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Comment by paulpauper | Hacker News Reader

2 cents. Discourse on the web has declined markedly over the past 2 years or so, imho, whereas things were pleasant from pre-2021, (yes even during 2016 with trump and 2020 and Covid) . Everyone is on a hair-trigger, on either side of aisle (not just the woke, who are often stereotyped as being intolerant). Maybe the Elon buyout of twitter had something to do with it. Or an increased pessimism about society that is hard to nail down precisely.

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I don't think it's just the internet. Covid was a very (ahem) masks-off moment for people realizing just how shitty things are and deciding they don't want to put up with /anything/. I think culturally, we're experiencing burnout, and at least in the US, stuff has gotten a lot rougher economically. People have less emotional bandwidth, and that translates to less self-filtering. Over that same span of time, it's gotten more dangerous to drive where I am, more drive-by shootings, more robberies...

Individuals are /angry/. Societies are /angry/. Our entire species is pissed right now.

well put

To me it seems people have gradually become more angry and hostile over the past 10 years.

I remember in 2014 I genuinely felt like most people I met were kind and friendly. Nowadays there seems to be this sense of mean spiritedness to many people.

Good news though is that there are still lots of friendly people out there. It seems the friendly happy people are the ones who don’t spend too much time online. The terminally online people seem to be the most nasty when you talk to them in real life.

Somehow it seems easy to tell when someone spends a lot of time on the internet or when someone doesn’t. Just instinctively you can tell who is who. Interesting phenomena I guess….

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