Before, the Internet was mostly inhabited by people who wanted to do something specific, and were at least minimally invested - they had to actively use a computer to access things on-line. Nowadays, the Internet is inhabited mostly by people ready to judge you while sitting on a bus, because their phone buzzed them a notification that their friend retweeted a story about some stranger being outraged that some other stranger retweeted a link to your SE question.
I am tempted to think the amount I have used social media and my smartphone has actually declined since 2014, and in the case of facebook I suppose it considerably has, but I'm not sure I haven't just replaced it with other compulsive clicks. So in that sense I must agree things have probably escalated a bit, but I can't point to a single event over the past decade to create a turning point.
A main difference between {MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.} and {reddit, hn, chronological forums, etc.} is that the former heavily rely on following/friending (i.e, establishing your social network) while the latter do not. Thus, the latter are not "social media" in the sense of media existing in a social network.
Also, I find that when replying to something in the former I'm thinking about the person (I know them, in some sense) and what they said, while in the latter I'm thinking almost exclusively about what they said (I probably don't know the person). The latter lacks that social element.
If every forum qualifies, you're using the term so broadly that it's useless. That's what everyone else understands, which is making it seem to you like they're missing something you see. They're not.
For comments that's mostly a consequence of a tree-based commenting model, whose huge benefits over linear model more than offset any "damage" caused by it not being strictly chronological.
What was once a bunch of individual sites, forums, chatrooms, etc., is now concentrated on a few companies (facebook, google, reddit,...), which are not that interested in content, but more into advertising and pleasing advertisers, and earning money, and advertisers, and ads and money, and less on their users.
This meant that everything had to be policitally correct (unless it was deemed acceptable to target a specific group), moderators got more powers, more thought bubbles and echo chambers... and now everything is going slowly downhill.
Hate to be that person, but do you have a source for that claim?
According to a quick search of BLS data, single men outspent single women on food and cars, and comparable amounts on entertainment. Women spent more than men on clothing, but men outspent women overall.
eg:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bridgetbrennan/2015/01/21/top-1...
> Women drive 70-80% of all consumer purchasing, through a combination of their buying power and influence. Influence means that even when a woman isn’t paying for something herself, she is often the influence or veto vote behind someone else’s purchase.
Also this https://hbr.org/2009/09/the-female-economy
> Women make the decision in the purchases of 94% of home furnishings…92% of vacations…91% of homes… 60% of automobiles…51% of consumer electronics
I think the BLS is probably better data.
The way I recall the key events:
• 2008~ – The rise of smart phones and social media floods the internet with less sophisticated (for lack of a better word) people.
• 2011 – 'Occupy Wall St' kicks off a wave of internet populism and paranoia.
• 2015~ – Europe's migrant crisis and a wave of terrorism (ie: Bataclan massacre) inflames the populist anger, making it nastier and uglier.
At this point, social media platforms start to resemble 4chan, but the prevailing attitude in techis still, almost universally, that sunlight is the best disinfectant.
• 2016 – Brexit vote, Trump election. I speculate that people around this time began to question the wisdom of too much freedom on the internet.
• 2017 – Charlottesville 'Unite the Right' rally. There was an explosion of online discussion after the rally where many people defected from online free-speech absolutism.
Since Charlottesville, many online services began to adopt stricter moderation.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open...
I’m 37, but I look back at the internet I don’t really remember anything feeling like an overnight paradigm shift. But, revisiting moments like this buttocks post are like relics frozen in time — and I definitely feel like things are different and more streamlined in the internet now.
The internet became a streamlined hate-filled echo chamber so slowly that I never saw it happening.
I'm not sure what happened to SO, I can imagine their intent was to improve quality and reduce duplication - both bad for e.g. Google ratings or returning users. But the funny posts made it a living community. Removing the fun parts of a site like that makes it sterile.
I mean there's still e.g. codegolf, worldbuilding or the D&D spaces that are kinda funny sometimes.
For starters, it's incomplete. Yes, "some" people think humor itself is offensive. I would wager that there have always been some people like that, since humor itself was invented. How does that relate to what happened to Stack Overflow?
To make your answer complete, you have to connect the remaining dots, and there are multiple ways to do that. Thing is, none of those ways are "obvious".
For example, you could posit that the majority of people find humor offensive today, as opposed to 2014, but I don't see any evidence that's even true, much less obvious.
More likely, you're implying that the majority of people who have influence over Stack Overflow's tone consider the humor itself offensive. If that's obvious to you, it sure isn't to me.
Are you expecting a link to a scientific study proving it, or what?
.. is what I said. Why can't you just leave it at that?
Most of this thread is humorous, or trying to be. I don't see you answering every other post in it.