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[Unk Adams]

I don't remember these people being online back in the 90's and 2000's. By the mid-2010's especially we started getting all of these online weirdo control freaks who want everything they don't agree with banned and censored, want echo chambers over discussions, and are very controlling and basically spend all day online. They also seem to have severe mental/emotional deficits as they literally don't understand things like humor, sarcasm, or nuance and have meltdowns if you say one thing they don't agree with. They're bitchy and miserable all the time and are so socially awkward that they can't even interact normally online. Popular sites like Reddit, Twitter, and even a gaming forum similar to this one are filled with these types of people.

Who are these people and why do they seem to control the internet now?

 

[ManaByte]

Millennial helicopter parents who gave every kid a trophy and told every kid they were special flowers.

 

[Drew1440]

They always existed, just look at old shows of Jerry Springer, Maury and Jeremy Kyle.

 

[Coolwhhip]

People that are succesful at life don't sit in a dark room on their computer all day spouting hate on Twitter and Reddit.

So you have the failures of the real world shaping the online world.

 

[StreetsofBeige]

1. Social media sites give them a platform to be weird together. Back then, it was confined to oddballs on forums which are their own little island. FB, Twitter, Reddit etc.... can be seen and shared everywhere.

2 Maybe the last 5 years it got really bad(?), but modern day drama queens which skew liberal needing to tell the world their problems. And if they dont get their way they cry like babies or try to go for revenge doxxing or shaming people into getting fired..... all typed from their parents basement.

3. Lazy and trying to make a career out of social media hoping for a fast win making money doing tweets. Notice how most online weird people are pretty young. You don't get too many 50 year olds with a job, wife, and kids in high school or college doing dumb shit on Tik Tok or trying to be Twitter celebrities.

 

[IntentionalPun]

Most people don't want edge lord shit everywhere. They aren't exposed to that at all in real life and are shocked by it online.

So it's just.. when "most people" ended up on the internet.

Like it became a normal public space, instead of a basement where a group of teens are burning each others eyelashes off and seeing what it's like to dock their penises together.

 

[chromhound]

Weirdos were here since the beginning. They just have a platform to speak (Social Media)

 

[DarkestHour]

Well, back then it was only us nerds. Once the internet became mainstream, then all the whackos started to get involved. The internet was so much more peaceful back then too. I remember it was people just hanging out and talking about their hobbies. People were so friendly and helpful.

 

[bitbydeath]

The bullying system has really let us down lately.

 

[IDKFA]

1. Social media sites give them a platform to be weird together. Back then, it was confined to oddballs on forums which are their own little island. FB, Twitter, Reddit etc.... can be seen and shared everywhere.

2 Maybe the last 5 years it got really bad(?), but modern day drama queens which skew liberal needing to tell the world their problems. And if they dont get their way they cry like babies or try to go for revenge doxxing or shaming people into getting fired..... all typed from their parents basement.

3. Lazy and trying to make a career out of social media hoping for a fast win making money doing tweets. Notice how most online weird people are pretty young. You don't get too many 50 year olds with a job, wife, and kids in high school or college doing dumb shit on Tik Tok or trying to be Twitter celebrities.

Came here to say this. Social media gives these people a platform to share their views with other like minded people. They then fall into their own echo chambers and develop a very unhealthy view of the world.

I don't want to make this political, but I'll say that the FBPE crowd (cult?) on Twitter are like this. Very, very unhinged individuals.

 

[ManaByte]

Came here to say this. Social media gives these people a platform to share their views with other like minded people. They then fall into their own echo chambers and develop a very unhealthy view of the world.

 

[haxan7]

Decades of cultural subversion aimed at ending Western civilization as we know it.

 

[wondermega]

I was thinking about this earlier. 20 years ago the Internet was a tool and you could use it to learn things, get directions to places, and watch badly compressed movie trailers. There was a lot of utility to it, but for the most part the social element was more of an enhancement to one's life rather than what it's become (a lens through which everything is processed through). Probably since it went mobile, our accessibility has gone into overdrive and there's just too much. It began as a novelty but now it's just making people crazy. What once seemed quaint has become frightening. Likewise I expect things to become more divergent as we go through another full decade of this. The older of us who have seen this change shake our heads, but the younger ones (gen z) have been growing up with it since it's been in this bad phase. I really feel for them and what it is doing to the psychology of society at that level. It's not ok and there will be bad ramifications from all of this.
Without sounding too much "old man" I'll say that I do feel all of this has been inevitable. We are social creatures and our ability to communicate (add manipulate each other through that) has always been a deeply rooted part of our nature. It's just always been on a different level until everyone got so plugged in and the novelty of that wore off; but yes this was always going to happen, and I'm sure futurists were able to conceive of some level of it since "mass media" (tv, radio, newspapers) became a thing. In that vein, we have to be optimistic that there will be a period of normalization on the horizon, somehow. Again, maybe ask the futurists..

 

[protonion]

All this happened due to the rise of social media.
They are a true digital drug by design.
Toxicity is pushed non stop in your face by their algorithm due to high engagement.

I've actually heard people saying they spend up to two hours to make that "perfect" Instagram photo or Facebook post so they get a lot of likes.

When you spend more time on social media than having real interactions with people, there will be consequences.

I had a case with a close friend that discovered Facebook in his thirties.
Up until then he was a normal guy with relationships, jobs and everything.

Post facebook he became a drone.
-on his phone all the time
-zero girlfriends
-he bacame angry and repulsive
-kept losing jobs
-he got fat because of anti depressants (we learnt this later)

A few years later he decided to delete everything. It took a a couple of months and he was a normal person again (girlfriend, nice job and a pleasure to be with)

But like a junkie you cannot understand this until you are free of your drug.

It's sad millions of people all over the world keep wasting their lives like this.

 

[Wildebeest]

They learned all these things from higher education courses designed to make them a good fit with US corporate culture. When they couldn't get a job because of too much competition, they went wild, and these toxic corporate values spread out all over the internet with nowhere else to go. This is a consequence of the death of the idea of a well-rounded "liberal education" where people would learn a variety of things and not just be trained to meet the mercurial demands of "industry".

 

[RAÏSanÏa]

Matt 7:5

 

[Sybrix]

Social Media exploding over the last 10 years gives everyone a megaphone to the world.

These people always existed, now their amplified ten-fold.

A few get together to bash a company/film/actor etc, a media site picks it up and we’re off… it hits mainstream news and the complainers get validated and round and round it goes

 

[Coolwhhip]

Social Media exploding over the last 10 years gives everyone a megaphone to the world.

These people always existed, now their amplified ten-fold.

A few get together to bash a company/film/actor etc, a media site picks it up and we’re off… it hits mainstream news and the complainers get validated and round and round it goes

Add in a little sheep behaviour and you get where we are.

 

[Scotty W]

Shot

Hollywood Consultant Admits ‘Glee’ Started the Wokeness Epidemic”

Where did cancel culture and wokeness come from? This is the question that consumes many conservative writers almost as much as the question of how to beat it. While others have pointed to the rise of postmodern critical theory in universiti

humanevents.com

 

[nush]

They used to all be in their own little communities hidden away where nobody cared to look. Then the internet was condensed to just a few major portals and they all grouped together there.

 

[Amiga]

Canceling is a business industry that generates money.

corporations that don't have diversity supervisors and EGS plans get their information doxed and spammed by FUD. A company must comply and hire a certain number of approved persons that come from the community that launch the dox/FUD campaigns in the 1st place. rinse and repeat until a whole industry is dominated. then target another industry.

stuff actually started in the games media industry, then comics, then big time media.

If enough companies replied to the blackmail like Red Bull and Musk the culture could have been different.

 

[Happosai]

All this happened due to the rise of social media.
They are a true digital drug by design.
Toxicity is pushed non stop in your face by their algorithm due to high engagement.

I've actually heard people saying they spend up to two hours to make that "perfect" Instagram photo or Facebook post so they get a lot of likes.

When you spend more time on social media than having real interactions with people, there will be consequences.

I had a case with a close friend that discovered Facebook in his thirties.
Up until then he was a normal guy with relationships, jobs and everything.

Post facebook he became a drone.
-on his phone all the time
-zero girlfriends
-he bacame angry and repulsive
-kept losing jobs
-he got fat because of anti depressants (we learnt this later)

A few years later he decided to delete everything. It took a a couple of months and he was a normal person again (girlfriend, nice job and a pleasure to be with)

But like a junkie you cannot understand this until you are free of your drug.

It's sad millions of people all over the world keep wasting their lives like this.

Agreed the weirdos came from social media. As awkward as it is that there are teenagers doing exceedingly narcissistic things for attention...there are an equal amount of middle-aged adults who try the same. I cut the cord in 2018 officially. When I moved abroad I had plans to shutdown all my accounts in 2016 but...family from the States complained that they would have no way of communicating with me. I kept up Facebook from 2016-17 and little by little everyone cared less whether I wrote anything or not and were more endowed in their own things. I decided to just stop writing and cut all activity in 2018 and noticed no one cared either. It was pretty easy to delete everything at that point. The same complaint came up that there was no way to communicate with me anymore...therefore, I gave the following options: email, phone call or challenged them to actually buy a plane ticket and visit.

I'm more than 3-years out of social media and feeling pretty good. I tried Discord for about 2-weeks back in November but noticed it seemed to be a remnant of chat sites from the early 2000s with plenty of echo chambers going on there too. I prefer to just have the company of my wife and that's it.

 

[nush]

I kept up Facebook from 2016-17 and little by little everyone cared less whether I wrote anything or not and were more endowed in their own things. I decided to just stop writing and cut all activity in 2018 and noticed no one cared either. It was pretty easy to delete everything at that point. The same complaint came up that there was no way to communicate with me anymore...therefore, I gave the following options: email, phone call or challenged them to actually buy a plane ticket and visit.

I went through the same thing, minus the facebook element when I moved to China. Your friends no matter how good they are, how long you've known them slowly stop replying to emails or sending emails to you. When you move away you are forgotten, when you get back you were missed.

I had a flat share with a younger British guy and I told him that all his friends would forget about him after a short time. Sure enough they did, except for one guy who would still message and actually setup times when they could play online together. I told this guy, that's your actual real friend. To which he replied he didn't even think they were that close back in the UK, well he's the one that gives a shit about you and making the effort.

Social media is shit and all about getting attention, photographing your food and showing people who are not there how much fun you are having, instead of just enjoying the fun event you are at.

 

[ShadowLag]

 

[tell yourself.]

i'm glad someone else has noticed this as well. it's gotten way more political/racist etc.

I don't agree with the "it's always been the same" crowd. nah. Way more hateful psychopaths in public forums now.

Really sucks because yet another thing i like is ruined. I can't even go on youtube without some bullshit in the thumbnail and the title.

I personally blame 4chan and their ilk for spreading their hate everywhere. And even that site was much less racist in 2006.

edit: also another thought alot of just insulting whoever reads a post, and personal insults as well to whoever posts something. That is probably the greatest increased ive seen in this 15-20 year jump. It's just alot of personal insults to each other for no real reason but personal satisfaction. It's pretty pathetic and why i dont even read the replies to my messages because it's usually just some casual insult and reaction to belittle me. At least there are small nuggets of decent people out there but man the utter trash of modern communication in recent times has become pretty unbearable. Even on this post i can't even the imagine the amount of bullshit that will come my way.

 

[Trogdor1123]

I blame this all on Ronald Reagan. This all started with” Work smarter not harder” to push people into post secondary. This pulled people out of trades and made them fell smarter than what they were. It also forced post secondary schools to create space that wasn’t there before to capitalize on the flow of cash. The amount of money affected institutions around the globe to match. Now we have too many retards in too many useless degrees that grew up with the first batch of this group as their parents.

Ronald wasn’t wrong, it was just so poorly and all the people after it made it 10x worse.

 

[nush]

Now we have too many retards in too many useless degrees

I have a PHD!

 

[Darryl]

I feel the opposite, like I can talk about anything nowadays and nobody gets upset at me randomly, as if they were looking for someone to fight with.

Like look at this place. People used to pick all kinds of arguments about nonsense around here. Now there's nothing, everyone is getting along.

 

[DeafTourette]

I feel like most of these posts are dunking on liberals and lefty's.

Quite frankly, these weirdos are all over the map ideologically. Whether that's religion, politics, sciences or whatnot. Toxicity comes in every thought process there is. Antivaxxers, flat earthers, holocaust deniers, Trump is still president/George Soros is the devil, conservatives are racists, Critical Race Theory, ACTUAL racists, etc...

The weirdos basically come in all flavors and the point that SHOULD be made is that we have to push back against them with logic and facts. Not condescension and insults and hatred.

Pardon my language, but FUCK a party or ideology or conspiracy theory or whatever... Be a good person and treat others with respect. If they don't respect you, leave them in the dust and let them be dirty together!

 

[Pejo]

Reddit and the upvote/downvote system sure didn't help. They have an instantly effective way to silence dissenters and feel morally superior, and the site reinforces that type of shit.

 

[Mossybrew]

OP just woke up from a decade long coma or something, old news.

 

[The Incarnation]

I don't remember these people being online back in the 90's and 2000's. By the mid-2010's especially we started getting all of these online weirdo control freaks who want everything they don't agree with banned and censored, want echo chambers over discussions, and are very controlling and basically spend all day online. They also seem to have severe mental/emotional deficits as they literally don't understand things like humor, sarcasm, or nuance and have meltdowns if you say one thing they don't agree with. They're bitchy and miserable all the time and are so socially awkward that they can't even interact normally online. Popular sites like Reddit, Twitter, and even a gaming forum similar to this one are filled with these types of people.

Who are these people and why do they seem to control the internet now?

Here's my theory. People mistake their consciousness for vocabulary, or some narrative given to them from various media platforms. Thus, their awareness has a symbiotic relationship with "News". So, if the narrative of the of the day is messed up and miserable, they become messed up and miserable as well if that is their main source of information. In short, change the vocabulary, you change the consciousness of people. Of course, within that, there is media repetition which reinforces things, which can create a stubborn and contentious person. (TikTok is somewhat of a good example, in China for example, their videos led by algorithms on the platform tend to encourage family and building, whereas in the west it generally promotes someone "shaking their ass".) Which is what I call a narrative driven destiny. Again, control the imagery and language and you'll control the consciousness of the people.

Keep in mind, since 2000 or so people have only known this way of gathering knowledge, since it is the most immediate source available to them... And that includes older people in their 50's plus who I personally find to be more emotional online than their younger counterparts, probably because of their repressive upbringing.

Also drunk, don't take me too seriously, it just one of my observations.

 

[nush]

Reddit and the upvote/downvote system sure didn't help. They have an instantly effective way to silence dissenters and feel morally superior, and the site reinforces that type of shit.

You're not wrong, I was on a forum not too unlike GAF and they implemented the upvote/downvote function for posts. It near instantly changed the flow of discussions for a few years until it was removed.

 

[HoodWinked]

it's religious fanaticism. people are seeing these group of weirdos pretty much mimicking that of religious extremists, completely adherence to uniform dogma, outgroup/ingroup. even questioning their orthodox is met with rageful zealotry.

think about the kind of psychosis that formed in the 1690s when they were burning people because they suspected them to be witches during the Salem witch trials, completely irrational behavior. Because social media sites have created echo chambers it has only isolated people further but more insidiously by creating the mirage that there is community. But also because of how social media works it also pushes the most inflammatory rhetoric to the top, so it massively tries to raise the stakes so this group now believes what they are doing is a life and death affair. It's why when you see these twitter cretins without hesitation state blatant hyperbole like how its "the end of democracy", being part of a "resist"ance or how everything is fascism. These people need to go outside and see that isn't anywhere near reality but to them the thing the algorithms show them on their phones is more real than what they see in front of them.

 

[The Pleasure]

1. Social media sites give them a platform to be weird together. Back then, it was confined to oddballs on forums which are their own little island. FB, Twitter, Reddit etc.... can be seen and shared everywhere.

2 Maybe the last 5 years it got really bad(?), but modern day drama queens which skew liberal needing to tell the world their problems. And if they dont get their way they cry like babies or try to go for revenge doxxing or shaming people into getting fired..... all typed from their parents basement.

3. Lazy and trying to make a career out of social media hoping for a fast win making money doing tweets. Notice how most online weird people are pretty young. You don't get too many 50 year olds with a job, wife, and kids in high school or college doing dumb shit on Tik Tok or trying to be Twitter celebrities.

Here's an easier way to say it

 

[Hypereides]

Its probably always been like this. The internet just made it more apparent than ever. It generally seems like the internet opened some sort of Pandora's box with consequences we didn't anticipate. Its also made adundantly clear there's a significant deficit of common sense.

I gotta admit what they did with social media was pretty clever. The tech giants behind these inventions managed to hook its users through the most primitive drives of humankind such as vanity and pride.

 

[nush]

Its also made adundantly clear there's a significant decifit of common sense.

That's always existed without the internet. Now we just get to see people broadcast it.

 

[mcjmetroid]

I don't remember these people being online back in the 90's and 2000's. By the mid-2010's especially we started getting all of these online weirdo control freaks who want everything they don't agree with banned and censored, want echo chambers over discussions, and are very controlling and basically spend all day online. They also seem to have severe mental/emotional deficits as they literally don't understand things like humor, sarcasm, or nuance and have meltdowns if you say one thing they don't agree with. They're bitchy and miserable all the time and are so socially awkward that they can't even interact normally online. Popular sites like Reddit, Twitter, and even a gaming forum similar to this one are filled with these types of people.

Who are these people and why do they seem to control the internet now?

I think it all started with SmartPhones and the apps. It made the internet easier to access and therefore normies started using it as opposed to the innocent days of nerds fighting over consoles.

 

[nush]

I think it all started with SmartPhones and the apps.

Depending on where you live it was actually when broadband at home became a standard. Those tone police squares you used to have to work in an office with and the best way to get through the work day was to be online when none of those people knew what the internet was other than it was "for nerds".

You could tell who they were, mon-fri 9-5 they were there. Evenings and weekends they were not, and then they got the internet at home....

The weirdos came way after that, but they were always coming on the roadmap.

 

[Nyxir]

As an outsider. I am watching the western civilization getting torn from the inside out by the social media. It obviously wasn't the intention of these apps/websites. But even in this thread, people are just pointing fingers and have the "fuckem' mentality. The damage is done.

And it's not exclusive to the west. Look at what's happening in India.

I don't think it's gonna stop soon, if ever. As all of these companies are US located. Where money has power over policy and politics.

 

[Artoris]

No matter what you do, there are always nasties trying to ruin it, in the last decade or so they have learned to gang together on the internet and of course people who spend their time on destroying others are not spending that time on advancing themselves this makes them unsuccessful and bitter and the only way they know how to feel better is to be even more destructive

 

[HoodWinked]

Here's an easier way to say it

This was when the Internet actually was better. When people were anonymous everyone was on a level playing field. Now social media is clout driven so there is vast inequities in audience and influence. So we have a complete distortion because a small minority are signal boosted

 

[Hypereides]

Speaking of which, I'm inclined to think this isn't too far fetched. It might explain why some/large parts of the internet seem so... inorganic and maybe even sterile in a way. I wouldn't be surprised if it was a dirty secret that many of these major websites and/or platforms to dispatch artificial chatter to generate response and engagement. Most of the population are still by large tech illiterate, even if they can manage to navigate a smartphone or website.

On a sidenote, I recall when I used to garner like hundreds and hundreds of pages of results on a random term way back in the early 00's on search engines. The stream of content and information accessibility was incredible compared to today. Now, its condensed into something like 10 or 50 pages. Its pretty vile how much control these tech giants have taken over the stream of information.

Its going to sound hypocritical, but part of me is beginning to regret supporting propagation of the internet if this current state is supposed to be its penultimate form. The next big step is going to get nasty.

 

[MHubert]

Back in the 90´s and start 00's it was mostly successful people who had access to the internet.

 

[Cyberpunkd]

They also seem to have severe mental/emotional deficits as they literally don't understand things like humor, sarcasm, or nuance and have meltdowns if you say one thing they don't agree with.

That is because instead of spending time with their peers outside they stayed indoors with their face in their phones all the time. Contrary to what social media want you to think they are incredible anti-social.

 

[eddie4]

 

[MastaKiiLA]

Where did all the idiots come from? Where did all the anti-science wackjobs come from? Etc, etc. They were always there. They were usually too stupid and/or poor to get into online forums. That and forums are splintered. Now FB and Twitter centralizes all that stupidity and amplifies it. Personally, I feel like people who complain about how oppressive the internet is becoming are a bigger problem than any movement they're railing against. I have to imagine that the vast majority of people operate and communicate online in a way that they never feel threatened, persecuted, or offended. But there are a small percentage who can't seem to wrap their heads around why they continuously have conflicts or arguments online. These are probably the same people who can't understand why people don't like them in real life.

Personally, I've massively curtailed my online activity, and not because I feel threatened. I just find I'm a lot happier when I don't interact with a bunch of randos online. The issue isn't that the internet is changing, it's that you're placing way too much importance in your ability to communicate with strangers in public settings. Get back to face-to-face conversations, where you will be moderated by a thing called common decency.

 

[synchronicity]

It's just a case of the mind being a hard beast to manage for many. When the struggle for survival isn't a pressing concern, the mind can run rampant without any focus, and well, weeds grow in an untended garden.

 

[haxan7]

I blame this all on Ronald Reagan. This all started with” Work smarter not harder” to push people into post secondary. This pulled people out of trades and made them fell smarter than what they were. It also forced post secondary schools to create space that wasn’t there before to capitalize on the flow of cash. The amount of money affected institutions around the globe to match. Now we have too many retards in too many useless degrees that grew up with the first batch of this group as their parents.

Ronald wasn’t wrong, it was just so poorly and all the people after it made it 10x worse.

Of all the people I'd blame for the online weirdos, I think Reagan would come in pretty damn low on the list.

 

[Tams]

I don't remember these people being online back in the 90's and 2000's. By the mid-2010's especially we started getting all of these online weirdo control freaks who want everything they don't agree with banned and censored, want echo chambers over discussions, and are very controlling and basically spend all day online. They also seem to have severe mental/emotional deficits as they literally don't understand things like humor, sarcasm, or nuance and have meltdowns if you say one thing they don't agree with. They're bitchy and miserable all the time and are so socially awkward that they can't even interact normally online. Popular sites like Reddit, Twitter, and even a gaming forum similar to this one are filled with these types of people.

Who are these people and why do they seem to control the internet now?

That's just a lot of normal people for you. Before they were often limited in their reach, but the need to control was still there (see prohibition in the US). But when they got online, it allowed to gather from all over the world and be heard all over the world, and what gave them that access was easy to use social media.

So normies. It was the normies.

Mumsnet was one of their first online bastions.