There was a tipping point somewhere.
I’m not sure where or when, but at some point, social media hit critical mass and the platforms realized that the best way to drive those weekly active users was to make them really fucking mad at each other, so they optimized the feeds for outrage and conflict farming.
And boy, did humans fucking take the bait.
The lowest common denominator people with a keyboard have learned that it’s perfectly acceptable to behave like your worst self from behind the screen. They’ve channeled all of their insecurity around not fitting in into assaulting strangers with insults and vitriol while never experiencing the consequence of getting punched in the fucking mouth for throwing those words at someone who might actually hold them accountable for them.
No one seems to be able to read context clues or fathom that not everything on the internet is written expressly for them. Bean soup theory pervades, and if you don’t spell out every nuance, exception, edge case or variation on a fucking theme for every post you write, some banshee ends up in your replies shrieking about how you “forgot” something or didn’t consider some obscure, alternative scenario.
People can’t interpret sarcasm. They can’t fucking scroll past things that aren’t for them without making some snarky comment. They can’t let people have harmless joys or share innocuous life moments without lobbing insults because they didn’t get enough at-bats as a schoolyard bully when they were kids.
Then there’s the whole crew of people who weaponize their own mental health or neurodivergent status and struggle to understand the difference between the reason you treat people like shit and the excuse you’re making to do so. Many of the rest of us also have had mental health challenges or are neurospicy (including me) and still somehow manage to go to fucking therapy and otherwise figure out how to not be an absolute dickhead to everyone we come across.
These days, I can’t go a fucking day on the internet without being called fat, bitch, whore or cunt, sometimes all in the same 24 hour period and 99% of the time by men (and no, it’s not just the MAGA brigade). Most weeks involve some kind of threat to get me fired, hurt or harm me or my family, or otherwise try to adversely impact my career.
The usual response to shit like this from people is “just block”. And I block with impunity and without hesitation. But honestly, after several decades online, why is the expectation that I have to bar the door multiple times a day because people have forgotten how to behave like fucking human beings? At a certain point when you’ve actually done the work to build the platform and the audience and the community, the cost-benefit analysis of staying there vs. spending all of your waking hours moderating the fucksticks in your comment section just doesn’t net out. And don’t tell me about the “bots” either because yeah, there are plenty of those, but there are also plenty of real, life human beings who just happen to be awful people and love to demonstrate same loudly and often because social media gives them a free pass to do so.
I don’t know what the answer is. I vacillate between wanting to bail from all of it and refusing to cede the online territory to the assholes by giving them the satisfaction. But something has to give, because the people who want to build community are getting drowned out by every petty betty with an attitude problem and every dude who is working out his inferiority complexes via keyboard abuse.
I used to try to remind people that there are human beings on the other side of the keyboard in hopes that it will remind them to behave more humanely, but the more I observe this phenomenon, the more I’m convinced that’s a feature and not a bug. These folks want to hurt people. They’ve made an entire personality and hobby of it on the internet. And having a living, breathing human target they can wound is exactly what they want.
I know people are hurting. I know life is incredibly difficult for a lot of people right now. But I also don’t think we need to give endless oxygen and effort to people who seem bent on breaking every single unspoken rule of social contracts to show up in communal spaces like a fucking wrecking ball.
I’m taking a little bit of a breather from some of the social platforms, and when I get my bearings back, I’ll back to playing custodian of my online spaces…but who’s to say how long I’ll have the patience for that anymore either?
Anyway. Go be nice to someone on the internet today. I promise it’ll stand out because it’s sure the exception these days.
Love and angst,
Amber
If I could make everyone, before they press send, say what they wrote out loud, it might cut a third of the traffic. But who am I kidding? The worst people are proud of their hot takes.
Yes to all of this. I think a lot of us are disengaging more online for all of the reasons you mention in this article.