One overlooked thing about pre-2011 internet is trolling. The quality of trolling has degraded since about 2011, and honestly? I blame social media. I’m serious! Think about communication pre-2011. Image boards and forums. Closed, smaller communities with dedicated mod teams.

Mods were quick to respond; trolling had to be clever. It had to be thought out, be fairly undetected. Rile someone up without being too obvious. Confusion & disarray through subtlety & small jabs of personal attacks but just small enough to not raise suspicion. Nowadays, well...

Nowadays with social media having billions of users, trolling is largely unmoderated. Since there’s very low/slow policing, there’s no need to disguise. Any vehement, low-effort statement will do, any reaction is a win. Call someone the N-word & you’ve got a horde of responses.

Not to say that kind of low-effort trolling didn’t exist before social media, but it was surely more pointless due to mod teams & less fruitful. Sure, you can block now, but social media is public. Their trolling still remains, even if you can’t see it now, generating responses.

So, that’s something I miss about trolling. It was almost a sport. If you trolled someone and they gave you a clever or good response back you might even tip your fedora and call ‘em a good sport - and continue trolling anyway, but all the same. That doesn’t happen anymore.

Now it’s just, call someone ugly or throw some slurs around on a popular post and you’ve got potentially hundreds of people eating the bait. It’s boring. Its stale. It’s the fast food of trolling. Anyway, these are the kinda things I think about. I should do a study on this...