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  • I'd definitely agree, especially regarding driving. Last summer I was talking with my insurance agent, and wondering why auto insurance rates were going through the roof, to which he responded that accidents are surging. I live in a small town, and haven't really seen to much of an increase. Then I went down to visit my mom last weekend, and holy shit now I know what they're talking about. People driving like absolute lunatics, much worse than when I lived down there, especially during rush hour. Another side note, COVID broke people experiencing concerts. It used to be people dancing, moshing, singing along, etc. Now, people just stand there, usually on their phones, and look at you like a nutjob if you dance. I saw David Gilmore at the Hollywood Bowl a few months ago, and aside from people talking straight through the show (which happened even before COVID because people have always sucked), most of the crowd was sitting still in their seats, and the people behind us got mad when we were standing. It was weird. Like I know that Gilmore attracts an older crowd these days, but still, it's David freaking Gilmore.

  • I always felt it was because of 'social norms' (the unwritten non-laws we all conduct ourselves by) have eroded away in the age of Trump, enhancing the normal angst the two 'culture war' sides have for each other, releasing people from acting civilly with each other. Throw in the new age of corporate 'conflict bots' on social media, and things get amped up even more.

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  • I’d walk that back to the first trump campaign. That’s when assholes decided it was ok to come out of the closet and abandon all pretenses at having any objective reasoning behind it. The whole “snowflake”, “liberal tears”, and “fucking the country up is ok as long as it pisses off the libs” thing really got rolling.

    Don’r forget, we had trump convoys harassing people, nazis at protests starting fights, laws made so that it is ok to run over protesters…. Yeah, the shitty behavior thing was in full swing prior to Covid.

  • Because of COVID, or just within the last few years? I'm not sure the rudeness was caused purely by the pandemic, because gestures broadly

  • Disagree. I say since the progression of the internet and how it became more accessible, was the day everyone has gotten ruder.

    As I always said, give a person a computer, internet access and tell them the anonymity you'll have online. Watch them flip their character around as they turn into absolute assholes to people online.

    • The problem is that this theory is incomplete. What actually makes them become a total asshat on the internet is no real social consequences for being so. Being banned isn't actually a deep social consequence. Especially when you can just use a VPN and spin up a new email, and then a new account, basically infinitely. So while the initial point of anonymity is part of it, the deeper part of it is lack of real social consequences for such behavior, enabling shitty behavior long-term.

      • The passing of cyberbullying laws only helped, but not really to the effect lawmakers probably had hoped it would. The real story of the matter is how utterly out of tune tons of politicians are to everything that happens in the internet, aside from wanting to take it over for the sake of capitalism and surveillance. All the while letting Big Tech do whatever it wants because they're the ones who understand the internet far better than a politician could.

        And even that not factoring into it, a lot of moderators and admins have trouble finding the middle ground. They are either too lenient or too strict, almost no in-between. Being a moderator is basically a virtual janitor that does not pay anything and being an admin is where you could be paying for something but getting no return. There's no room in either position for them to properly evaluate things.

56 comments