Turns out, people are just stupid and the more information access you give them the more they can reinforce their stupidity with other idiots’ opinions
Ex-fucking-actly. Like I said in another recent comment, the problem with the internet is that it allows the worst people you can imagine to form communities, and instead of them essentially dying alone and shunned by anyone who isn’t a complete psychopath they start to think that their fuckwittery is not only acceptable but common
Yeah it can even be less sinister. The dumbest people can all hear someone of perceived authority (like someone on Rogan for example) who says “there’s actually no proof the world is round” and the idiots can be like “I knew it! I was right all along!” And they’ll never accept anything else because they were “proven right” that one time
It’s the complete degradation of (capital T) Truth
Oh yeah absolutely, although more often than not those people also tend to have hair-raisingly awful “political” opinions (ie. opinions which only qualify as politics for conservatives, but would usually land anybody else in jail)
Yeah it’s all bundled together. Before the internet, there were established authorities on certain matters. Now any idiot can go on twitter and claim to be a MD and fool a bunch of other idiots into thinking vaccines are deadly and used for brainwashing.
Like I said before, it’s the complete erosion of actual Truth
The human brain doesn’t seek logic, it seeks validation and a storyline to explain how you feel. It will whip up stories very easily, but even easier if they’re supplied.
So this system has been exploited to the extreme. It’s our largest vulnerability as a species, that someone can make us feel an emotion and then attach a story to it, and our brains will adhere to that story without question.
We’ve had libraries since long before the Internet. I don’t think lack of access to information is as much to blame as lack of time and/or willingness to make an effort.
Also, we live in a culture that celebrates, glorifies and rewards stupidity to an insane degree. There is simply very little incentive for people to try and improve themselves.
Pretty sure it’s a complex soup of dis/misinformation, conservative (not necessarily the political type) leadership, laziness, indifference, lead poisoning, and a kaleidoscope of logical fallacies.
I have to admit, even while finding the crooked corners of the internet with rotten and CJ, I did hold onto the belief that access to information was going to lift the masses up out of ignorance. I knew about flamewars since the BBS days. I knew about trolls since rm -rf advice was given. I, in my naivete, seriously underestimated the effects of these phenomenon on society writ large.
IIRC there are around 51Million americans thats have low IQ (~80 and less). I imagine its worse in developing countries. Not much you can do about them.
The problem with internet was always that access to bullshit is way easier than access to information. Except now the difference gets exponentially bigger, and bullshit is indistinguishable from truth.
Late 90s to 2000s was the decade of internet glory. Then social media and big tech took over. Now with personalized feeds and searches, along with conflict promoting engagement metrics, many people spend their time within echo chambers and those chambers keep getting more partisan. On top of that, rampant misinformation has made it all the more difficult to separate fact from fiction.
But you had to deliberately look for BBSs that contained what you wanted. Platforms weren’t as all-encompassing as they are now compared to the scattered and independent phpBB groups of yesteryear. People didn’t have social media in their faces all the time. You had to dial-up and go looking for whatever it was, whether it was AIM, ICQ, or your favorite forum.
No, social media in the super-limited context that it existed in 20 years ago wasn’t an issue. It absolutely is an issue today because of their size, popularity, ease of access, and definitely the algorithms.
Lemmy can have its fair share of echo chamber syndrome. For example, almost nobody here vocally likes Reddit, and if you post anything pro-Reddit, it’s likely to be met with a lot of negativity. I’m anti-Reddit too, for the record, but it’s good to acknowledge tribalism even when you agree with the tribe. But the nice part is Lemmy can’t have competing echo chambers nearly as easily as Reddit can because we’re so much smaller.
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