The admin of sh.itjust.works has been approached but as of yet has failed to reply to concerned Lemmy users. I’m glad Beehaw admins look out for us by cutting off instances that host communities like this.
The admin of sh.itjust.works has been approached but as of yet has failed to reply to concerned Lemmy users. I’m glad Beehaw admins look out for us by cutting off instances that host communities like this.
Absolutely. The edgelord mentality got completely normalized and persisted for so long that people just seem to accept that’s how people on the Internet are.
I used to spend a lot of time in Linux and F/OSS forums and there were so many people who, when posting in screenshot threads, had their browsers open to 4chan. It was just a totally normal and everyday thing for these people. And back when I was a bit more naive and having never heard of it, I remember hopping on and looking around 4chan, like just to see what the hype was all about, and wondering wtf was wrong with all these people who spent so much time there.
I don’t think those sort of folk are specific to F/OSS communities, but moreso as an overall tech culture thing. There’s this myth of “meritocracy” where people think that if your a 100X coder, then that’s all that matters, and being a disgusting shitstain of a person shouldn’t be relevant at all. And when they get chucked off of a project for being a bigoted asshat, they get pissed and spew their bile and entitlement all over the place.
And this is absolutely where it led and where it leads. It feels like it takes its roots in tech enthusiast circles, then bleeds out into other enthusiast cultures, e.g. gaming, comics, etc., and then just poisons everything. And then after something like GG, you get people like Steve Bannon who see how that entitlement and disaffection can be weaponized, and can be used to drive the alt-right pipeline even faster.
Another thing I think contributed to this is that, as millennials, especially early on in Internet adoption, we had this idea of a separation of identities. Our online personas were completely different from our IRL personas because we were conditioned to believe that this was the safe way to go about things. But I think it just gave people a mask to hide behind, and just assume “well, it’s not real life. So I can just do whatever” without ever thinking about there being an actual human on the other side of the screen. And for so many millennials, it seems impossible to change this perspective.
As PA put it so succinctly: