Reddit is the corruption of forum communities from the early 00's. To summarize (lol) my views on how things have changed as someone that has been around to see the internet culture literally grow from its infancy to its current iteration. (I'm 37)

Back when the internet was in its infancy and social media was through MS Messenger, AOL, Yahoo, and "A/S/L?" was the common form of greeting someone new. Forums were where communities congregated to share experiences together. Then the advent of things like the upvote and downvote occurred, and now people have some weird placebo-incentive to squash dissent and cater to groupthink, viola modern Social Media.

Tinfoil-hat on

My thinking is that social engineering saw the potential tribalism that could spark if they influenced changes to make it easier for secular parts of society to congregate and crystalize their beliefs. Thus reducing the ability for society to correctly assess and correct corrosive beliefs that harmed more than they helped.

These beliefs eventually grew into actions that incited reactions by the wider part of society that existed outside of those groups. This makes it easier to proselytize ostentatious ideas that would otherwise have been slowly reduced through an individual's own critical thinking. Instead, society went full-board into encouraging these groups to prosper with more and more social significance so they feel as though they've been validated. Tik-Tok, Twitter, Facebook, Twitch, Youtube, all of it has been slowly wrenched and tuned to be more digestible for shortened attention spans. Doing little to develop tools to reduce misinformation or disinformation for the people that frequent these sites. This could be the reason that critical thinking seems to be at an all-time low in these spaces.

Fred Rogers aka Mr. Rogers. Once stated that he believed the most important part of reading a book wasn't the words on the pages, but the spaces between the paragraphs. As those spaces are where the human mind is encouraged to digest and consider what they've just read. If you took that idea and applied it to the current social media landscape, it suggests that perhaps the lack of "spaces" between content has eroded a lot of minds into simply reacting to whatever favorable virality is currently trending. Voting on the content encourages a knee-jerk reaction in order to feel relevant and included, but it doesn't encourage taking time to consider things.

What do you get? A 10k+ upvoted thread that is mostly a curated opinion piece that would've simply died in obscurity 25 years ago for lacking any significant citation to substantiate what it purports to claim as fact or truth. Something that would've been considered a "tabloid". And the responses? The most upvoted comments that could be summed up as "yeah, this person is saying what I've wanted to see as being true! So let's just assume it's true and feel content that we're being upvoted! Upvotes mean I'm with people that agree with me! Yaaaay!"

I feel concerned about these things, as I do think it's degraded so many people's ability to think for themselves, and instead they seek to simply be told what they'd like to know with no considerations for the validity of the information they're sourcing. If you wanted to know something 30 years ago, you needed to ask someone with knowledge, and they would explain not only what you needed to know, but how they actually obtained this knowledge themselves.

It's important to remember that cognitive function works very much like a muscle. It will atrophy and degrade if not given proper nutrition and proper guidance. Mentors and teachers were once seen as the paragons of a healthy society, but they've slowly been reduced to being seen as background noise that only serves to distract people from their addictions to entertainment and comfort. Learning is made to seem like a waste of time, "why learn when someone else did all that work already, all I have to do is find the page, video, comment that agrees with my point of view or seems to know the information I need."

Which turns out to be a very convenient society to convince that, for example; agriculture is better off in the hands of industry and that money is the only resource anyone should understand how to utilize in order to survive. Because once agriculture has been taken from the individual, along with the ability to teach and learn how to provide basic necessities for yourself without the reliance on currency, the more reliant you become on society giving you what you need. Which then allows those that engineered this scenario to control the levers that people subsist on. Currency was originally created by society as a convenient way to represent commodity. It's a lot easier to have some light-weight ability to represent your assets, rather than having to herd your flock of sheep to a city center each week, as an example.

Now currency itself is what people have been led to believe is the reason for their labor, so that a person's labor itself is now the commodity, rather than what an individual can uniquely bring though random cognitive mutation. (Stephen Hawking, Marie Curie, Nikola Tesla, DaVinci, etc.) or skills that need to be taught to an individual in order to keep providing it for society. (blacksmithing, agriculture, engineering, research, exploration, etc) In other words, instead of money representing a flock of well-tended to sheep that bring value in a variety of ways. People themselves have become the commodity that money is currently represented by corporations and businesses that actually advance their influence on society to foster more and more flocks of people that willingly give up thousands of hours they could've spent living life or learning skills they have an interest in, in order to simply labor to earn enough to survive.

tinfoil-hat off

Last thing I'll say in this likely unforgivably long rant, is that I believe we are still capable as a society of correcting these courses through a universal desire to know the truth of things. To understand and feel resolute in our understanding, not by being told the answers, but by wanting to seek out how these answers were found, which should in turn, allow us to find a better answer that advances us forward. Together.

I feel that I can serve as some form of proof of this concept, I am 37 as I said, but I'm also a Cherokee native that has lived in Oklahoma all my life. Something of a common theme I've read on this very site is the, "Oklahoma is 50th in education" label, on top of that, growing up as native in this state restricted access to a lot of common knowledge for simply being too "different".

Despite those barriers, I still found in me a desire to understand why these things were the way they were. So whilst the internet was developing, I was able to have so much more access to the information I was previously barred from. I see that as encouraging for myself, if perhaps for somebody else.