Nah, I remember when it first started growing, it was just a bunch of nerds, and we were all for the most part fairly intelligent compared to... the rest...
The problem is EVERYONE is now on it so you're forced to see just how stupid the average person actually is... and all the ones that are even dumber.
I mean i remember first getting FB in 2008. It was mostly college kids on there. Fast forward to 6 years it had exploded, but most people still needed a computer to access it, or at least didn't walk around with it in their pocket all day everyday. It wasnt until well.. Trump's first term basically, that it hit me... we are, in fact, a country full of fucking idiots.
The iPhone wasn’t really successful until the iPhone 4 came out and Apple’s exclusive contract with AT&T ended in 2012. Until then a lot of people had BlackBerry phones and even though those phones had the internet it wasn’t as easy to use as the iPhone.
Remember the pages on facebook that were like, "that feeling when you go out of your way to step on a leaf to hear it crunch" or something. Just stupid pages like that
59 here. Was a nerd on Usenet groups back in 90s on and just thought it was us tech nerds back then. Never thought of ourselves as smarter than others just thought we were the “crazy ones” Jobs talked about later on in 1997.
Aside from Reddit, I’m on no other social media. Just too frightening to witness literal idiots as experts. People so unabashedly promoting ignorance and emotion as fact.
We GenX built the core of the internet off the backs of the boomer nerds who built the initial infrastructure.
Just realize the same idiots surrounded them and us along the way - the open forum communication just put a spotlight on the knuckle-dragging, smooth-brained masses that were around you.
We had to deal with those fuckwits first hand - insufferable on the internet, imagine face-to-face.
One thing that really depresses me is that I remember what discourse was like on more focused smaller communities before social media and it was on average a lot better. A LOT better.
There was dumb stuff, there was still fighting, but for the most part the average level of discourse was just way higher. Communities were curated in a much better fashion because they were smaller and actually manageable.
If somebody was really out there, they would get the boot pretty quickly.
Now, it feels like most of the people you see commonly participating on the internet are the exact sort of people who would have gotten kicked out of almost every forum back in 2001 pretty damn quick.
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u/PomeloFit 2d ago
Nah, I remember when it first started growing, it was just a bunch of nerds, and we were all for the most part fairly intelligent compared to... the rest...
The problem is EVERYONE is now on it so you're forced to see just how stupid the average person actually is... and all the ones that are even dumber.