Everything the Internet touches ultimately turns to shit. At first it seemed like the answer to years of information puddling and speculative science fiction. It was relatively cheap communication with every corner of the world. It was the democratization of knowledge. You could see anything. You could hear anything. You could buy anything. Then, came social media and you could connect with anyone. And this was great unless you were in the high school reunion industry.
But somewhere that turned sour. I guess it was Facebook. MySpace was a little too raw, a little too unformed, it pretty innocent in retrospect despite the fact that it was turned to nefarious purposes off and on over the course of its existence. But Facebook was not like that. You couldn’t really personalize it outside of curating your list of friends. But the relatively clinical feel of the layout seemed to make the experience more logical, disguised as more enjoyable.
So, you take a couple of years and listen to your cousins and high school friends tell all of their worst opinions and worst hopes for the future and you start to realize that not all reunions are worth pursuing. The teams start to shake up and everyone starts migrating to one wall of the gym or the other. Now we’re all lined up with the people that think like us. I think that’s when I realized I was a rat in someone else’s lab. You can sense the stink even if you can’t identify the turd. And even when you find the turd, not everyone wants to admit it’s on their shoes as well.
That’s about when I checked out of Facebook and headed out for new territory, a land called Reddit. It wasn’t anything like Facebook. It required very little personal information as part of my profile. As far as I dug in, I was little more than a unique user name and my post history. But even then, the funneling phenomenon was there. It always felt like my thoughts were being directed into a narrower and narrower range of bandwidth. And it felt like the most toxic users (read: most active) rose to the top of any subreddit.
And then somewhere along the way, the bots came in and they are the most active users of all. They had been there in some form or other since MySpace but a decade in computer technology is like a century of industrial invention. The bots aren’t human, they are hyper-human with one or two opinions and one mission—propagate a train of thought. I didn’t know this why I left but this is what was going on when I got off of Reddit. Even when I dip a toe back in to something like r/PublicFreakout or r/AITA for a day, I can immediately see the effects of non-human users. The videos posted hundreds of times in hundreds of subreddits direct political thought, cultural thought, the general shitty mood of the country and the world.
