PREFACE:

hi, i'm romanda. i (occasionally) write things that are smarter than i usually am. if you are someone who likes to be mean online, this is a blog about you. i'm giving you the time to write your silly little comment berating me before you've even read this blog or clicking off and going about your day being mean to others. i'm not complaining or sighing at you, it's... how you say? "just words", no? if you need more ammunition to use against me, i'm a fat autistic transgender lesbian, have fun with that now. and as for the nicer, neutral folks, go on. read. i'll await you at the tl;dr.

In the beginning, CERN made the internet.

And from the internet, came the users.

From the users, came communities.

[ONE "ETERNAL SEPTEMBER" LATER...]

From the communities, came the centrals.

From those centrals, came an era known as the "Wild West."

In their times, people would come and go, some would stay, others lurked. 

Practically anything went, the internet was a place where people could be as unhinged as they wanted, with a mask of anonymity... who was there to stop them?

The internet is a place with filth and garbage almost everywhere you go. Constantly you get shoved with brainrot and negativity. The titans of a once-free internet have bowed down to their masters in corporate or federal. We're under constant annoyance of a blockchained future, the age of disinformation is upon us, creators are being left dissatisfied with the directions their careers are being driven, overmonetization, et cetera, etc., ellipses. 

And despite all of that, we're just stuck with it. But despite that despite? Everyone seems to have adjusted fine with these changes over a good 20 years since the start of Web2.0. Sure, there seems to be a big rise in serious mental illness amongst internet users, an entire generation is being raised on the worst content available, people have softened up a bit too much, and maybe people have gotten a bit too out of lane in recent times.

...

Actually, those last two.

Those two have to be something that I've seen come up many times in this era online. Two sides of the same coin, but still under the umbrella of a single question.

Is the internet getting meaner?

[jesus christ romanda you don't need to put the title in the body of every "smart" blog]

(yeah i do)

[fuck off]

( :( )

Now, I know what you're thinking. "Yeah it has, there's way too many -phobic people appearing online!" or "No. People are just snowflakes." And I hear you both, calm down. I believe both sides have few credits to their arguments; for those in favor, it's definitely another repeat of the "edgy" era from about 8 years ago, but this time there's less authority to stop this escalating rampage of hate speech and other types of harassment. And for those who oppose, I've definitely had my fair share of disagreeing on posts where someone attempts to disgrace another whose offenses were either exaggerated light taps or otherwise unnotable. 

Liberally biased, however... (hear that? i think that's you clicking off or going to the comments to insult me EVEN MORE.)

I do side a bit more with the people who are in favor. In my view, the case of a meaner internet is rooted in a tale of politics, billionaires, and sociology. To understand why people believe the internet has become a bit mean, we have to understand what the hell "meanness" is online. We're not talking much about your extremist mean people (i.e, transphobes, racists, religious nationalists,  etc.), we're mostly talking about your textbook cyberbullying (i.e, fatphobes (whether or not you believe it exists doesn't really matter in this blog), gatekeepers, unreasonable critiquers). That's not to say they're irrelevant here, they've got a whole lot to do with this question.

When people say that "the internet has become too mean", it's usually supplied with screenshots of your average everyday user being scrutinized by somebody or people out of nowhere. Sometimes it's just a simple artist showing off their work being berated for the way they draw a character that some people don't like. Other times it's someone attempting to improve their life and health only to be insulted for daring to look the way they look at the time. Maybe it's somebody with scars, a woman dressing expressively, a man with a relaxed life, you get the idea. And most of the time, those screenshots come from three main sources: Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. All of whose userbases have a majority of beliefs that (probably) makes sense as to why they make people worried about the way we're regressing.

Twitter, as we all know, has become the alt-right's new nightlife. After the former pedestaled rocket man's purchase of the company, almost every bad take you can imagine is now amplified for the low low price of 9 bucks. But hey, it's not harassment if it's "allowing free speech", right? That means I can finally promote nazism without being scolded by the SO-CALLED TOLERANT LEFT. I can finally tell that fat woman online who's actually improving on her health to FUCK OFF. And the LIBERAL SLOP on my feed? Clearly posted by a [YOU GET THE PICTURE.] 

There's no place quite like Twitter post-2022, and that's just my bias speaking. Without my shortened visuals, I can tell you that as much as crazy blue-checks and Jimmy McBunchanumbers will post their unhinged shit, there's also a wider span of just unhinged folks on the other side. Don't get me started on the disasters that are "edtwt", "communists", and "stans." Oh what's that? Are you like 1 BMI above average? Literal fat fuck. Death tolls from communist events in history? Literally set up by the ruling class to dissuade our ideologies. Literally DIE if you insult my favorite pop artist.

(Author's note: I identify as a socialist, however I believe that the way twitter communists and other marxists attempt to hide away from the actual negatives that some communist groups have in their history isn't a good look.)

In short, Twitter is about as mean as mean can get on both sides. If you aren't looking for a fight, chances are you're bound to get into a fight anyways. And most of the time this kind of behavior is encouraged or unpunished. You can call people as many slurs as you want, you can bash peoples' appearance as much as you want, you can make as many gimmick accounts based entirely on a race or identity as you want. But saying cis is too much, just to remind you.

Now we move to Instagram, and... boy if you thought Twitter was bad then Instagram is like if you trapped a bunch of early teenagers in a room and gave them microphones. Almost every comment you'll see on a popular reel is just shock humor for the value of shock. Like, holy crap they're gonna spell the n-word slur you can't do that!!!!! oh dear neptune, you can't sex the woman drawing!!!!!!! dude they really just said that to the hurt person!!!!!! Now of course, I'm cherrypicking from examples both reciprocated and personal, most of my suggested reels have reasonable people or genuine funny folks, but there are those where people just decide to say the most despicable shit. And if you call them out, they double down and act like their belief is more true than reason. It's like you took a time machine to 2016 internet and overlayed our modern interfaces on top of it.

In short again, Instagram is a repeat of the anti-SJW era online if you know where to look for those kinds of people. It's not an absolute majority, people can definitely be funny and such, but there are those moldy pieces on the loaf called Instagram.

But TikTok, oho, TikTok is a crazy place. The most liberal space on the modern web right now really likes to show how free they can be progressively. If I had to summarize this early, TikTok is about as liberal as Twitter is conservative. What the fuck does that mean? Well, Twitter likes to promote old traditional American values and nationalist points of views, TikTok has communities that promote older fandom ways and other gatekeepy points of views. 

Like, if you have a headcanon for a character you like then there's a definite chance that multiple people are going to beat your ass for portraying a character in a way that they don't like. Do you have a funky artstyle in anyway? You're definitely becoming the next traceover meme used by other fandoms to show how stupid you draw. You can't enjoy this game or character because too many people are having fun with them. It's just twitter discourse except it's all childish and the only people fighting are gay and depressed aesthetic accounts who think their controversial fandom is free of all evil.

In short finally, TikTok is just playground bullying. But people can actually be really unreasonable to other people just because they don't like the way they do things to their skrunkly scrimblos. But if anything else, at least the majority of TikTok users drive off the Twitter-Instagram types.

So, I've gone through the big 3 hotspots for evidence that the internet has gotten meaner. What does it all mean in the end, really? I mean, like I said for Instagram, we've already seen this type of meanness in 2016. Whether it was satire or not, you could just not give a shit about what was politically correct at that time, that was just for those triggered tumblr SJW anti-men feminists. But I think it all boils down to the fact that times have changed since then. Those old SJWs are now everywhere but without their radical ways as shown in those old "TRIGGERED" compilation videos, more people are aware of what's wrong and right nowadays. People just want to come to the internet and feel appreciated in an a time where it looks like we can all come together and laugh without being berated by some CS:GO bhopper commentary channel at any moment. 

But then all of that is shattered by people who only bring misery wherever they go, most of the time. They'll just come out of the woodwork to fuck you up mentally just because they don't like the way your eyes look or whatever. And where it looked like there was a cutoff to this kind of posting, say about 2018 or so, nowadays it's being promoted and shoved in everyone's face without any hint that there's going to be a cutoff anytime soon. Twitter's long gone, Instagram isn't really keen on doing much, and TikTok is far too engaged in a war over whether or not their fave is truly a Taki eater.

So to really answer the question on if the internet is getting meaner? After all I've said, all I've (attempted to) explain, all I've seen? It certainly seems so, but that's just me speaking as someone who would be subjected to this kind of internet cruelty really. I've been holding off on writing this blog(?) [essay?] for the past week, because I felt like people wouldn't really care for it or straight up clown on me for even suggesting what I'm saying. But looking back on it, if people would like to keep proving the point that the internet has become meaner in recent times, they are free to. Why'd you think I added the preface?

...

Conservatively biased though.............. it is the internet, people aren't expected to be kind or good.

(god just shut up romanda)

[FUCK OFF]

tl;dr: the internet has become meaner (imo) because of the fact that we've become too lenient on free speech that we've forgotten free consequence, also liberal says conservatives make me cry, more at eleven.

EASY COME, EASY GO...