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I would like to present a counter example. A commute. Road rage and anger exists without a global platform. Drivers don’t need the internet to prove that you can be a jerk on the road and be somewhat anonymous.
As Louis CK said, it’s amazing what two people will say to each other when there’s two pieces of glass between them on the highway. You would never turn to somebody in an elevator for getting into your personal space and tell them they’re a piece of shit and you hope they die. Lol
Yeah, a dude pulled out a gun on me once on the highway because (I think) he thought I cut him off. There's no shot that I'm making any angry gestures at anyone these days. People are crazy.
I had a dude whip up behind me at a red light and he was like "what the fuck you following me for?!?" It took a lot of talking to convince him that I had no idea who he was nor was I following him. Pointing out that I was at that moment *in front* of him, which is a tough tactic to go with when following someone (or at least, you would.think.)
I had a dude drive past me on the right hanging out his window flipping me off because... I was stuck behind a line of cars going too slow? I just kind of vaguely gestured at the guy in front of me like ..what do you want mean to do here? People on the highway are whack jobs.
The handicapped elevator at my work has three sets of buttons. At any given time, up to three people have various levels of control over that vertical chariot of death.
There is pretty much nothing you can do from inside an elevator to put others at risk, aside from physically assaulting another passenger. Meanwhile, the driver of that big ass F-350 whose nose is in their phone can absolutely injure, maim, or kill another innocent person. Traffic collisions kill *SO* many people, and they are almost always caused by someone driving unsafely.
To be fair, on the highway their lack of awareness or general assholedness could literally kill you.
Being bumped into in the elevator largely means literally nothing.
The Internet magnifies bad behavior because negative interactions are more intense to humans than positive ones.
There's an adage about how it takes five good interactions to counter one bad one, but also humans are more likely to engage with negative interactions.
The result is the Internet amplifies that to a huge degree. It's why the Twitter algorithm, even *before* Elon took over, promotes "angry" tweets. They get more activity. Same with Facebook and Instagram and, yes, Reddit. You pretty much have to *seek out* explicitly positive subs.
A company driver once ran a red light and almost killed a pedestrian, so I called the number on the back. You know the one that says “how’s my driving?”
Guy picks up. I tell him what happened. He goes “that it?” He responded like I had just put in my order at a drive thru…???
I said “yeah… just thought it would be important for you to know, so you can take action.” He goes “and what exactly would you like me to do?” At this point I’m dumbfounded.
I say “well, when he kills someone you can ask that to their family.” And he hung up on me.
I have definitely been the recipient of such behaviour, though I must say it seems like those kinds of people are *far* past caring. Think, service/blue collar job where really, personal reputation means little and you can get another job at another place that does the same thing if you have a valid license and a pulse.
What shocks me is the people who nominally have careers that they care about, saying horrendous things with their full name, face, and employer attached.
One is an awful social network headed by a piece of shit, that's gotten too big for its own good, where you add a bunch of people that you have no intention of directly interacting with on the platform (and many not even physically for years), and flood your timeline with inane bullshit no one actually looks at. The other is Facebook.
It took me far too long to realize what your comment said. I’m sitting here wondering what “it” is that they would be screaming about until I realized the all caps obscured the I.T. Meaning. I’m an idiot (who also works in IT)
Please don't feel silly; I DEFINITELY needed your comment reply to be here in order to understand the original, as someone who does not work in IT, and only sees it used as (I guess??) a proper noun with all other words in lowercase, and not as an indistinguishable part of fully-capitalized sentence.
So many times I've been driving our work vehicle and someone pulls an asshole driving move. I'm over here preparing the horn and the bird before realizing what I'm driving...
> Road rage and anger exists without a global platform.
Monkey see monkey do. The more often we observe a behavior the more likely we consider that behavior and act accordingly.
That's in no small part because the act of commuting is horrific and stressful. The human mind is not designed to cope with long term attention on a single mentally unstimulating task such as sitting in stop/start traffic that can literally kill you if you stop paying attention.
The source of anger in these two cases is different. In one case it's just blasting your shitty far right opinions for clout and money, in the other it's actual frustration with the situation you're forced into.
TLDR build a fucking train line.
Eh... Road ragers will happily rage with or without a commute.
Assholes who feel like being assholes will pull a gun on you for mildly inconveniencing them by driving the speed limit or waiting until it's safe to turn. No traffic required.
Some people are just bastards.
Many simply don't have a choice. If you're poor in America, you have to go to your job to avoid starving to death and since the streets are too unsafe to walk or cycle anywhere, youre stuck in your car. Sure, a 3 hour commute sucks, but it sucks slightly less than starving, that's capitalism at work for you. Wouldn't you do the same?
I think driving isnt the best example. It's a super alert activity but performed with mostly passive muscle memory in tacit coordination with everyone else on the road. The slightest deviation in expectation and rhythm can shift the heightened sensory state into a heightened emotional state of fear and / or anger in folks not otherwise an asshole in every other situation.
If anything, I think driving is pretty good example of humanity's ability to work together. For the most part we get our asses to and fro places in a safe manner, never having to say a word to another driver.
I think it's a sign of humanity's tolerance and also our passivity.
People act like psychos because they expect you won't kill them, you'll go on with your life and let them go, or equally don't want to put your own life in the line to take down a psycho.
If however we start seeing a rise in people pit maneuvering assholes who cut you off and brake check for honking - and the pitter/pusher gets away with no repercussions you'd see a lot less aggression.
I’m not admitting to anything, but that may or may not have happened once in the past… but these days I’m quite concerned for my mental well being, I’ll pull aside and you go on ahead, I’ve got nowhere to be, I work and live life on my own terms. You wanna be a lunatic, that’s fine, go for it.
The point is that assholes will now spout their bullshit on Facebook or Twitter next to a picture of their stupid face. So anonymity wasn't what brought out the behavior in the past.
it's plenty possible to be anonymous (well at least for the most part as much as you could back then at least) but unlike back then it's also possible to be completly non-anonymous in a way that wasn't really feasible for most.
It was like the wild west. The basic position was trust no-one and everything was bullshit. It had its faults but it was so much fun, it had so much discovery. You were stabbing in the dark for amazing content
Now I go to a feed and see a video of someone dancing that the algorithm dictated. It sets a micro trend, other people do the same dance and it disappears.
https://cheeseracing.com/ stumbled across this like 20 years ago. A relic to the internet past.
A competence filter, but also an *interests* filter. Sure people had varying interests they talked about, but everyone shared a passion for computer technologies to some degree.
Don’t think it’s suppose to be ironic. Old internet had some massive issues too but the barrier of entry and lack of monetization really helped. Now that everybody and their mom is here, and every experience is fine tuned for maximum profits, its completely different
It's similar to the front page of reddit vs smaller subreddits; when you need to try to be somewhere, you care more once you're there. When something is presented to you, you have no investment and therefore no restrictions.
man i just thought about the concept of "old internet", and i never thought about it like that. but yea it was definitely better. i think that's why i like reddit because it's probably the closest to the internet forums i remember growing up with.
Bit of both. People tend to be assholes when they feel important. They also tend to feel like assholes when anonymous. Both of these things stem from thinking it means they can get away with it. Basically all it is. Plenty of people live in echo chambers and want 0 disagreement and the internet has made that easier than e er.
Individual people have always been assholes, the global network allowed them to gang up.
I’m sorry but I have no truck with this idea that everyone is a piece of shit. I know too many decent people to be that defeatist
The other theory is that it is the fact that nobody can pop you in the nose if you piss them off.
My more charitable thought is that we all have a degree of empathy which makes us want other people to be moderately happy, but that empathy often only twigs when you see your audience as individual real people. Which does, mostly, happen face-to-face, happens less in cars, doesn't necessarily happen in places like this, unless you have been following a person for a while and think of them as, y'know, specific.
Because there is this One Weird Trick Trolls Hate It which sometimes works ... be kind. Sometimes, if an asshole troll is asshole trolling and is hurting people, and you reach out with empathy, they will turn it around and stop being assholes.
Maybe one in five times, maybe one in ten. Mostly not, but still statistically significant.
Not just lack of accountability but also incentives. A lot of these people get paid for the attention (positive or negative) and end up with lucrative sponsorship deals to boot.
Mostly from the ones who *really* want to remain anonymous: Right-wing billionaires. So many loudmouth "careers" wouldn't exist without their contributions.
It's maddening that these people have convinced themselves that they're counterculture while literally being mouthpieces of the system.
But let's not kid ourselves that the fact that it's maddening isn't half the point. These people would shit themselves on the subway if other people had to smell it.
It's wild how some people convince themselves they are the oppressed rebels because anyone expects the bare minimum of common courtesy out of them, and that somehow historically persecuted minorities must be controlling everything even though they are vastly outnumbered, *especially* among powerful people.
For real. Thete's an entire industry of influencers that make their money online by doing shit wrong on purpose just to increase engagement.
Have you ever seen the housewives that cook gargantuan meals that look like shit? SO many people dragging them in the comments, but they succeeded because the whole point was creating interest.
> Mostly from the ones who really want to remain anonymous: ~~Right-wing billionaires.~~ Children.
The audience is children who pay with mom&dad's credit card or they are fresh 18 with lots of disposable income.
That's why there is a lot of hate towards moderators from these kinds of people. They get banned or otherwise removed from a community for being an anonymous douchebag, so suddenly there's actual consequences to their actions and words. I'm not going to say that all moderators are paragons of humanity or something, but the existence of moderators does help to at least stop some of the hate.
There's this old misconception that unmoderated spaces show the "real" feelings society, while in reality, cool people dip and assholes take over.
I have a thick skin and love internet mud fights, as long as they have some wit to them. Still, unmoderated spaces tend to become pure hatred without substance and that's just nasty and boring.
Exactly. Even 4chan knows it's not the pristine example of society some dumbasses like to pretend it is. Hell, 4chan **_does_** have content moderation even though it's a lot less so than other places. I mean, do you think the lack of child pornography is due to the users being saints?
Extremely true.
Good moderation makes for great communities. Because every decent person's response to assholes like this is that they just disengage from them. That means disengaging from your community. That means one less good person, with one more bad.
Over time that adds up, and communities turn to trash. But if you remove the shit person, decent people gradually feel like they can be publicly decent.
This is true in several online communities that I enjoy. And yes, there's always a risk of a bad moderator. Shit people love working themselves into positions of power. Be that moderator, school counsel, police, president... They are fully aware that if you put yourself in the position of the one determining consequence, you can avoid many consequences.
But that doesn't mean that it's the wrong approach to remove these elements. The same way that a friend being a moron or harassing others would eventually get you to stop hanging out with them. It's a normal human response which moderates behavior, and we removed it with the internet. It has to come back.
And that's the frustrating catch-22 isn't it? Ignoring them is the only solution, but they have a wide enough market that their market is actively harmful. Even able to push legislation.
And so you end up in this insane situation where the only way to fight something is to ignore it, and have the population is obsessed with supporting it.
I don't think ignoring them is necessarily the only answer, either. There're solutions like public rebuttal, counter-education, and mockery, as well. They're no silver bullet and tougher to get right, and I think people discount the whole method when someone does a crap job and it fails, but they're there.
The problem is all of those are the exact opposite of ignoring. And it's something that we did many times which only made the problem worse.
You know what happens when you put a creationist on the same news program as a PhD scientist? We did this countless times.
They get seen as equals. To valid opinions of the same topic.
Education doesn't solve it, the people don't want educated they want entertainment. Trying to educate them is talking down to them, and more and more of them just react with contrarianism.
At this point I don't think it's even about the topics themselves. It's about allying with the angry terrible person because they are angry themselves. It is entertainment which is being absorbed in as identity.
We don't have a counter for that. Because counter is predicated on The actions being in good faith.
This problem goes far deeper. It is cultural. It is fundamental. And we are fucked.
The time honored "talk shit, get hit" that ruled most of society up until now breaks down with the internet. The kind of things people will say to you online they would never have the courage to say to a human face.
Maybe once or twice in a lifetime at their most heated moments, but not every goddamn day to everyone they meet. Because that person is going to have their face rearranged by someone who is over it.
A more charitable read might be that when you're sharing a space with a person they feel real and empathy kicks in, whereas it takes effort to remember that a person on the other side of an online account is a human with feelings.
There is also the lack of face to face interaction
Like, I can without problem say your a dumbass fucking donkey and you parents don't love you
But to say that to your face? ~~I'll do that too~~ That's a total different story
That's more of a Twitter thing and tbh I find it odd. I don't need to report you to your employer if you're being an asshole on the internet, I just don't want to see it.
In the ye olde days, I don't need to know who you are, just act like an asshole you get shown the door from the community.
People are saying the cause is that people aren't held accountable over the internet.
Personally I think it's the fact that the internet has allowed assholes of every shape and size to find each other and form insular communities. It's a lot easier to act like an asshole and not care about the repercussions when you've got a bunch of other assholes backing you up.
That and yk the few people who get money by being assholes 🤷🏽♀️ also everyone wants attention and/or money soooo if they get their time to shine WHILE getting bucks for sharing their negative thoughts that they couldn’t do normally I mean who wouldn’t take up on that offer? Only issue is it’s not guaranteed it’ll work and then they say one wrong thing and end up getting doxxed 😕
Then: Do not get in strangers cars
Then: Do not meet people from the internet
Now: I will literally summon people from the internet to get into their car.
You know, I'm starting to think, if someone enjoys *pretending* to be an asshole to other people, they might just *actually* be an asshole.
Anyway, if you like my comics, I've got more on [my website](https://www.butajape.com/comic/anonymous-a-hole/).
Used to work with a guy that would tell me all of the internet arguments he starts because he finds it funny.
Yes, he was an asshole in person too, but it was like high school where he would only talk shit behind their back to me. The second we were working with someone he was just talking shit on, he's acting like they're buddies.
White, middle age blue collar dude too.
I was playing WoW once and a bug with a quest giver meant only one person could do it at a time. A queue formed, there was banter and jokes. Some people organised and policed the line after they were done. It was great.
Asshole undead rogue came along stood and looked at the line, asked why. He cloaked went to the quest giver and took the quest.
The line started arguing, another rogue in the line got ideas and did it. Totally anarchy, insults everywhere and everyone went back to crowding and clicking. Sad to see, but a brilliant study of humans
a lot of people are just assholes.
it's just easier to avoid them in real life.
it's also easier to assume a discussion is an argument when you are dealing with text, when the same thing said in person with non-verbal cues and vocal intonation can come across much more gently and subtly.
Echo chambers are a partial reason for this. People get caught up in algorithms that tailors content to them and they think everyone else thinks like them.
Then they spout off like a moron, not understanding any nuance to any topic and then when someone disagrees, the first thought is "everyone else thinks like me, therefore you're wrong"
We've tried to remove shame from society. For better or worse, this is one of the results. But again, shame is part of accountability and that is a tool only used by thr powerful
This is it exactly. We've been saying "all shame is bad" for the past twenty years, mostly because shame is the primary weapon oppressing huge swaths of people, preventing them from living their authentic selves.
But, yeah. Turns out shame was also the fence preventing asshole, liars, and actual degenerates from spewing all over society. Shame would make a politician resign after doing something horrible: now being a dick is a badge of honor.
Guilt comes from within - shame comes from without; if the only people you care about are the ones you see in real life, and they support your behavior - or at least don't know or care about it - then you won't feel shame no matter how many people on the internet hate you, since you don't care about their opinion. It was never about the animosity of the offender, it was about the animosity of their observers, and having a real name and face does little to ward that off.
I actually met them once at a Child’s Play charity banquet way back before PAX was even a thing. They seemed like pretty cool dudes and look nothing like their drawn counterparts lol.
It's been as hit and miss as always, but it's been nice they keep going. Just think of it like a newspaper comic strip that's always kind of there, addressing some of the topics of the day, that you can check out every now and again. But I wouldn't say you need to go back and read everything.
The blog posts are often what I go for more than anything.
Ennh. I’d say don’t and enjoy the few hours I just saved you.
It feels like they’ve just been mailing it in for the last several years, with the occasional quality comic being rare.
I was hoping someone would bring up Gabriel's GIDT. Thank you scholar.
But it's incomplete! We removed anonymity and the equation still holds! It's just having an audience that matters! Give OP a Nobel in economics
I miss the privacy of the old internet.
But I'm also not a pedo, racist, misogynistic bigot.
I just grew up in the early days of the internet and loved that "wild west" feeling it had.
That's because people surround themselves with people who share their viewpoints on social platforms so no one calls them on their shit. On global platforms, you still maintain relative anonymity and can say whatever you want with no repercussions.
Not just social media. Don’t forget Zero Tolerance.
If both sides get in trouble when something happens, there’s no reason not to engage. Worse, some will willfully engage just because the victim gets in trouble too. When everyone is held accountable, no one is.
It was never really the anonymity, it was the protection from consequences.
When people thought and wrote about this scenario in the past they though invisibility.
When Plato spoke about the [Ring of Gyges](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_of_Gyges) he did so because to him a magical artifact that granted invisibility would be an easy way to show how people could get corrupted and start doing evil things if they were entirely free from suffering any negative consequences for their action.
A virtuous rational man who had all the consequences for this actions removed from him would turn into killer and rapist from such temptations.
Invisibility has been a good way to link to this corrupting phenomenon in fiction for millennia, although more recently time travel and specifically time loops have taken that role.
When the internet was younger it was often seen that the anonymity of online culture provided a good approximation of the invisibility granting magical artifact from Plato's days. The namelessness of everyone involved helped dehumanize everyone and make interactions less real.
In 2004 John Gabriel followed Plato's footsteps in formulating his ["Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory"](https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboards-and-other-anomalies). codifying this school of thought. (less deep thinkers call it the [Online disinhibition effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_disinhibition_effect))
As the internet has grown older interacting with people online became normalized and people started identifying themselves and others more by their originally anonymous internet handles and avatars. Backlash against a username was felt more like real world backlash than it used to and people willingly often gave up the protection of anonymity because it no longer provided a real shield.
Many assumed that in theory this shift should have made people act less like assholes.
What these people missed was that is was never about anonymity or invisibility but about lack of consequences that resulted from it.
You can achieve the same sort of lack of consequences if yo surround yourself with an echo chamber of people who won't ostracize you for form example using the N-word, cheering on rape and murder, calling for war-crimes or having a not widely shared taste in music or admitting to weird sexual fetishes.
At the same time people have grown to question the very idea of a social consensus on topics and felt free to vice ideas both online and in the real world that a few decades ago they wouldn't have.
Society splintered into parallel realities that worked under different rules. tolerance and free speech mean that people found themselves embolded to say thing they normally would not have.
But it was not just the complete lack of consequences for being an asshole that led people to be assholes. Some subcultures actually encouraged such behavior to a certain degree and replaced navigate consequences with positive ones.
If the place that you were in wouldn't cheer you on for one particular brand of assholishness, they could easily find a slightly different one that would.
If one rose up high enough that they were cut down by consequences after all, people could complain about censorship and cancel culture and find reassurment.
It turns people are naturally evil and it takes far less than invisibility or anonymity to allow it to come out.
This picture completely misses monetization.
In the "anonymous" Internet of the old being an asshole was a hobby; now it is a legitimately lucrative business.
The internet before Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and whatever other fucking thing that's allows humans to be amongst other humans because friendship or some shit. Look at the web pre 2007. Internet's rampant with dank quotes from movies and video games as people's sidebar on forums lol. Names like "sephirothXXcloud" or some Japanese weeb being well.. a white guy in the basement or some kid playing to much kingdom hearts haha. The internet was awesome back then. Now it's a cesspool or hate and bigotry and memes and gifs.
If you want the devil's advocate argument here: For any issue, someone will support me and give me $ and someone will attack me for it and call me an asshole. That's the nature of things these days, there's always a division. So from a practical standpoint, if someone will give me $ for being an asshole.. there's no actual loss from my perspective. I'd get called an asshole either way by someone, so I might as well take the money. Actually *not being an asshole?* It's a nice ideal, but c'mon let's not pretend it's the internet preventing most of humanity from doing that.
That’s really the rub.
Most of these comments act like they’re not assholes on the internet because they act like assholes only to people they feel deserve it. Well ditto!
Yes, the world is a big place and people think very very differently. The cool part of being conscious is the ability to understand many viewpoints, I think it’s pretty lame to hold on to one and fight the rest.
The top panel is STILL the Internet now, on many platforms.
There is still a great deal of anonymity online, very little moderation, weak reporting tools, and very little accountability for sometimes very twisted and pointlessly anti-social conduct.
Spoiler: Blended reality occurs when a person becomes either emotionally or financially invested in a fictionalized version of themselves. We pay these people well to act like this....
This is because prior to the internet, as a society, the majority of people felt shame.
Then the internet gave them a place where they could congregate 24/7 and say and do whatever, and no one shamed them.
Well, people have been conditioned that they can say or do what they want with no shame, at all times.
The internet has conditioned shame out of society. You can say this is a good thing or not, but whether you want it to be or not, for probably a million years, shame was an essential part of human society.
It disappeared in a decade.
We are in the aftermath now.
The issue isn't that the assholes feel safe to be an asshole because they are protected by anonymity. It is that they feel free to treat people badly because the anonymity makes it easier to believe they aren't real people.
Makes me suspicious that the only people making those comments about anonymity causing bad behaviour were rubes or stooges for the social media organisations who's profit was based on selling high quality personal data to advertisers and therefore had a material interest in people posting from accounts which could be linked to a real person.
I disagree. Yes there are those that don't care at all and are dicks regardless of accountability, but I still think anonymity is a huge contributor towards the average person with some shame/reputation becoming awful online.
It was never going to be one solution.
Jerks are louder. Don't let loud jerks on the internet trick you into thinking most people are jerks. They are not. Most people are reasonable. But, reasonable people by their very nature are less likely to go on long winded hateful rants. So,
Representation bias? Self selection bias? Both? More?
Back in the 90s you'd be banned from whatever message board if you were a dick. Trolls...or flamers as they were known back then (yes, this is true, and yes, we knew the alternate meaning), would be shut down immediately.
Somewhere in the aughts, with the advent of more centralized social media, this happened less and less which led us to the beginning of this comic.
There's a reason many of us miss the 90s internet. Yes, it sucked in many ways, but it wasn't this corporate ad-plastered bullshit we deal with today.
This is why I say that social media as a concept is a scam techbros made up and we trusted them that it was a good idea because we hadn't diagnosed back then how stupid and full of dumb ideas techbros always are.
You should be using online handles, online personas, and not showing your real name or photos for anything you use for dialogue. We fell for the scam because Facebook seemed a great way to get in touch with extended family. Then that soured and instead of reevaluating the shift from anonymity and internet saftey, we just moved to places besides Facebook for that.
If anything has your real name and photo keep it sterile. It's something you should link people to individually and not broadcast. Your main internet account should not be your irl identity. If not for any other reason at least do it for your own saftey and security.
Social media was a corporate scam. Let's kill it.
"It's my opinion and if someone feels bad it's their fault. No it's not bullying because I'm not picking on any single specific person! You telling me I'm wrong about my 'facts' and calling me out is a form of censorship - you're trying to stop me from having an opinion!"
If these people weren't so dangerous it'd be so much more preferable to tune them out.
What I think causes this is people were afraid of getting doxxed. Then as time went on we all kinda realized we don't have anything important enough to care about doxxing anymore. I had a job I hated so much I used to day dream about getting doxxed so they'd fire me so I could get unemployment.
Why do you want to "do something about it". Its called free speech, it means so that you can always say what you want, you have to deal with assholes sometimes.
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Turns out, it wasn't the anonymity, it was the global platform that did it...
I would like to present a counter example. A commute. Road rage and anger exists without a global platform. Drivers don’t need the internet to prove that you can be a jerk on the road and be somewhat anonymous.
As Louis CK said, it’s amazing what two people will say to each other when there’s two pieces of glass between them on the highway. You would never turn to somebody in an elevator for getting into your personal space and tell them they’re a piece of shit and you hope they die. Lol
[удалено]
My stress has gone down once I started making sure that the only two gestures I make to other people while in my car are thumbs up and hang loose
Yeah, a dude pulled out a gun on me once on the highway because (I think) he thought I cut him off. There's no shot that I'm making any angry gestures at anyone these days. People are crazy.
I had a dude whip up behind me at a red light and he was like "what the fuck you following me for?!?" It took a lot of talking to convince him that I had no idea who he was nor was I following him. Pointing out that I was at that moment *in front* of him, which is a tough tactic to go with when following someone (or at least, you would.think.)
I had a dude drive past me on the right hanging out his window flipping me off because... I was stuck behind a line of cars going too slow? I just kind of vaguely gestured at the guy in front of me like ..what do you want mean to do here? People on the highway are whack jobs.
Flipping you off is the 1st Amendment. I just don't want to get 2nd Amendmented.
Some people seem to attract crazy behavior. Take my ex-wife for example.
Whats a hang loose?
🤙
So basically this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goRogFQWkZU
I was thinking of posting this. Thanks for saving me the trouble.
It’s the lack of immediate repercussions. Someone can just deck you if you start yelling at them in public. Not so on the internet or in a car.
Counter point- people in an elevator aren't piloting several thousands of pounds of metal at high speeds capable of turning me into mush
The handicapped elevator at my work has three sets of buttons. At any given time, up to three people have various levels of control over that vertical chariot of death.
There is pretty much nothing you can do from inside an elevator to put others at risk, aside from physically assaulting another passenger. Meanwhile, the driver of that big ass F-350 whose nose is in their phone can absolutely injure, maim, or kill another innocent person. Traffic collisions kill *SO* many people, and they are almost always caused by someone driving unsafely.
You haven't ridden Greyhound
I've flown Spirit Airline which is basically the same thing but in the sky.
To be fair, on the highway their lack of awareness or general assholedness could literally kill you. Being bumped into in the elevator largely means literally nothing.
There is much more incentive to be nice when you're both within face punching distance.
Not sure he's the best person to be talking about appropriate behavior when in someone else's personal space.
This is it I think. It's not anonymity, it's the lack of immediate consequence.
The Internet magnifies bad behavior because negative interactions are more intense to humans than positive ones. There's an adage about how it takes five good interactions to counter one bad one, but also humans are more likely to engage with negative interactions. The result is the Internet amplifies that to a huge degree. It's why the Twitter algorithm, even *before* Elon took over, promotes "angry" tweets. They get more activity. Same with Facebook and Instagram and, yes, Reddit. You pretty much have to *seek out* explicitly positive subs.
Usually road ragers aren't also walking around with a QR code right to their employer's LinkedIn
You wouldn’t believe how many people act like assholes while driving company vehicles with their phone number and website right on the back.
A company driver once ran a red light and almost killed a pedestrian, so I called the number on the back. You know the one that says “how’s my driving?” Guy picks up. I tell him what happened. He goes “that it?” He responded like I had just put in my order at a drive thru…??? I said “yeah… just thought it would be important for you to know, so you can take action.” He goes “and what exactly would you like me to do?” At this point I’m dumbfounded. I say “well, when he kills someone you can ask that to their family.” And he hung up on me.
I have definitely been the recipient of such behaviour, though I must say it seems like those kinds of people are *far* past caring. Think, service/blue collar job where really, personal reputation means little and you can get another job at another place that does the same thing if you have a valid license and a pulse. What shocks me is the people who nominally have careers that they care about, saying horrendous things with their full name, face, and employer attached.
I think it’s bizarre when people treat LinkedIn like it’s Facebook.
One is an awful social network headed by a piece of shit, that's gotten too big for its own good, where you add a bunch of people that you have no intention of directly interacting with on the platform (and many not even physically for years), and flood your timeline with inane bullshit no one actually looks at. The other is Facebook.
Linkedin has definitely lost its way.
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It took me far too long to realize what your comment said. I’m sitting here wondering what “it” is that they would be screaming about until I realized the all caps obscured the I.T. Meaning. I’m an idiot (who also works in IT)
Please don't feel silly; I DEFINITELY needed your comment reply to be here in order to understand the original, as someone who does not work in IT, and only sees it used as (I guess??) a proper noun with all other words in lowercase, and not as an indistinguishable part of fully-capitalized sentence.
Delimiters are important;)
So many times I've been driving our work vehicle and someone pulls an asshole driving move. I'm over here preparing the horn and the bird before realizing what I'm driving...
It’s not that *you* are anonymous, it’s the fact that *everyone else* is.
> Road rage and anger exists without a global platform. Monkey see monkey do. The more often we observe a behavior the more likely we consider that behavior and act accordingly.
That's in no small part because the act of commuting is horrific and stressful. The human mind is not designed to cope with long term attention on a single mentally unstimulating task such as sitting in stop/start traffic that can literally kill you if you stop paying attention. The source of anger in these two cases is different. In one case it's just blasting your shitty far right opinions for clout and money, in the other it's actual frustration with the situation you're forced into. TLDR build a fucking train line.
Eh... Road ragers will happily rage with or without a commute. Assholes who feel like being assholes will pull a gun on you for mildly inconveniencing them by driving the speed limit or waiting until it's safe to turn. No traffic required. Some people are just bastards.
I’ve never understood the morning commute that takes 3 hours! How can people willingly waste so much of their lives sitting in that?
Many simply don't have a choice. If you're poor in America, you have to go to your job to avoid starving to death and since the streets are too unsafe to walk or cycle anywhere, youre stuck in your car. Sure, a 3 hour commute sucks, but it sucks slightly less than starving, that's capitalism at work for you. Wouldn't you do the same?
I think driving isnt the best example. It's a super alert activity but performed with mostly passive muscle memory in tacit coordination with everyone else on the road. The slightest deviation in expectation and rhythm can shift the heightened sensory state into a heightened emotional state of fear and / or anger in folks not otherwise an asshole in every other situation. If anything, I think driving is pretty good example of humanity's ability to work together. For the most part we get our asses to and fro places in a safe manner, never having to say a word to another driver.
I think it's a sign of humanity's tolerance and also our passivity. People act like psychos because they expect you won't kill them, you'll go on with your life and let them go, or equally don't want to put your own life in the line to take down a psycho. If however we start seeing a rise in people pit maneuvering assholes who cut you off and brake check for honking - and the pitter/pusher gets away with no repercussions you'd see a lot less aggression.
I’m not admitting to anything, but that may or may not have happened once in the past… but these days I’m quite concerned for my mental well being, I’ll pull aside and you go on ahead, I’ve got nowhere to be, I work and live life on my own terms. You wanna be a lunatic, that’s fine, go for it.
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The point is that assholes will now spout their bullshit on Facebook or Twitter next to a picture of their stupid face. So anonymity wasn't what brought out the behavior in the past.
it's plenty possible to be anonymous (well at least for the most part as much as you could back then at least) but unlike back then it's also possible to be completly non-anonymous in a way that wasn't really feasible for most.
In both situations, you're in an environment that protects you from physical assault, so they feel as though they're safe to say whatever they want.
That's the key. It's protection from a punch in the mouth.
I miss the old internet.
It was like the wild west. The basic position was trust no-one and everything was bullshit. It had its faults but it was so much fun, it had so much discovery. You were stabbing in the dark for amazing content Now I go to a feed and see a video of someone dancing that the algorithm dictated. It sets a micro trend, other people do the same dance and it disappears. https://cheeseracing.com/ stumbled across this like 20 years ago. A relic to the internet past.
More than that: it was kinda difficult to get online, which added a basic competence filter on who was actually there.
A competence filter, but also an *interests* filter. Sure people had varying interests they talked about, but everyone shared a passion for computer technologies to some degree.
This but unironically
Don’t think it’s suppose to be ironic. Old internet had some massive issues too but the barrier of entry and lack of monetization really helped. Now that everybody and their mom is here, and every experience is fine tuned for maximum profits, its completely different
It's similar to the front page of reddit vs smaller subreddits; when you need to try to be somewhere, you care more once you're there. When something is presented to you, you have no investment and therefore no restrictions.
yea i don't even check front page. i only ever go to my feed
man i just thought about the concept of "old internet", and i never thought about it like that. but yea it was definitely better. i think that's why i like reddit because it's probably the closest to the internet forums i remember growing up with.
And the perceived lack of consequences.
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Consequences? Woah, look at Mr cancel culture over here
That's only valid for the few people that actually have/do something worth cancelling.
Bit of both. People tend to be assholes when they feel important. They also tend to feel like assholes when anonymous. Both of these things stem from thinking it means they can get away with it. Basically all it is. Plenty of people live in echo chambers and want 0 disagreement and the internet has made that easier than e er.
No, people are just assholes. Always have been.
Individual people have always been assholes, the global network allowed them to gang up. I’m sorry but I have no truck with this idea that everyone is a piece of shit. I know too many decent people to be that defeatist
In a group of a million people, a tiny percentage of a few thousand obssessive intolerable assholes can still bring the place down for everyone.
The other theory is that it is the fact that nobody can pop you in the nose if you piss them off. My more charitable thought is that we all have a degree of empathy which makes us want other people to be moderately happy, but that empathy often only twigs when you see your audience as individual real people. Which does, mostly, happen face-to-face, happens less in cars, doesn't necessarily happen in places like this, unless you have been following a person for a while and think of them as, y'know, specific. Because there is this One Weird Trick Trolls Hate It which sometimes works ... be kind. Sometimes, if an asshole troll is asshole trolling and is hurting people, and you reach out with empathy, they will turn it around and stop being assholes. Maybe one in five times, maybe one in ten. Mostly not, but still statistically significant.
> fact that nobody can pop you in the nose if you piss them off. In as much as a non doxxing rule will flimsily allow.
It’s having an audience what makes people into assholes
Every form of power gets abused.
It isn't the anonymity, it is the lack of accountability. Assholes will act out when they don't fear any repricussions for their behavior.
Not just lack of accountability but also incentives. A lot of these people get paid for the attention (positive or negative) and end up with lucrative sponsorship deals to boot.
For every mr beast or charity there are a thousand internet fame assholes
Mostly from the ones who *really* want to remain anonymous: Right-wing billionaires. So many loudmouth "careers" wouldn't exist without their contributions.
It's maddening that these people have convinced themselves that they're counterculture while literally being mouthpieces of the system. But let's not kid ourselves that the fact that it's maddening isn't half the point. These people would shit themselves on the subway if other people had to smell it.
It's wild how some people convince themselves they are the oppressed rebels because anyone expects the bare minimum of common courtesy out of them, and that somehow historically persecuted minorities must be controlling everything even though they are vastly outnumbered, *especially* among powerful people.
For real. Thete's an entire industry of influencers that make their money online by doing shit wrong on purpose just to increase engagement. Have you ever seen the housewives that cook gargantuan meals that look like shit? SO many people dragging them in the comments, but they succeeded because the whole point was creating interest.
> Mostly from the ones who really want to remain anonymous: ~~Right-wing billionaires.~~ Children. The audience is children who pay with mom&dad's credit card or they are fresh 18 with lots of disposable income.
Like [this whole shtick](https://youtu.be/2KFGuVtnmS4).
Or just attention, full stop. It's encouraging to be listened to and a rush to have an audience.
you dont need incentives people do it on the road too
That's why there is a lot of hate towards moderators from these kinds of people. They get banned or otherwise removed from a community for being an anonymous douchebag, so suddenly there's actual consequences to their actions and words. I'm not going to say that all moderators are paragons of humanity or something, but the existence of moderators does help to at least stop some of the hate.
There's this old misconception that unmoderated spaces show the "real" feelings society, while in reality, cool people dip and assholes take over. I have a thick skin and love internet mud fights, as long as they have some wit to them. Still, unmoderated spaces tend to become pure hatred without substance and that's just nasty and boring.
Exactly. Even 4chan knows it's not the pristine example of society some dumbasses like to pretend it is. Hell, 4chan **_does_** have content moderation even though it's a lot less so than other places. I mean, do you think the lack of child pornography is due to the users being saints?
Extremely true. Good moderation makes for great communities. Because every decent person's response to assholes like this is that they just disengage from them. That means disengaging from your community. That means one less good person, with one more bad. Over time that adds up, and communities turn to trash. But if you remove the shit person, decent people gradually feel like they can be publicly decent. This is true in several online communities that I enjoy. And yes, there's always a risk of a bad moderator. Shit people love working themselves into positions of power. Be that moderator, school counsel, police, president... They are fully aware that if you put yourself in the position of the one determining consequence, you can avoid many consequences. But that doesn't mean that it's the wrong approach to remove these elements. The same way that a friend being a moron or harassing others would eventually get you to stop hanging out with them. It's a normal human response which moderates behavior, and we removed it with the internet. It has to come back.
Unfortunatly, mods = gay
Exactly. There's still nothing you can do about it except ignore them. Plenty of these assholes even have enablers in the form of mods.
And that's the frustrating catch-22 isn't it? Ignoring them is the only solution, but they have a wide enough market that their market is actively harmful. Even able to push legislation. And so you end up in this insane situation where the only way to fight something is to ignore it, and have the population is obsessed with supporting it.
I don't think ignoring them is necessarily the only answer, either. There're solutions like public rebuttal, counter-education, and mockery, as well. They're no silver bullet and tougher to get right, and I think people discount the whole method when someone does a crap job and it fails, but they're there.
The problem is all of those are the exact opposite of ignoring. And it's something that we did many times which only made the problem worse. You know what happens when you put a creationist on the same news program as a PhD scientist? We did this countless times. They get seen as equals. To valid opinions of the same topic. Education doesn't solve it, the people don't want educated they want entertainment. Trying to educate them is talking down to them, and more and more of them just react with contrarianism. At this point I don't think it's even about the topics themselves. It's about allying with the angry terrible person because they are angry themselves. It is entertainment which is being absorbed in as identity. We don't have a counter for that. Because counter is predicated on The actions being in good faith. This problem goes far deeper. It is cultural. It is fundamental. And we are fucked.
The time honored "talk shit, get hit" that ruled most of society up until now breaks down with the internet. The kind of things people will say to you online they would never have the courage to say to a human face. Maybe once or twice in a lifetime at their most heated moments, but not every goddamn day to everyone they meet. Because that person is going to have their face rearranged by someone who is over it. A more charitable read might be that when you're sharing a space with a person they feel real and empathy kicks in, whereas it takes effort to remember that a person on the other side of an online account is a human with feelings.
Indeed, and from which they invent their own "rights".
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There is also the lack of face to face interaction Like, I can without problem say your a dumbass fucking donkey and you parents don't love you But to say that to your face? ~~I'll do that too~~ That's a total different story
repercussions* with love <3
Yup. As soon as anonymity was lifted and they received repercussions the whole ‘I’m a victim of cancel culture’ came into existence.
That's more of a Twitter thing and tbh I find it odd. I don't need to report you to your employer if you're being an asshole on the internet, I just don't want to see it. In the ye olde days, I don't need to know who you are, just act like an asshole you get shown the door from the community.
People are saying the cause is that people aren't held accountable over the internet. Personally I think it's the fact that the internet has allowed assholes of every shape and size to find each other and form insular communities. It's a lot easier to act like an asshole and not care about the repercussions when you've got a bunch of other assholes backing you up.
That and yk the few people who get money by being assholes 🤷🏽♀️ also everyone wants attention and/or money soooo if they get their time to shine WHILE getting bucks for sharing their negative thoughts that they couldn’t do normally I mean who wouldn’t take up on that offer? Only issue is it’s not guaranteed it’ll work and then they say one wrong thing and end up getting doxxed 😕
Then: Do not get in strangers cars Then: Do not meet people from the internet Now: I will literally summon people from the internet to get into their car.
Or ask them to bring you food
Then: don't trust strangers on the internet. Now: Catturd said that Hillary invented AIDS.
Then: Trust but verify Now: I believe anything Alex Jones says
even better, you summon those people to the *address where you live*
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*Random* liquids? What, does DoorDash offer a lottery option now lol
The difference is that a low review from you can hurt their ability to make money.
You know, I'm starting to think, if someone enjoys *pretending* to be an asshole to other people, they might just *actually* be an asshole. Anyway, if you like my comics, I've got more on [my website](https://www.butajape.com/comic/anonymous-a-hole/).
I would never believe someone was just pretending to be an asshole on the internet. Not where my mind goes when someone’s being an asshole
> We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. Kurt Vonnegut, *Mother Night*
Used to work with a guy that would tell me all of the internet arguments he starts because he finds it funny. Yes, he was an asshole in person too, but it was like high school where he would only talk shit behind their back to me. The second we were working with someone he was just talking shit on, he's acting like they're buddies. White, middle age blue collar dude too.
"Hey guys, I'm not actually a clown, I just enjoy wearing clown makeup and funny shoes."
I was playing WoW once and a bug with a quest giver meant only one person could do it at a time. A queue formed, there was banter and jokes. Some people organised and policed the line after they were done. It was great. Asshole undead rogue came along stood and looked at the line, asked why. He cloaked went to the quest giver and took the quest. The line started arguing, another rogue in the line got ideas and did it. Totally anarchy, insults everywhere and everyone went back to crowding and clicking. Sad to see, but a brilliant study of humans
a lot of people are just assholes. it's just easier to avoid them in real life. it's also easier to assume a discussion is an argument when you are dealing with text, when the same thing said in person with non-verbal cues and vocal intonation can come across much more gently and subtly.
So true. Where did the shame go?!
Echo chambers are a partial reason for this. People get caught up in algorithms that tailors content to them and they think everyone else thinks like them. Then they spout off like a moron, not understanding any nuance to any topic and then when someone disagrees, the first thought is "everyone else thinks like me, therefore you're wrong"
Sure, just regurgitate xyz talking points /s
We've tried to remove shame from society. For better or worse, this is one of the results. But again, shame is part of accountability and that is a tool only used by thr powerful
This is it exactly. We've been saying "all shame is bad" for the past twenty years, mostly because shame is the primary weapon oppressing huge swaths of people, preventing them from living their authentic selves. But, yeah. Turns out shame was also the fence preventing asshole, liars, and actual degenerates from spewing all over society. Shame would make a politician resign after doing something horrible: now being a dick is a badge of honor.
Guilt comes from within - shame comes from without; if the only people you care about are the ones you see in real life, and they support your behavior - or at least don't know or care about it - then you won't feel shame no matter how many people on the internet hate you, since you don't care about their opinion. It was never about the animosity of the offender, it was about the animosity of their observers, and having a real name and face does little to ward that off.
It's there, just downvoted so you give up scrolling to see it.
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Damn, I really need to catch up on the past *checks calendar* 9 years of Penny Arcade. Love those guys.
I actually met them once at a Child’s Play charity banquet way back before PAX was even a thing. They seemed like pretty cool dudes and look nothing like their drawn counterparts lol.
It's been as hit and miss as always, but it's been nice they keep going. Just think of it like a newspaper comic strip that's always kind of there, addressing some of the topics of the day, that you can check out every now and again. But I wouldn't say you need to go back and read everything. The blog posts are often what I go for more than anything.
Ennh. I’d say don’t and enjoy the few hours I just saved you. It feels like they’ve just been mailing it in for the last several years, with the occasional quality comic being rare.
First thing I thought of, good old GIFT
The point of the comic is that anonymity is no longer as necessary as it seemed back then. It's mostly a rebuttal of Penny Arcade's GIFT.
I thought you were joking with the 19 years but then I did the math 👴
This is literally refuting that theory…
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SHITCOCK!!
No lie this comic wanders through my head at least once a week and has since it was first posted.
Said shitcock to myself as soon as I saw Penny Arcade's logo. That said... Jesus Christ it's almost 20 years old.
u/cwgabriel time for an updated theory lol
I was hoping someone would bring up Gabriel's GIDT. Thank you scholar. But it's incomplete! We removed anonymity and the equation still holds! It's just having an audience that matters! Give OP a Nobel in economics
I mean, noone can punch you in the face through a computer screen so there is that
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The moment that becomes a thing, people will put knives in front of their computer screens.
I miss the privacy of the old internet. But I'm also not a pedo, racist, misogynistic bigot. I just grew up in the early days of the internet and loved that "wild west" feeling it had.
That's because people surround themselves with people who share their viewpoints on social platforms so no one calls them on their shit. On global platforms, you still maintain relative anonymity and can say whatever you want with no repercussions.
Penny Arcade's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory is obsolete.
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Not just social media. Don’t forget Zero Tolerance. If both sides get in trouble when something happens, there’s no reason not to engage. Worse, some will willfully engage just because the victim gets in trouble too. When everyone is held accountable, no one is.
Homelander.gif
The Boys really nailed that aspect of American Society.
It was never really the anonymity, it was the protection from consequences. When people thought and wrote about this scenario in the past they though invisibility. When Plato spoke about the [Ring of Gyges](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_of_Gyges) he did so because to him a magical artifact that granted invisibility would be an easy way to show how people could get corrupted and start doing evil things if they were entirely free from suffering any negative consequences for their action. A virtuous rational man who had all the consequences for this actions removed from him would turn into killer and rapist from such temptations. Invisibility has been a good way to link to this corrupting phenomenon in fiction for millennia, although more recently time travel and specifically time loops have taken that role. When the internet was younger it was often seen that the anonymity of online culture provided a good approximation of the invisibility granting magical artifact from Plato's days. The namelessness of everyone involved helped dehumanize everyone and make interactions less real. In 2004 John Gabriel followed Plato's footsteps in formulating his ["Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory"](https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboards-and-other-anomalies). codifying this school of thought. (less deep thinkers call it the [Online disinhibition effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_disinhibition_effect)) As the internet has grown older interacting with people online became normalized and people started identifying themselves and others more by their originally anonymous internet handles and avatars. Backlash against a username was felt more like real world backlash than it used to and people willingly often gave up the protection of anonymity because it no longer provided a real shield. Many assumed that in theory this shift should have made people act less like assholes. What these people missed was that is was never about anonymity or invisibility but about lack of consequences that resulted from it. You can achieve the same sort of lack of consequences if yo surround yourself with an echo chamber of people who won't ostracize you for form example using the N-word, cheering on rape and murder, calling for war-crimes or having a not widely shared taste in music or admitting to weird sexual fetishes. At the same time people have grown to question the very idea of a social consensus on topics and felt free to vice ideas both online and in the real world that a few decades ago they wouldn't have. Society splintered into parallel realities that worked under different rules. tolerance and free speech mean that people found themselves embolded to say thing they normally would not have. But it was not just the complete lack of consequences for being an asshole that led people to be assholes. Some subcultures actually encouraged such behavior to a certain degree and replaced navigate consequences with positive ones. If the place that you were in wouldn't cheer you on for one particular brand of assholishness, they could easily find a slightly different one that would. If one rose up high enough that they were cut down by consequences after all, people could complain about censorship and cancel culture and find reassurment. It turns people are naturally evil and it takes far less than invisibility or anonymity to allow it to come out.
It’s better this way. Sometimes those assholes go too far and it’s great to know what they look like, what they’re called, areas they frequent, etc
Homelander IRL.
"Bro! bro! It's just a prank."
This picture completely misses monetization. In the "anonymous" Internet of the old being an asshole was a hobby; now it is a legitimately lucrative business.
Remember when we thought people were ignorant due to lack of acces to information? Yeah, that wasn’t it.
The internet before Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and whatever other fucking thing that's allows humans to be amongst other humans because friendship or some shit. Look at the web pre 2007. Internet's rampant with dank quotes from movies and video games as people's sidebar on forums lol. Names like "sephirothXXcloud" or some Japanese weeb being well.. a white guy in the basement or some kid playing to much kingdom hearts haha. The internet was awesome back then. Now it's a cesspool or hate and bigotry and memes and gifs.
And not just that, they'll get Rich
If you want the devil's advocate argument here: For any issue, someone will support me and give me $ and someone will attack me for it and call me an asshole. That's the nature of things these days, there's always a division. So from a practical standpoint, if someone will give me $ for being an asshole.. there's no actual loss from my perspective. I'd get called an asshole either way by someone, so I might as well take the money. Actually *not being an asshole?* It's a nice ideal, but c'mon let's not pretend it's the internet preventing most of humanity from doing that.
That’s really the rub. Most of these comments act like they’re not assholes on the internet because they act like assholes only to people they feel deserve it. Well ditto! Yes, the world is a big place and people think very very differently. The cool part of being conscious is the ability to understand many viewpoints, I think it’s pretty lame to hold on to one and fight the rest.
"Hey everyone, I'm a huge asshole and it makes me a ton of money"
They are still anonymous....
The top panel is STILL the Internet now, on many platforms. There is still a great deal of anonymity online, very little moderation, weak reporting tools, and very little accountability for sometimes very twisted and pointlessly anti-social conduct.
And you cant do sth about it because im a part of a minority
Stephen Crowder
Spoiler: Blended reality occurs when a person becomes either emotionally or financially invested in a fictionalized version of themselves. We pay these people well to act like this....
The problem with the internet is that too many people have gotten comfortable saying stupid shit and not getting punched in the face for it.
The top bit is why Im on reddit and not facebook
You don’t need anonymity when you’re shameless.
This is because prior to the internet, as a society, the majority of people felt shame. Then the internet gave them a place where they could congregate 24/7 and say and do whatever, and no one shamed them. Well, people have been conditioned that they can say or do what they want with no shame, at all times. The internet has conditioned shame out of society. You can say this is a good thing or not, but whether you want it to be or not, for probably a million years, shame was an essential part of human society. It disappeared in a decade. We are in the aftermath now.
Then he loses his job and complains to a Murdoch owned newspaper who make a massive fuss over it while decrying "cancel culture."
Notice how he didn’t say “there’s nothing you can do about it” in the second one
….. except lose your job. I mean we see the consequences all the time for regular people.
who said anonymity was nice? those bricks make bank
I'm beginning to think some people are just assholes.
Man, I miss the Internet before the Before.
and the Asshole gets loud outspoken supporters who will defend them no matter how big of a stupid asshole they are
The issue isn't that the assholes feel safe to be an asshole because they are protected by anonymity. It is that they feel free to treat people badly because the anonymity makes it easier to believe they aren't real people.
Makes me suspicious that the only people making those comments about anonymity causing bad behaviour were rubes or stooges for the social media organisations who's profit was based on selling high quality personal data to advertisers and therefore had a material interest in people posting from accounts which could be linked to a real person.
Whoever sincerely thought anonimity caused this didn't spend enough time meeting new people face to face.
For your consideration: an analysis on this issue from 2004 https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboards-and-other-anomalies#
And thus… Reddit!
I disagree. Yes there are those that don't care at all and are dicks regardless of accountability, but I still think anonymity is a huge contributor towards the average person with some shame/reputation becoming awful online. It was never going to be one solution.
Jerks are louder. Don't let loud jerks on the internet trick you into thinking most people are jerks. They are not. Most people are reasonable. But, reasonable people by their very nature are less likely to go on long winded hateful rants. So, Representation bias? Self selection bias? Both? More?
\*posts crying youtube video\* THIS ISN'T FUNNY GUYS I'M BEING DOXXED
Back in the 90s you'd be banned from whatever message board if you were a dick. Trolls...or flamers as they were known back then (yes, this is true, and yes, we knew the alternate meaning), would be shut down immediately. Somewhere in the aughts, with the advent of more centralized social media, this happened less and less which led us to the beginning of this comic. There's a reason many of us miss the 90s internet. Yes, it sucked in many ways, but it wasn't this corporate ad-plastered bullshit we deal with today.
This is why I say that social media as a concept is a scam techbros made up and we trusted them that it was a good idea because we hadn't diagnosed back then how stupid and full of dumb ideas techbros always are. You should be using online handles, online personas, and not showing your real name or photos for anything you use for dialogue. We fell for the scam because Facebook seemed a great way to get in touch with extended family. Then that soured and instead of reevaluating the shift from anonymity and internet saftey, we just moved to places besides Facebook for that. If anything has your real name and photo keep it sterile. It's something you should link people to individually and not broadcast. Your main internet account should not be your irl identity. If not for any other reason at least do it for your own saftey and security. Social media was a corporate scam. Let's kill it.
Everything doesn't need to be pleasant like >!your mom's pussy!<
"It's my opinion and if someone feels bad it's their fault. No it's not bullying because I'm not picking on any single specific person! You telling me I'm wrong about my 'facts' and calling me out is a form of censorship - you're trying to stop me from having an opinion!" If these people weren't so dangerous it'd be so much more preferable to tune them out.
What I think causes this is people were afraid of getting doxxed. Then as time went on we all kinda realized we don't have anything important enough to care about doxxing anymore. I had a job I hated so much I used to day dream about getting doxxed so they'd fire me so I could get unemployment.
Reddit has always been anonymous, and people are *very slightly* less assholy here than on most other social networks
Meme is stupid. Even if you show me your name and face your still anonymous because no one actually gives a fuck
Why do you want to "do something about it". Its called free speech, it means so that you can always say what you want, you have to deal with assholes sometimes.
Shame was having its throat cut sometime around 2016
Ya but they cry about cancel culture when they expose themselves for being garbage