The Social Internet Is Dying

 Ides Of June 2021
Can The Internet Survive?

The troll problem has more than gotten out of control. I'm seeing a torrent of disturbing behavior on sites that I practice writing or generally socialize on. It ranges from run of the mill perverts and Manosphere whiners to future serial killer stuff. It makes people's lives harder.

You're thinking that I'm referring to Facebook or twitter. 

Well...no. 

Facebook is a garden community at this point; half my "friends" circle are people I've known or met in real life or at least had personal correspondence with. And twitter has done some excellent work purging extremists from it's site and empowering you and me to purge them from our timelines ... as it should have been doing for some time, but is now doing because it's hemorrhaging users.

They can because they have the money to pay a "troll patrol" to respond to complaints and enforce basic rules of conduct. (Sites that are their own entities, say newspapers or retailers, have their own agenda for comments. Typically it's "throw that dead squirrel in Zuckerberg's yard and let him clean it up.")

Sites like Quora or reddit? Or your favorite vBulletin site where you talk about, say, novels you read or trading Blu-rays? Not so much. They're understaffed, underpaid, and wandering the landscape vulnerable to sniping or just attacks by trolls.

And trolls know this. Like any bully, their game is about finding easy targets. So sites where there's no real quality control but a devoted fan base are playgrounds for the worst among us.

And everyone pays the price. The events of January 6,  2021 at our nation's Capitol Building could be summed up as the inevitable result of way too much time online.

This is personal for me. The point of the internet is having more than two or three sites to log into to chat about what you want to chat about at the end of a long, hard day at work. I started programming specifically because I loved the power of creating my own corner of this new universe with my two hands and my brain, and I loved seeing everyone else do that too. 

It seemed like a good idea at the time, didn't it?

Who even has a personal site anymore? I own mariocaiti.com because I'm distressed by the idea of what someone could turn it into if they got it. So I figured it should be a portfolio, except it's really just links to Behance, Github, and the others. People's personal sites are going the way of DVDs and reel to reel recording equipment - a great idea that the future has no desire to keep alive.

And public sites are unlikely to proliferate in this environment, either. You would have to be the most twitchily enthusiastic of masochists to want to be a devops or contact center rep for public facing sites like reddit or YouTube. The trauma the aforementioned "troll patrols" endure is documented, and it's bad.

So what's the solution? Is there one?

Blogs (ahem) and eMail communities like Substack are great if you already have a IRL following - otherwise, good luck.

Gated communities like Medium or newspaper sites have promise - trolls really, really hate paying to play, and a debit card plus phone number as bar for entry would be great for eliminating abusers. A service to centralize payments and pool incentives to subscribe (subscribe to 2 newspapers and get a 3rd free, something like that) is needed.