Okay, so this is going to be a rant about social media, politics, and internet drama. I’ve realized that attempting to have any form of meaningful conversation on social media about politics is basically futile and will almost never go anywhere with many people. Instead it will likely just devolve into petty insults and potentially a flamewar that is a complete waste of everyone’s time. The way social media works is that they want to keep people on their platforms as long as possible and usually the best emotion for engagement is anger so this leads to an incentive where people want to create content that gets others like them to be angry at another side and then this just creates a feedback loop of people wanting to create rage bait content to pump their social media numbers and people just becoming more exposed to stuff that makes them angry and hateful of the “other side” and this just continues in a toxic cycle. This is a problem on pretty much every social media website, ranging from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. This is mostly the reason why I’ve decided to avoid using any of these platforms other than YouTube and to be honest, I’m getting sick of the flood of useless negative content on YouTube as well.

Quite frankly, both sides of the political spectrum seem to just be completely incapable of listening to a dissenting opinion that just happens to lean to the other side. The “woke” and “anti-woke” mobs (I personally think that “woke” is just a stupid word at this point, it practically just means “something I dislike” now - I hope within a few years that word will be dead and people will just cringe when they see old clips of people saying “woke”) are basically the same people but with different opinions. They both get so angry whenever somebody steps remotely out of line with their opinion and probably spend way too much time on the internet consuming this rage content. In the end, a lot of controversies are blown out of proportion and both sides think they are the “right side” and that they are in the “majority” or whatever which is just simply stupid. I’ve seen people get called “fence sitters” and attacked by both sides for simply offering a neutral centrist take or for trying to be unbiased and actually being levelheaded and doing research about a topic. It just feels that useless low quality content designed to make people angry is given the spotlight and all its doing is making the internet into a toxic dumpster fire.

These internet rage channels and accounts in my opinion have little to no justification in existing - don’t get me wrong, anyone should be allowed a platform to speak and if they want to create rage content then I suppose that is within their free speech rights to do so (as long as they don’t call for anything objectively horrible like violence). But whether they have the right to exist is a completely different question from whether they provide any use. All they do is pollute the internet with more hate and anger and provide nothing positive or fun. They don’t create art, they don’t make fun animations, they don’t really do anything interesting except rally people to get angry at something, and they don’t make anything fun like video games. Yet they seem to dominate the internet solely so that the people behind these channels can profit off of anger and not really add anything to the world. Perhaps this post ironically enough is also inadvertantly contributing to that anger cycle with me getting angry at these people who post rage content but I still feel that these points must be made. People are so quick to demonize another side and downvote a dissenting opinion in a mob mentality that is quite terrifying to see in full action. One of the reasons that I think has led to this growth of rage content is the rise of clickbait and people just losing attention span, people don’t want to listen to a thought out argument that is too long for their attention spans and also don’t seem to look past a clickbait thumbnail or title and just proceed to make their opinion on a subject without even seeing the full context.

This same idea can extend to internet drama, and while there are many serious situations that do not fit in this category, there also still seem to be many situations that are blown out of proportion and just seem to create a tide of toxicity and hate that I think is horrible and useless for society. It just seems that there is a whole community of people looking to prey upon someone’s small mistake and then try to spin it as “______’s CaReEr iS sO oVeR!!11!” and just continue feeding that wave of hate and just contributes to the cancer that is cancel culture (cancer culture is a more appropriate name). I’m aware there are many very serious situations around this time that would be inappropriate to call “cancel culture” (I’m not going to name them here because I don’t want to discuss those topics on this blog) but there are still some that aren’t that big of a deal and are usually someone accidentally saying something that *gasp* some people disagree with! Some people just need to go outside and stop being on social media so much…

Anyway, in summary, internet politics and drama is cancer, social media is cancer, and I should probably stay off that side of the internet and actually focus on productive things. We live in a society, blah blah. I might sound like an angry boomer but I feel that these things are true and I think that we should all strive to just not feed this toxicity cycle.

Some of the ways that I’m going to try to avoid this part of the internet would be to just not use social media like Twitter and Reddit (I never really used those platforms ever so I think I’m good on that front). Perhaps attempting to get away from these platforms and focusing on other interests such as programming would also contribute to me being happier and avoiding this toxic side of the internet and I probably will feel more fulfilled than spending my time scrolling through useless rage content. Thirdly, for YouTube I’m probably going to experiment with using an extension to Firefox to hide suggested videos and other things that are designed to get me into an infinite scroll and waste my time. Hopefully this can lead to my mental health recovering and I can just avoid useless rage content from now on.

Anyway, that’s it, have a nice day.