• 0 Posts
  • 7 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 18th, 2023

help-circle



  • I think the answer is pretty complex and gets into why online communities in general become hostile, not just Reddit.

    First off, there are incredible amounts of money and effort being spent to make people feel tribal and hate each other. Destabilization happens by convincing people that those next to them are at fault for their woes, and ensuring they don’t look up at the strings being pulled.

    Second, those who generally aren’t hostile naturally don’t gravitate to places that are, so the gravity of hostility increases by hostile people being there and echoing hostility to those they perceive to be being hostile to them, even if the sentiment is “be less hostile.” It’s baked into meme culture. “Touch grass” is genuinely like “hey go outside, take a breath” at its core, but is now an insult or hostility that gets a reaction of further hostility.

    Third, the world is really fucking shitty in ways outside of most people’s control. You can vote, martyr, donate, but generally the world has gotten to a close point to 100s of sci fi stories we’ve written warn us about, and so some people are just doing what the money in item one is spending, the conditioning works. Feels warm to hate someone. But then for those on the opposite they want to hate what they consider stupid.

    That being said, people are genuinely shitty often, and it’s foolish to pretend that’s not the case. Open source has often been full of pettiness and bickering. Many a GitHub threads are just arguing about someone who wants a feature and is mad at volunteer developers for not delivering it. I could go on a tirade but I’ll end there




  • kautau@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzOn Venus.
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    2 months ago

    Yeah one of my favorite little stories / poems is something I read on Tumblr years ago. It’s currently attributed to Swan Jolras:

    we spent hundreds of years looking up at the stars and wondering “is there anybody out there” and hoping and guessing and imagining

    because we as a species were so lonely and we wanted friends so bad, we wanted to meet other species and we wanted to talk to them and we wanted to learn from them and to stop being the only people in the universe

    and we started realizing that things were maybe not going so good for us— we got scared that we were going to blow each other up, we got scared that we were going to break our planet permanently, we got scared that in a hundred years we were all going to be dead and gone and even if there were other people out there, we’d never get to meet them

    and then

    we built robots?

    and we gave them names and we gave them brains made out of silicon and we pretended they were people and we told them hey you wanna go exploring, and of course they did, because we had made them in our own image

    and maybe in a hundred years we won’t be around any more, maybe yeah the planet will be a mess and we’ll all be dead, and if other people come from the stars we won’t be around to meet them and say hi! how are you! we’re people, too! you’re not alone any more! , maybe we’ll be gone

    but we built robots, who have beat-up hulls and metal brains, and who have names; and if the other people come and say, who were these people? what were they like?

    the robots can say, when they made us, they called us discovery; they called us curiosity; they called us explorer; they called us spirit. they must have thought that was important.

    and they told us to tell you hello.

    The astronauts of today from various nations literally live and work together in shared space stations, less concerned with who’s tribe is better and more concerned with, you know, space, which is vast and doesn’t give a shit about our petty differences