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These kinds of posts are tiring - the Internet White Knight is a tired meme, and has been tired for almost twenty years. Unless you can provide a solution to th
by debacle 13y ago
These kinds of posts are tiring - the Internet White Knight is a tired meme, and has been tired for almost twenty years. Unless you can provide a solution to the problem, you're just creating noise - something, like assholes, that the Internet certainly does not need more of.
Social networking on a grand scale has been around for almost 30 years, and in that time the Internet has remained skeptical, critical, and slightly negative.
Lets think about why that is for a second. The Internet is built on ads. Not content, not content creators, and not Google. Advertising drives the machinations of the Internet and there are very few large sites out there that aren't advertizing driven.
When the underlying pulse of the Internet is marketing, it's no wonder that people take a reserved and slightly negative approach - they don't know whether they're experiencing something genuine or being fed bullshit, and sometimes the answer is both.
So please, be a bit less of an anti-asshole and a bit more understanding about why people take this tack in their online personas - it isn't about an inherent negativity of their personality, but rather a defensive mechanism that they've subconsciously developed due to the reality of what the Internet is - a marketing platform.
- DanBC 13y agoUsenet was famously full of assholes and vigorous flaming. Usenet was (for some time) free of advertising. Very many other online fora with no advertising have had similar problems with vigorous discussion. See, eg, Wikipedia, where people often have personality clashes.
- debacle 13y agoParts of usenet were full of assholes. But parts of any ecosystem will be full of assholes. Also, Wikipedia does not exist in a void. I would posit that more than half of Wikipedia's traffic comes from Google, the poster child for ad driven business in the Internet age.
- girvo 13y agoHonestly, even though I've very thick skin and it really doesn't worry me when I see negativity on the internet... I still find it astounding that people are so much harsher behind a keyboard than they ever are in real life. I'm sure there are studies that explain it, etc. but I still find it interesting, and sometimes it's actually completely unproductive. Hell, adults goading teenagers to kill themselves -- that HAPPENS online. I still don't understand it. I'm a bit of an asshole in real life. I'm a bit of one on the internet at times; being blunt is necessary at times. But people just seem to forget that there are people behind the screen-name, after all. I disagree with your thesis here, just by the way. Plenty of sites have nothing to do with marketing, and yet it has remained. Usenet had no advertising either to begin with, but was even WORSE than the 'net at times. I think it's more primal than that, something to do with being "faceless in a crowd" -- the sort of things that cause mobs and riots. *shrugs