circklejerks"...

zahlman 2mo ago

> a big part of it is just how incredibly toxic the web has become.... Like what [person in my ideological group] did [allegedly, with no explanation or description] with [thing that happened online]... [this comment made online] I see. You complain of astroturfing, but you seem unaware of things that you have come to believe because of it.

marginalia_nu 2mo ago
Steve Bannon's involvement in promoting Gamer Gate and co-opting it into a (what would become MAGA) recruitment funnel is fairly well documented[1]. There's absolutely nothing "allegedly" about it, he proudly spells it out himself[2]. Everyone is running this playbook now. The far left, the alt right, IS, Hamas, IDF. Russia was an early player in the space too but seems to have lost a lot of that ability when Prigozhin fell out of a window. [1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Gamergate-campaign https://www.britannica.com/topic/Gamergate-campaign [2] https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2017/07/18/steve-bannon-learned-harness-troll-army-world-warcraft/489713001/ https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2017/07/18/st...

cpill 2mo ago

yeah, most ppl I know just don't go on social media. but they are grown-ups now... life is fine without it.

scotty79 2mo ago

> Going online it's like everyone is really angry and tired and sad all the time, and it's getting worse every year. Oh my. You need to step up shepherding the algorithms that decide what to put in front of your eyes. If you reject content that contains angry, tired and sad people it stops showing up. And you are left with content by cool people, energetically and optimistically doing awesome things.