From: vintageapplemac@gmail.com   
      
   In article <10dnlhc$p446$1@dont-email.me>, ~misfit~   
    wrote:   
      
   > On 27/10/2025 10:27 pm, Sir Tim wrote:   
   > > Dominates the weekend, drives brilliantly ……and gets booed!   
   > > What’s with people?   
   > >   
   >   
   > Yeah. People! The world's turning to shit and I blame social media for   
   accelerating it.   
      
   The tendency for people to be loudmouthed arseholes isn't new and hasn't   
   been introduced by social media, but social media has certainly made it   
   easier for loudmouthed arseholes to make themselves heard than ever   
   before.   
      
   I mean, before social media really took over, there was comment threads   
   beneath blogs and news articles where arseholes would congregate to grind   
   their axes. Message boards and forums, too - chock full of arseholes. And   
   before that back in the 90s, as we'll all remember with fondness..., was   
   Usenet, full of loudmouthed arseholes trolling the hell out of each other   
   and everybody else.   
      
   Thing is, all of those things were relatively siloed away from The Real   
   World in a way that Facebook and Twitter no longer are, so every arsehole   
   with an opinion has a direct line to a huge audience, which triggers the   
   arsehole opinions out of many who read it, and so on, ad infinitum.   
      
   Best thing I ever did was abandon Facebook a good few years ago and then   
   Twitter a couple of years back - almost immediately felt better in myself   
   for not having rancid piss continually poured into my eyes from these   
   dreadful apps. That's the only answer, cut the cancer out from your life -   
   the more of us who do it, the better.   
      
   Something my History teacher said in class in the early 90s has  always   
   stuck with me; "If you want to know what the *really* crazy people are   
   thinking, buy your local newspaper and read the letters page...". That   
   used to be the only outlet that loudmouthed arseholes had to sound off on   
   their hobbyhorses, but involved some effort (writing on paper and posting   
   a letter) so only the genuinely committed and/or unhinged arseholes would   
   invest the energy, but when I got onto Usenet properly about 5 or 6 years   
   later I thought to myself "Hmmm, looks like this is the new Local Paper   
   Letters Page, then, but with a lower barrier of entry", and then thought   
   the same about messageboards about 5 or 6 years after that, and then the   
   same about Facebook about 5 or 6 years after that... And so on. It's all a   
   dead loss, that's the conclusion I've come to. A race to the bottom that   
   everybody's going to lose.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)