The admin of sh.itjust.works has been approached but as of yet has failed to reply to concerned Lemmy users. I’m glad Beehaw admins look out for us by cutting off instances that host communities like this.
The admin of sh.itjust.works has been approached but as of yet has failed to reply to concerned Lemmy users. I’m glad Beehaw admins look out for us by cutting off instances that host communities like this.
Sometimes I wonder if the early version of the internet (the one that millenials grew up with) were too accepting of the “online edgelord” mentality. You know, the people who don’t believe their own words, just spouting stuff because it makes them look edgy and cool. Like, I know a younger me thought being edgy was cool, and I took that version of myself to online spaces - it wasn’t shut down like it should’ve been. However, I did end up growing out of it, only to realize my old friends never did. Even in their 30’s they still act like “top kek memelords” and are some of the saddest and loneliest people I know.
It kinda made me realize that “grown up people” online need to NOT put up with that crap. Like, zero tolerance, “Oh, your being an edge lord today? Temp ban - come back when you grow up”.
These same people, that were my friends back in high-school days often feel “persecuted” when they can’t be an edgelord anymore. After all, it was just SO NORMAL before. “It’s just a joke bro!”. And now every time they interact with society it’s through a lens of persecution because they can’t be as edgy as they want anymore.
THEN it get’s to bad faith bullshit as external bad actors feed the narrative that they “get” to be an edgelord and that’s what freedom of speech means - which then becomes a slide into alt-right and incel territory.
It’s exhausting, and honestly, I have a bit of myself to blame here - when I was more accepting of that type of behavior rather than pushing back on it. I even think that extends to the larger millenial cohort as well. We just kind of “accepted” 4-chan and the trash that came out of it for so long that many just feel entitled to be an edgelord these days.
It’s always a joke until it’s not anymore. It’s why places like 4chan led to the creation of QAnon and real-world white supremacist terrorism. Even on sh.itjust.works, the mod of the Trump community insists it’s all just “ironic”. But I’ve heard that before and it never stays that way.
I had always heard that supposedly the original r/t_d started as a joke, and we all know how that ended up.
Poe’s Law ruins everything
“Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they’re in good company.”
Absolutely. The edgelord mentality got completely normalized and persisted for so long that people just seem to accept that’s how people on the Internet are.
I used to spend a lot of time in Linux and F/OSS forums and there were so many people who, when posting in screenshot threads, had their browsers open to 4chan. It was just a totally normal and everyday thing for these people. And back when I was a bit more naive and having never heard of it, I remember hopping on and looking around 4chan, like just to see what the hype was all about, and wondering wtf was wrong with all these people who spent so much time there.
I don’t think those sort of folk are specific to F/OSS communities, but moreso as an overall tech culture thing. There’s this myth of “meritocracy” where people think that if your a 100X coder, then that’s all that matters, and being a disgusting shitstain of a person shouldn’t be relevant at all. And when they get chucked off of a project for being a bigoted asshat, they get pissed and spew their bile and entitlement all over the place.
And this is absolutely where it led and where it leads. It feels like it takes its roots in tech enthusiast circles, then bleeds out into other enthusiast cultures, e.g. gaming, comics, etc., and then just poisons everything. And then after something like GG, you get people like Steve Bannon who see how that entitlement and disaffection can be weaponized, and can be used to drive the alt-right pipeline even faster.
Another thing I think contributed to this is that, as millennials, especially early on in Internet adoption, we had this idea of a separation of identities. Our online personas were completely different from our IRL personas because we were conditioned to believe that this was the safe way to go about things. But I think it just gave people a mask to hide behind, and just assume “well, it’s not real life. So I can just do whatever” without ever thinking about there being an actual human on the other side of the screen. And for so many millennials, it seems impossible to change this perspective.
As PA put it so succinctly:
Yes, I think this is true. There was a lot of “irony” that, as it turns out, was not really very ironic.
I genuinely think a lot of it was ironic back in the day – at the very least people seemed to know not to “take it too far” – before a generation grew up online who perceived the edgier posters as Cool and took it seriously, leading to the miasma we have today.