I, and many others around who were on the internet as early as...maybe...a little over half a decade ago remember the internet being far less driven by politics. I want to spend my time here just rambling about how I don't think the internet has changed as much as people think (at least in that aspect)
I'm going to get a lot of outrage for what I just stated, so let me be clear...Yes, politics has become a much larger part of the internet in recent history...shocker. But to argue that the internet is all about politics anymore is simply a shitty way to look at things (that I didn't stop believing until only recently)
I want you to look back on some of the popular videos, flash animations, flash games, podcasts, even forums you used to be on. I'm sure a lot of them crack jokes about politics and/or political figures from the time period. The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny, :the game:, The Biggest Problem in The Universe, all of these did that CONSTANTLY.
I don't actually disagree with you here, not entirely. I want you to hold onto this thought for JUST a minute until I get the next segment finished here, you know that I keep shit low effort and short so it'll be like a minute tops I promise <3
We all know it's happening, we know exactly the extent to which it's gotten. But we don't try and do anything about it. That's right, data collection. Using the internet is a privacy nightmare, no doubt about it. And it's my genuine belief that this is to blame for how you feel the internet has been "ruined." not politics.
I don't know, let's find out together...jkjk I already found out, but here's the line of thinking I went down.
Social media companies WANT to make sure they serve you as many "life changing" articles and posts that they physically can. The place we can see this as plain as day is on Twitter and Facebook. For the sake of keeping things short we'll just use Twitter as our example.
I only go on twitter to check on news about bands and game devs, but I'm subjecting myself to the pain I wished so much to break free from so that you guys can have a post that has a quality of 2/5 instead of 1/5. Here's some of the first things I'm seeing as I open up Twitter and interact with all the buttons
Already this is looking kind of bad. To be honest, if you're gonna integrate news into your social media, you should really focus on making sure you prioritize the facts of the situation before you show people speculating over what colored skin the person who ended the lives of innocent people has. Maybe this is one-off
If you act like you have no idea what kind of conspiracy theory, fucken, cyberbullying type shit I just exposed my eyes to then I really think you should get your head checked. To describe what I just seen in depth would take hours. All I'm gonna say is among all of the crazy shit I just seen someone openly far left and openly far right arguing over whether a video game character was trans o_o
Something like this is apparently political? Idk, I don't particularly think this character in question is transgender, but trans people are cool. I don't really care tbh. I'm not trying to villainize one person or the other. It was literally just someone being like "This character is trans nobody can tell me otherwise" and someone was triggered by that enough to interact with them, and then said person who made the initial post got pissy like the commenter did. Nobody is the good guy in this situation
The real kicker here is that I could make the argument that both disrepect and harassment is something you can report posts for, and idk. something about calling your buddies to call people psychotic because of suspected political beliefs rings both bells, and if we wanna take people saying to shoot themselves we can slap 2 more on those. But I guarantee when these people report eachother, on both sides. Nothing will come out of this
Because I hold a potential way to help you find social media peace
Get off Twitter. Get off Instagram. Get off Facebook. Maybe not entirely, but hear me out!
Think of what came before all this. If you wanted to talk about a video game, there were forums for that. If you wanted to talk about politics, there was a forum for that. Sure. Some forums had politics boards. But that's exactly it!
Modern social media throws you into this weird amalgamation of every possible topic to discuss, without any real sort of order except for maybe what an innacurate AI will throw at you. It's not trying to get you to find what you want. It's trying to find you something that'll make you stay on their site or app for as long as possible.
Centralizing all of your online social communication to one place is a really bad idea. It gives the illusion of convinience when in reality it puts so much shit in the way.
I am honestly writing this in hopes that SOMEBODY out here reads this some day and maybe it'll at least make them CONSIDER the fact that they have options. I am being very serious when I say that there's several ways to get a single task done. And Twitter isn't the best choice for all of them
You're right, you probably won't take much of anything I said seriously. But if you take anything away from this. If you're looking for an escape from outrage culture on the social medias you use. There's a lot of alternatives that are honestly better than you think. Different isn't always a bad thing. Even writing about an alternative to the World Wide Web that I've been checking out.