Yeah Daniel’s trolls are honestly some of the worst. Idk if it’s like a generational thing or whatever but I find it super weird how eager some people are to meet Daniel in real life to fuck with him.
It kinda is a generational thing. Most Kiwis (a bit of a generalisation, but culturally I think it's correct) are old enough that they remember a time before the internet, or at least a time before the internet became the monster that it is now. So we have that grounding, and were introduced to the internet later in our lives when we knew what reality was. So I think people my age and maybe a decade either side have this attitude that the internet and IRL shit are to be kept separate. We would go onto classic 4Chan or SA or PoE or Newgrounds or wherever and have this attitude that the internet was a playground there things didn't really matter all that much. SA's tagline was "the internet makes you stupid", on KF being "mad at the internet" is taking it too seriously. Because for most Kiwis the internet has always been this fenced-off thing, its own little world. You kept your online identity separate from your irl identity, that's really, really important.
I got my first broadband connection in 2002. People born that year are now old enough to drink in the US. For people of that generation, the internet has always been part of real life. Having a device in your pocket that connects you to almost everyone on earth and all of human knowledge is as natural as breathing and eating. It's hard to get into the head of someone for whom the world has always been this way. But for a generation babysat by iPads rather than the TV, there's no separation.
That's why Zoomers do things that we find so baffling. It's why they overshare. It's why they have no opsec. It's why they are baffled and frightened by internet anonymity and want to abolish it. It's why they think they have the right to say and do whatever they want without people making fun of them or being mean to them. For me, calling someone a nigger on the internet and calling someone a nigger in real life would be totally different things, I've done the former many times but I have never, and never will, do the latter. But if you consider online and irl to be the same thing, then being told "lol calm down it's only the internet" makes no sense. It's why they fear and hate KF so much, the fact we keep our opinions online isn't relevant to them, we have expressed wrongthink by chatting amongst ourselves just as if we chased them down the street calling them a faggot, even though almost none of us would dream of doing such a thing. And it's not cowardice the way they think it is, it's that most of us would consider that, well, rude, but calling someone a homo jew retard on the internet is just jokes, it's our own internet shibboleth, our way of speaking that is separate in the online space and has its own moral rules.
And it's why they are willing to cross those lines. Almost all trolling that spills over into irl harassment is from people who are so young they don't see any difference. The online identity and the irl identity are interchangeable, moving from one to the other is so seamless they don't think about it. When I saw someone on TV as a kid, they didn't seem real. People on TV weren't the same as people in meatspace. But if you grew up with the means to interact with anyone, at any time, seeing Dan Larson on Tik-Tok is the same as seeing him at the end of your street, and if you're a psycho, it means you can go and fuck with him in person.
What I'm saying is, these kids need to get off my lawn, I'm trying to yell at this cloud.