I say this as a person who LOVED the internet in the early days. The early days of the internet was humanity’s peak. I say that with full belief in the statement. The early days of the internet allowed us to see just how creative, fun and wonderful humans can be. We created new ways to have fun together. Online games were mostly free and didn’t use psychological hijacking to squeeze money out of you. Sites like Bitmagic paved the way for pages like Newgrounds. Community created flash content out of pure passion. Nothing was created to go viral. Everything was created in the hopes that there was just 1 person out there that might watch it and enjoy it. There was so many things back then that really shined a light on the good side of people. Sure there were ‘trolls’ and toxic things, but you had to generally seek that stuff out on your own. If you ran into a troll elsewhere, you shrugged it off and moved on. They were a very small part of the overall experience.
Today? It’s just hell. The internet is hell. It’s no longer fun. We’ve been funneled into 3 or 4 websites which are over run with censorship. Sure you can create anything you like, but make sure you don’t do anything to upset the gatekeepers! Wanna play a game? Go ahead and install it on your mobile device, it’s free! It will flood your screen with bullshit so you can barely see what is going on. That’s okay though! The game will play itself with very minimal input from you in hopes you accidentally click something to spend money on absolutely nothing.
Recently, the Phillies played the Colorado Rockies in a series where we swept them out. The Rockies are bad. I mean really, really bad. As of writing this, they have a current record of 9 – 45. They won 9 games this season and lost 45. That is historically bad. The last teams to start a season this badly were in the early 1900s and late 1800s. Anyways, we swept them out and I sat watching our post game show and had the thought “Let me check their Twitter replies”. Each team in the MLB will post the final score of the game to their Twitter. On these posts, you will find a shit show of posts from both sides. I’ll be honest, a part of me wanted to see the fans of the Rockies write in despair. I wanted this because I thought it would make me ‘feel good’.
That’s when I seen something that made me take a step back and do some self reflecting. The Rockies Twitter page has replies disabled for their posts. Part of me couldn’t believe it while most of me completely understood why. I’ve looked at damn near every team’s Twitter page and I could not find one which had replies disabled. After the quick disappointment faded, it allowed me to look at myself and question: “Why?” Why did I wanna go look at that? What would I gain from reading their fans feeling bad about their team? I felt genuine shame.
I went down this rabbit hole of guilt when something else hit me. Is it me, or is it the internet that conditioned me to do that? The only reason a person like me would go to seek that out is because the internet conditioned me to do it. Before Twitter, I wouldn’t go seeking that because there was no easily accessible channel for such toxic discourse. These ‘final score’ posts might as well have a bright neon sign on it with a fucking bulls-eye on it that says “COME BE AN ASSHOLE!” I’m not kidding, go to a random Team’s twitter page and find their latest ‘final score’ post. Especially one for a loss. It’s basically 4chan lite.
With the way the Rockies’ season started, I don’t blame them at all for disabling this. In fact, I think EVERY team should do it. If you take away people’s ability to be shitty to each other, everyone wins. There is no reason to have replies on for those posts. If fans want to have a genuine discourse with others, they will find ways. If all teams disabled replies on these posts, it would help stop toxic behavior and maybe help us heal. Recondition us to not seek that harmful bullshit out and finding joy in other peoples pain. This can then be broadened to apply to EVERYTHING. People are too irresponsible to wield the power of the internet safely. We’ve proven that.