Everywhere you browse, people have such strong opinions about everything and are so toxic or extremely negative. You start playing a game, want to check the forums or something and most of the posts are people being mean to each other. You open social media to keep in touch with people that you’d like to maintain a certain level of contact and there’s always some people that are always complaining about every single thing.
I see myself more and more closing myself into a bubble which makes me appreciate Beehaw much more. I know I am guilty of being taken away by the toxicity and sometimes replying things I wouldn’t be proud of but since I joined Beehaw I see myself policing myself more and more focused on being better.
Just a quick rant, I currently started playing Baldur’s Gate 3 and I am honestly pissed off on the fact people can’t give feedback without being rude or “gamers” just shitting on developers because they are stans of another game. I wanted to be active on the forum and comment on bugs and such because I want the game to be better but it is so depressing reading people being awful so often.
Why are we so shitty to each other? I’m so tired.
Edit: Pardon me if I used weird terms or grammar errors, english isn’t my first language
Edit2: removed specifics
why are we so shitty to each other?
I am honestly pissed off on the fact people can’t give feedback without being pricks or “gamers” just shitting on developers because they are Starfield stans
Painting with such broad strokes about opinions you don’t like and writing them all collectively off as “pricks” and “starfield Stans” is contributing to the current state of discourse that you are lamenting.
I was just giving examples. English is not my native language so I did my best to diversify on adjectives. It takes like 5 seconds to find a comment anywhere you go where the person is just being straight up toxic and there’s no good intent on the post. I don’t care about the opinions, I am talking about the intent.
Edit: typo
Intentional or not, the phrasing is very hostile and dismissive, just fyi. No worries just pointing it out.
Sorry but that wasn’t the point I was trying to make. I wasn’t trying to sound hostile I am just extremely frustrated and sad right now.
I started using 4chan around 2007/2008. It was always like that. It was the place to be if you were a toxic edgelord - a space to openly be a nazi and racist and homophobic.
I remember threads on /b/ back then too where people were looking for a new Hitler.
And they always had that shitty mentality. Be as contrarian as you can and as long as you can antagonize people into reacting, then you got one over on someone.
I haven’t been on there since 2020 but I watched it get worse and worse over the years as it spread into the mainstream with things like Gamergate and the fappening. I even tried to tell people but they would just laugh it off cause “4chan”
Lots of Rage bait out there, or people purposely posting things and making it sound slightly wrong, knowing people will comment too
TL;DR… /jk
However, there are two sides to every coin: thought-out discussions are one side, extensive rambling diatribes are the other. There is value in being concise in one’s arguments, when possible without compromising precision.
In any case, even scientific papers have an abstract, extensive laws have a rationale, so IMHO it makes sense for a series of paragraphs to have a TL;DR, or some other way of structuring the content —maybe through headers, or highlighting key elements in bold, or incises like this one— in order to let the reader skip over what they’re not interested in.
It’s good to have markdown, Twitter 𝕏 could try some.
It’s already quite easy to forget we are interacting with other humans when we are behind screens and keyboards
I honestly hate that people do this. Maybe its because I work online in customer service and I chat with people online so I always know that I’m talking to a real person - but even before I worked online, I always assumed I was talking to a real person on the other end.
It’s wild to me that people become so incredibly inconsiderate that they don’t even think they’re talking to a human and instead interpret it as “oh I’m just arguing an idea” yeah, you’re arguing an idea with a HUMAN.
Sometimes I catch people doing that because they’ll respond to me like I’m someone else and I have to be like, hey no, I’m not that person, I’m my own person and you are in fact talking to me now. A person who will react to things being said. Cause you know, human.
I think most people aren’t toxic, but the toxic ones always stick out. If you get 20 normal comment replies and one that was rude, you’ll probably remember that rude one more.
Same goes for anything that people have strong opinions about online - especially politics. The most extreme, hostile, and bizarre takes get a lot of attention and float to the top, which makes it seem like the majority opinion, when most people aren’t like that.
IMO, there’s a lot of factor playing part in this. (Copying from my fedi personal fedi acc!)
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A lot of people lack control of the real world situation that happen to them and some are desperate for the feel of being in control enough to harm other people just to feel like ‘I’m in control’
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A lot of people do not have a way to properly deal with their anger and frustration. They only teach to ‘hold or suppress it’ and there’s such also consequence in showing negative emotion IRL, so online is almost having no consequence for it.
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Online people are separate by screen. People know that there’s people behind it, but they don’t feel it. In online, we don’t get in your face ‘feedback’ from body language or facial expression from other people. IRL, you mess around and pretty much find out instantly.
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Social media reward people with engagement and fav/like, which is easy dopamine for people like it’s just a tip away from their body. And SOMEHOW I feel like social media normalized people being mean to each other as ‘Playful witty funny hahaha’ so they get rewarded by that. And yeah these things are addictive, so you can crave more, making you do more ‘extreme’ thing to get them. And yes you can get addicted to being angry too.
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And then there is also peer pressure and ‘us vs them’ mentality that is so strong in social media. I mean yeah, if we look at it, being ‘mean’ together with your group it’s sort of activity that you can bound together and also reward you as well. It just not a good one and come at a cost of another people.
Now add all of them together, you get the platform that reward toxic interaction and also extremely addictive. You get reward from like/fav. You get reward by ‘Peer approval’ (because today we forbid other people having neutral opinion on a thing, but it could be just my experience.), You get reward by your own brain. Not counting other thing like politic, moral compass, religion because it adds entirely another layer on this.
off-topic, language
Don’t take this as a criticism, I think your arguments are spot on… but if you might excuse my curiosity… it looks like you’re not a native English speaker, and I can’t figure out which language those expression structures come from… may I ask what’s your native language?
