Got roasted on a local FB group for a joke about potholes, and the pile-on lasted 3 days
Posted a dumb joke in a neighborhood group about our street looking like the moon, someone screenshotted it to a bigger page, and by Tuesday there were 200 comments calling me a bad neighbor. I tried to explain it was a joke but that just made it worse. Back in 2010 this would've been forgotten by lunch. Now there's a whole archive of it. Weird part is I still see the same people at the grocery store and nobody says a word. Did the internet always move this fast or did we just get meaner?
Did the internet always move this fast or did we just get meaner" hits hard because I read some article a while back about how outrage spreads way faster than anything else online, like the algorithm feeds on people being mad. The thing about 2010 is that stuff really did just vanish, no screenshots, no archive, you said something dumb and it was gone. Now every joke has a paper trail and strangers can dig it up forever. The grocery store part is the weirdest to me, all that anger stays online and never shows up in real life. Makes me think we didn't get meaner exactly, we just got a place to be mean without any cost.