… I received feedback from multiple users that they prefer to post in fucking retarded DM chains specifically because they don't want negative feedback on their posts. They have been discouraged from using this webforum as a forum because they do not feel safe to post as a result of these incessant notifications and looming persistent scorecard ratings.
The people hiding in DMs to avoid being dumbrated by Hollywood Hulk Hogan and Android Raptor or whoever were
never here to use the site as intended, they want a ‘free speech’ hug box to jerk off in. They’re not going to be encouraged to interact with other users just because they’re not being pinged every second about how shit they are, because this site is the kind of place where we tell them for free. These are the same kinds of people who you decry as incapable of reading nuance in your own opinions - they don’t want nuance or discussion, they want an environment that caters only to their sense of truth. Take away DMs, well they just go to Discord, which we know is happening anyway.
Like the thumbs up on Twitter, reactions don’t cause mental illness, they exacerbate existing insecurities. People who fear disagreement or not fitting in with a group of Internet strangers already have a serious complex, and it’s telling that the people who feel the most passionately about negrating are invariably borderline schizophrenic. If your sense of security is destroyed by stickers - why not troon out? And then inconveniencing a whole bunch of people by wallowing in your own pettiness would be perfectly on brand.
People splintering into groups or private spaces is a natural and inevitable product of the unironic diversity of the site. This apparent need to make everyone play nice with each other or else you should know
more than anybody doesn’t work. It’s the perpetual utopia around the corner of every futurist and technocrat. But there’s simply too many different people who don’t want to deal with each other precisely because it’s a linked community, not a hivemind. Even individual threads (for example in the Beauty Parlour) have a strict posting culture that if you deviant from, it can get nasty. You even had to make a male free zone for women to complain about men that people criticised directly (and I think unfairly) exactly
because it contradicts this thinking. Mass debates is a shitshow because it is the natural consequence of having a bunch of people from different backgrounds passionately arguing about Jews and autism - these sorts of things as far as I can see, are a far higher barrier of entry to site participation than being notified Secret Watcher gave your post a trash can picture, even if it’s just a symptom of the true cause.
This whole debate is silly, but the upshot is about 70% of the site is just left in a lurch wondering exactly how you perceive your own user base.
