Comic Strips

It was never just the anonymity, it was the lack of consequences as well. Combined those two often lead to people showing their worst selves.

Now though? Often those worst characteristics are applauded by others. It's disappointing.

Don’t feed the trolls

• Long forgotten adage, internet

I still blame the algorithms. Angry people click more => let's assure they always get more to click.

Yeah but also targeted advertising and invasive data harvesting.

The internet was definitely better before.

Raising $600k after going public about dropping the N-bomb on a child might have something to do with this.

A few incredibly racist billionaires are financing endless waves of bigotry and brutality. Until they stop, this is only going to get worse.

I always though it was anonymity, but its more likely the missing human connection. On the internet, our thoughts are transmitted without seeing the person before us in real time, so some may act different, forgetting there is a person on the other side.

There's obviously people who don't give a shit, but they were just assholes to begin with.

It's almost like a large-scale social experiment, with the result that there seem to be many profoundly evil people whose malicious beliefs are artificially pushed by billionaire "gatekeepers" to a point where they can appear socially acceptable, a few good people who have less and less say due to social media logic and content overload, and a large majority who just stand by and watch civilization go down the drain because they're too lazy to change their habits and just rely on someone else to fix this mess, if they even recognize the problem in the first place.

In this context, I think the definition of public opinion established by political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann back in the 1980s is once again highly relevant:

"Public opinion is the opinion dominant in public which can be expressed without risk of social isolation."

The spiral of silence : public opinion, our social skin (1984)

Noelle-Neumann emphasized that public opinion is not just any opinion, but specifically those views that are visible, vocal, and supported by the majority, making them safe to express in public. This ties closely to her "Spiral of Silence" theory, where individuals may refrain from expressing minority views due to fear of social isolation.

The great problem of our current media situation seems to be that these public opinions are increasingly artificially constructed since they just seem like majority opinions, even if they are not, because they get pushed so hard by the influential crooks controlling major parts of the Internet (social media and search engine monopolies and so on).

So I think today's web has become almost the opposite of what early Internet utopians had in mind.

People on Lemmy are getting bad too, you can’t disagree with someone in the most inoffensive way without getting a response full of hateful comments or name calling. Like if had a face to face discussion with a stranger I wouldn’t be like “you’re a brain dead idiot and you’re stupid” that’s rude as fuck, but that’s just how people respond to each other around here and it’s awful

“SHITCOCK”

(Quick edit: daaaamn that really was 21 years ago…)

I kind of miss the anonymity of the internet. It's too easy to be ostracized now.

As soon as we figure out how to punch someone through the screen this shit is done.

Yeah turns out it wasn't anonymity, that was estimated because the internet has a greater amoun of dickery than real life.

But really, Assholes online are also assholes in real life. Same for kibd people. What the internet did was allow assholes find and network with each other, and make environment uncomfoetable enough that kind people leave. Only assholes are left.

Defederate from him.

I am guilty of thinking this. All I can say is... Huh.

Really like how the artist used the "? face" to symbolize anonimity and drawing the after with real faces to tell that anonimity is gone.