Why the Internet sucks (& what you can do about it)

My resolution for 2024: Mock, block, and move on.

Clowns to the left of us, jokers to the right. Here we are, stuck on the Internet. Source: Midjourney.

I used to be a fan of the Internet.

I used to think it would help level the playing field between people with power/money and the rest of us. It would enable entrepreneurship, give voice to the voiceless, provide access to vast libraries of accumulated knowledge, encourage us to engage in intelligent discourse on issues of importance, and allow us to consume as much porn as we can hold without having to walk into an XXX store and wonder why the floor is so sticky. [1]

Social media would allow us to find and build communities of affinity with like-minded individuals, as well as stay in touch with our families, distant relatives, longtime friends, old work colleagues, past or future employers, and total strangers who look really good in yoga pants.

Personally the Internet has served me well. I still get paid to write about it. I'm able to sit here in my sweats, with lord only knows what is going on with my hair, tapping keys on my laptop and getting direct deposits sent to my bank account. And, so long as I still have a few functioning brain cells and Xfinity doesn't crap out on me, I can probably keep doing this indefinitely. [2]

But at some point, the Internet started to get really shitty. It didn't happen all at once, but over time it built into a rolling tidal wave of feces.

ICYMI: Misinformation is the point

Author Michael Gerber [3] says he first noticed it 2015, in the comments sections of his online posts. In his Substack blog, The American Bystander's Viral Load, he writes:

Comment sections are the worst thing to happen to writers since the Income Tax.

For about fifteen years, I had a little hobby running the biggest Beatles fan site on the net. I spent an hour every day reading and moderating, and it was lovely. Trashed comments were vanishingly rare, and for about a decade, we had wonderful commenters; everybody learned a lot, and opinions changed as data was shared. Then, around 2015, something changed. Among all the good eggs, a new type of commenter started showing up, people with bizarre monomanias, indecipherable personal grudges, conspiracies, grievances…and those outliers attracted more of the same. I held out for as long as I could, but last year I had to shut the site down because of Gerber’s Law:

The quality of a media outlet eventually settles at the level of its worst commenters.

Been there, done that, still have the T-shirt

Oh boy. Tell me about it. In 2015, I was working at Yahoo, writing for and later running the Yahoo Tech "online magazine."

When the magazine launched, we were encouraged to engage with our readers in the comments section. At the time we had a staff of 5 or 6, and a monthly readership somewhere between 10 and 12 million.

ICYMI: Marissa & me: A love story in three parts

In this era, some 20 years after it launched, Yahoo still had something between 300 and 400 million daily visitors. This was because near all of them had a) bought a computer that had Yahoo.com installed as the default home page in their default browser, and b) they were not aware that they could change this setting. Nearly all of them were somewhere between 63 and 123 years old. [4]

Your typical Yahoo reader, circa 2015. Source: Midjourney.

If one of our stories happened to appear on the Yahoo home page [5], it would get at minimum a million page views. If it was on a trending topic, or appeared in the "carousel" of thumbnails at the top of the Yahoo page, closer to 5 million. So a single story could easily have 3,000+ comments, with approximately 80 percent of them ungrammatical, nonsensical, angry, hateful, or just dumb.

We quickly gave up on the idea of interacting with these people. And compared with the cesspool comments sections of other popular sites like YouTube or Reddit, they were like Oxford Dons dissecting Evelyn Waugh's use of ironic understatement.

So yeah, Michael, I hear ya.

Substack for subhumans

Gerber's essay, which got me thinking about all of this, was about Substack's pathetic response to the complaints about how it platforms Nazis, especially in light of how it unapologetically censors adult content.

ICYMI: Substackers Against Nazis

Here's the nut graph from the official reply by Hamish McKenzie, part of three-headed hydra that runs Substack:

I just want to make it clear that we don’t like Nazis either—we wish no-one held those views. But some people do hold those and other extreme views. Given that, we don't think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away—in fact, it makes it worse.

We believe that supporting individual rights and civil liberties while subjecting ideas to open discourse is the best way to strip bad ideas of their power. We are committed to upholding and protecting freedom of expression, even when it hurts.

As Gerber points out, it hurts everyone but Substack, which continues to profit from subscribers who support these blogs. Or, in other words: Nazi bros good, naked boobs bad.

I typed “Imagine: No boobs allowed” into Midjourney, and this is what it came up with. You tell me what this is supposed to mean.

"Subjecting ideas to open discourse" is a quaint notion, totally suitable for a high school debate tournament but a complete disaster on the Internet. You might believe you're eviscerating someone's fact-free argument while putting them in their place, but all you're really doing is spreading the stupidity and hatred over a wider surface. You're feeding the algorithms, and the algorithms are not your friends.

One of my cardinal rules is that it's impossible to argue with an imbecile, a drunk, or a lunatic without sounding like an imbecile, a drunk, or a lunatic. So don't do it. Make that your New Years resolution for 2024. Want to make the Internet better? Don't acknowledge these people. Don't interact. Mock, block, and move on. [6]

The best way to deal with Nazis is to cut off their oxygen, shame them into submission, and chase them back under the rocks they crawled out from since a certain orange-tinted politician gave them the 'all clear' sign. It's not to give them a seat at the debate table.

And if all of that fails, shoot them. It worked once before.

What's your plan for saving the Internet, and does it involve yoga pants? Share your wisdom in the comments below.

[1] Just kidding. Not all adult store floors are sticky. (No, really. Just kidding.)

[2] When I die they will find me face down on my keyboard, QWERTY written backwards on my forehead.

[3] In addition to publishing The American Bystander, an actual magazine containing actual humor, Gerber is also author of a series of best-selling Harry Potter parodies, such as Barry Trotter and the Unnecessary Sequel.

[4] I'm guesstimating here.

[5] You would think that working at Yahoo, we had a pretty decent shot at our stories making the home page. But the home page editors had their own little fiefdom, which they guarded like a junkyard dog with a T-bone. We had to literally beg for some of our stories to appear there. And usually they only featured the most clickbaity ones.

[6] And don't give me that line, 'You're just censoring people you disagree with'. We can disagree on plenty of things: If NFL officiating rules need a serious overhaul, whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie, or why anyone in their right mind would want to eat beets. This is about the future of democracy, as well as literal life and death for large segments of our fellow humans.