This Bluesky skeet encompasses a lot of what's wrong with the modern internet
One of my biggest problems with the modern internet, aside from the fact that it's been condensed to a tiny handful of unstoppable data-collecting and advertisement-spewing juggernauts, is that everyone on it is...kind of a jerk?
You don't have to look hard to find this behavior, and it's a big part of why I've pulled away from most online discussion spaces. Go to reddit, for example, and poke around below the sea of now-hackneyed, deeply unfunny, top-level joke comments, and it shouldn't take you very long to find an asshole.
For example, I just opened reddit in an incognito tab, and this is the very first post: https://www.reddit.com/r/whatisit/comments/1x0d0xc/its_like_a_hammock_between_two_benches_but/
And this is one of the replies to the very first comment:
The fuck do you mean you don’t know if it’s the answer.
If that quote is from a product listing, it’s the answer. If it’s not, what ambiguous ass web page did you find with confident but untrustworthy descriptions of urban park furniture?
And don’t fucking say AI.
They sound pleasant.
I know that people being jerks on the internet is hardly a new phenomenon, but Back In My Day™, it used to be limited largely to trolls. "Don't feed the trolls" was a ubiquitous mantra, and people who routinely exhibited such behavior would silently disappear, eventually, ignored by the communities they sought to provoke into worthless "discussion."
The difference now is that a shocking percentage of people online present this behavior by default in all scenarios, and instead of simply being ignored, are constantly engaged with, to the point of many discussions devolving into people feverishly arguing about nonsense that is, at best, tangentially related to the primary topic at hand.
For a good taste of this, go spend some time -- some real time, don't just flip through two threads -- on ResetEra, a community with good leftist politics populated disproportionately by insufferable pseudointellectuals who spend all day in vitriolic back-and-forths about everything from video game Metacritic scores to sandwiches to children's movies. It becomes an exhausting forum to read, over time, which is probably why I don't go there anymore.
All of this is the backdrop to a single "skeet" (yes, this is actually what Bluesky users call "tweets," a portmanteau of "sky" and "tweet") that I came across when reading something linked to in a Discord.
It feels worth noting that Bluesky is among my least favorite places on the internet. Whereas X proudly wears its Nazism on its sleeve, and thus can be summarily ignored as the trash that it is, Bluesky, as with ResetEra, has good politics, but spends a shocking amount of time engaged in tiresome, performative moral purity testing, lending validity to Michael Kinsley's oft-paraphrased quote, "Conservatives are always looking for converts, whereas liberals are always looking for heretics" (this being "liberals" in the American politics sense; i.e., non-conservatives).So it wasn't a surprise that I came across a skeet like this on Bluesky, the perfect encapsulation of much of what is wrong with the modern internet, a concise skeet whose totally valid request is couched in the douchebaggiest of language:
I've censored the photo and name because the skeeter's identity is irrelevant. The only context needed here is that this skeet is in response to one that included screenshots of a lengthy reddit comment. For what it's worth: a.) the screenshots are difficult to read, b.) people should use alt text or provide a link to the source material, and c.) I really don't think this person was trying to come off as a douchebag. I think it's simply become so normalized that everyone talks this way now that, well, everyone talks this way now.
The reason this skeet immediately caught my eye and stuck with me is that it manages to hit everything about what makes internet discourse shitty in so few words:
- "I can't read any of this." -- whining.
- "Why is there no Alt Text?" -- indignant.
- "Please be considerate" -- commanding, accusing.
- "always use #AltText" -- chiding, performative grandstanding.
- "especially for text in images" -- doubling down.
It's beautiful, in a way. There are so many boring, neutral ways this person could have made this request, but they chose not just one, but five distinct points of aggression, because this is just how people are now. Everyone's always on both defense and offense, because people spend all day, every day, immersed in the outrage machine.
I would like to be less tired on the internet. A modicum of consideration before posting would go a long way there, I think. If you ever get to the point in your life where you're like "I'm a mid-30s guy with no kids and I'm writing a furious dissertation about why the Toy Story 5 trailer actually looks bad, you fucking idiot," maybe just pump the breaks a bit on your onlineness, lest you end up sounding like the above skeet every time you want to say something innocuous.