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No. 24156
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I can't fit in with anyone. Any community (except for maybe this one, but that's not saying much that I can fit in here and not to metapost but people don't really hangout here, it's more of a check twice daily site and the IRC is full of non-NEETs who are always talking about their university experiences or whatever). Every time I find one I think I can finally fit in with and call "home", something always ruins it for me, the closest I came to fitting into a moderately fast place was the infamous Krautchan /int/ (and it's spinoffs for a short time after it died) but the problems that it had grew and grew until it wasn't fun to browse anymore. I either find a place that I think looks good on the surface that is intolerable once I get to know the community, or is intolerable on the surface. Some examples of the former: at first liveboards (sites running on Meguca and Doushio software, even those sites themselves) seemed like an okay place to hang out and get my social interaction and be less lonely but after sticking with them for about a year and even getting addicted to them at one point I realized how repetitive and cancerous they could be. It didn't help that people liked to latch onto identities and the drama that comes with that, the post quality was also a bit low with the users treating it more like a circlejerk-oriented Discord or IRC channel. Another thing that really bothered me about these was how often off-topic discussions came up, despite a lot of them being otaku-themed and a lot of the users at-least liking anime, things like current events, ethnicity, nationality, sports, meta for other websites (usually 4chan, but sometimes another liveboard they're having drama with) and meta in general were often discussed and often in a very low-quality and non-civil way described as "shitposting" by the users but often with very little humor and played straight unlike the term often entails. These are problems that likely plague every online community but the instant gratification nature of the format probably exacerbates them. Another one that seems deceptively better is pretty much almost every social media website with the exception of Hacker News, (which actually isn't bad but has it's own problems and posting style that you may or may not like depending on your preferences, the technical focus and serious tone probably will turn people off) as people's interests are more varied and posting style is varied with some people being friendly and respectful and because of people's varied interests a lot of the topics I complained about were contained in their own little areas that usually could be ignored but it has very heavy issues including how corporate the platforms typically are, privacy issues (ranging from storing your data to practically turning you into a product to be sold, but I'm sure you've heard all this before), the variety of users with interests leads to a lot of normalfags using the services and creating a consensus similar to the one many people are trying to avoid but this also can create very strange communities with very extreme unagreeable opinions. Another thing that keeps me off of social media is the culture of bullying it has created or at least enabled, which is disastrious when paired with real life identity like it typically is. That is probably the single biggest thing keeping me off of it, nobody cares about a flame war on some random imageboard but on social media fights can seriously affect people's lives. That culture of serious bullying and mobbing also tends to pair with an agenda and people are fighting over shit that doesn’t affect them; all that and I just don’t like the “memes” that people love to use as a substitute for being funny or witty and often to push their own agenda. The median age of users on these are probably quite young, honestly. I’m not implying I’m special or above anything but it’s honestly depressing that this how people actually are without any pretense for others they have in real life. Imageboards themselves are pretty much on life support, with very few I’ve seen having regular users and those that do are often an impenetrable community. Same with textboards, with most getting several posts a year at best. Platforms that are just intolerable are discord and similar protocols, comments on articles and videos and pretty much anything contained within an app/program like steam or amino all for obvious reasons. The only major thing I haven’t tried yet is the good old forum which is pretty dead for the most part but apparently still has some pretty large communities.
I’m probably just complaining about human nature and society here but I wish everyone wasn’t so negative and cynical, I’d give anything to go back to when the internet was fun.
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