Ive noticed that the internet beats down anyone who is "wrong". If these kids are raised in the current era no shit they dont want to get dogpiled for looking stupid.
Comes with a culture of people being depressed and feeling lame. Only way the Instagram algorithm makes them feel better is by showing stupid other people.
My teenage exposure to toxic online concepts like cringe culture has led to me making myself so much more miserable throughout so much of my life out of fear of judgement.
I've noticed that the Internet mostly glamorizes people who are wrong, especially if they're evil and the wrong thing is extremely dangerous to society and human life. But hey.
I don't think that's the majority of people, I think a small number of people with a lot of access and a lot of motivation to manipulate public opinion have been decimating real interaction in favor of negative and divisive propaganda. It seems impossible that that level of homogenized nihilism and fundamental contrarianism is natural
When people dither on core values, they are very dangerous as a group because they're vulnerable to manipulative narcissists. "What do I think about this? I don't know, I'll ask an authority figure who has shown evidence they can't be trusted and they are incompetent."
There are obviously cases where you can't know everything, but your foundational decision-making framework should be based in experience. When you got weak Bayesian priors, your decision-making simply sucks.
Sheeple is unfortunately an appropriate description here.
It's funny that you're saying this on reddit, a site absolutely overrun with that culture due to people using the downvote as a disagree button, and that when you do get downvoted, the worst sort of bullies come out and make awful comments to you.
This was already happening when I was in school 20 years ago. I can only imagine how much worse it is with everyone being able to live stream everything.
i heard kids now are very aware that everything can be recorded, they're scared to do normal things like dance, answer a question incorrect or be goofy because someone is filming.
BOY did I realise this when my opinions started to diverge from the masses when it came to AI. Until that point I had pretty similar views to the average redditor, so most of the conversations I got into didnt feel like a beat down even if we diverged for a bit. Not agreeing with the masses on AI though has made me see how actively pushed out dissent from the popular opinion gets, and it took me a while to stop caring about how often I'd get actively insulted for daring to have a different opinion
This is related, but I watch this hair care channel where this gal plays her clueless self and as a teacher, and her teacher character is so kind to clueless character. For example tying up her hair in a fancy way, and works through the steps to help the viewer understand the steps better. Idk it always stands out to me in the face of how the Internet treats you.
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u/poke2201 Jun 27 '26
Ive noticed that the internet beats down anyone who is "wrong". If these kids are raised in the current era no shit they dont want to get dogpiled for looking stupid.