You Do Not Need To Know What Strangers Think About Everything
Recently I talked about why I cut back on my visits to Reddit. After using the site for a long time and getting a little older and more jaded, I simply grew to really dislike it. I'd grown more skeptical of the users and more disgusted by their pseudointellectual bravado. (I still think the sports subreddits are funny though).
But yeah, before my disillusionment fully set in, I definitely was on Reddit a lot. Actually, what's scary is that I've noticed I started spending more time in YouTube comments after "quitting" Reddit. I'm not well.
Anyway, this post is like a sequel to my post about why Reddit annoys me, but even more so it's a sequel to an earlier post called "We don't even know why we're arguing."
Discussion threads versus actual discussions
For a while, I was in the habit of looking for discussion threads for seemingly every single piece of media I consumed. Watch a new movie? Go to Reddit for the discussion thread. New TV episode? There's a discussion thread for that too. Read an interesting article? Must've been posted somewhere on Reddit, right?
Similarly, Twitter in its heyday was great for seeing reactions to stuff. Of course, you couldn't write essays on Twitter, so the posts definitely had a different personality than Reddit comments.
Like much of social media, the ability to find such conversations on these sites promises an always-available instant-gratification substitute for talking to friends, right? And I feel a little conflicted about this. I think you can have meaningful conversations with strangers online. There's value to that. But I also think it can go wrong rather easily.
I really am more sure than ever these days that the types of discussions people have in these Reddit threads simply don't feel like the ones I would want to have if I was talking to an actual friend.
I mean, first of all, when it comes to real life friends, there isn't necessarily that instant-gratification thing I was talking about before. Well, maybe you live together and spend a lot of time together. Or they're just fine with you calling them a lot. But most likely, when you see a friend, you won't update them on every single movie you watched and book you read and game you played. You'll talk about some of them, sure, but not every one. And you're going to tailor the topics depending on who you're talking to.
With Reddit discussion threads, honestly, I was far more of a consumer than a producer. Sometimes I did leave comments, but even in those times, it still didn't feel that much like an actual conversation.
A real conversation is a two-way street. There's fun in just connecting, and also in getting to share stuff you're excited about and hear what your friend is excited about.
The online alternative to this may originate from a similar to desire to just chat about something you like with someone else who likes it, but online, when all you see is a list of messages from strangers, you easily forget to see the strangers as individual human beings. Instead they're just invisible guys who I'm calling idiots based on some opinion they posted. But in my defense, the messages people post are often Very Bad.
Honestly, what I think I have always really sought from opening up a discussion thread online is to feel like there's someone else out there who shares in my excitement from having experienced what I thought was a pretty cool piece of art.
Except a lot of the time, I think something was cool, and the Internet has decided to hate it for some reason.
And that's fine. We don't have to share the same opinions. It may just be that people who comment a lot on Reddit have very different personalities from me. I can accept that and move on.
However, I do think there are some inherent problems with certain types of discussion threads, and I will explain one now:
Overreacting to every little hitch
I said before that I still like sports subreddits. I don't know if it's just because I'm not extremely knowledgable about sports and therefore don't know better, or if it's just that people who like sports tend to have a better grasp on social norms than most video game enthusiasts and anime fans. I'm not trying to be offensive. You know I love video games and am a total weeb. But did I lie? Sometimes you even encounter people online who are like "Errm everyone's talking about some sort of sportsball I see!"
Ok I'm getting off-topic.
While I enjoy sports subreddits, I typically don't spend much time in game threads, which, if you're unfamiliar, are simply where people discuss a game live as it's happening. My reason for this is simple: people get emotional quickly and start posting extreme doom and gloom the minute the game starts looking a little hairy for their preferred team. I think most people would agree it wouldn't generally be rational to decide to fire a coach or trade a player in the middle of a game, before the final outcome is even known, but in a game thread, people are always demanding those types of changes. Because it's really just their response to a strong emotion. And if they're pouring their doom and gloom into a thread that I'm reading, that gloomy feeling is gonna rub off on me. Maybe some people are able to easily shake it off, but I'd rather just avoid such situations. I'm a sensitive lil guy you know? (Chat should I delete that last line?)
You know what's kinda similar to game threads? Discussion threads for individual manga chapters.
Ok hear me out. Many manga use long-term arcs to tell their stories, meaning that a single chapter is just a small piece of a large story. This is especially true of weekly manga, where the chapters may not be very long. If you have a strong opinion on how a manga is going to play out after reading about five minutes of story: Congratulations, you must be an r/manga user!
Some fans are just super on-guard for anything they think they don't like, and they're so quick to post their complaints about anything they don't like on Reddit. It makes me think they're far more interested in being heard online than in absorbing whatever the creators are trying to deliver.
How can you actually judge the totality of a story when you're not even halfway through it? Do you pause a movie ten minutes in to write a comment online about it? Ok, different mediums, sure. I'm not saying you can't have an opinion after a chapter. But you can at least give the story a chance to play out a bit more before writing it off entirely.
So I won't spoil anything, but in Dandadan there's a certain twist that happened some months ago (I mean in real time) and is still affecting the story, and while I didn't bother checking Reddit, I did see comments on the Viz website (you know, one of the official places you can read the manga), and one guy was freaking out when it first happened. "AAAAAAAAGH WHY WOULD TATSU RUIN IT."
See, on Reddit they were probably saying the same thing, but pretending to be intellectual and clever about it. I don't actually know that, of course, so let's just call that a cheap joke and move on.
Anyway, yes, people were worried when this twist happened. But then, this arc grew into something really excellent. I mean, I have absolutely loved a lot of these chapters. And I've encountered positive reactions online, too, including in the Viz comment section. So... maybe it wasn't necessary to doom-post, you know?
Like, maybe doom-posting and spreading your fears, rational or otherwise, to everyone around you just makes the internet a worse place to visit?
Anyway, yeah, I really can't deal with people who are gonna freak out over every little thing. I'm not... strong enough.
Section where I rant and kinda rudely accuse you all of not having enough variety in your life
Now this may be unfounded. And maybe a little mean. But I kinda feel like a lot of r/manga is the type of people who never actually read any books without pictures. I mean I feel like some of these people would hate a lot of classic literature.
And what the heck did people expect the final chapter of Attack on Titan to do anyway? The arc was already what it was. I don't know how a single chapter was supposed to carry so much weight. When I read it, I was like, "People were mad over THAT?" It was actually a pretty good ending, if you ask me. I know the anime (never got around to finishing it) made some changes, but the fact that there was no second wave of mass meltdowns when it aired made me think that manga readers are just particularly prone to tantrums and that I was never crazy for liking the ending to begin with.
But you know, people online hone in on specific things. They spend day after day just locked in on certain panels, certain words. Like that one week in 2019 where I was desperately waiting for the next chapter of Kaguya-sama because the story was at Christmas and it was after the whole culture festival thing and oooh I just couldn't wait, the tension was unbearable.... But I mean, nowadays, with every manga I read, I simply just wait for the official release, I don't look at fan theories, I certainly avoid leaks, and overall I just live in my own peaceful world and usually don't even think about the stories much throughout the week unless one's got something really juicy cooking. But that's just me. And I think I'm generally happier this way.
And maaaaaybe when you spend too much time online, it affects your personality. I'm just saying, if anyone out there wants to have richer conversations than what they're getting on Reddit, we probably gotta look to people who are living slightly more varied lives. It's not even necessarily just a matter of going outside. Watch movies, listen to music, read books—but experience those that are OUTSIDE of your usual comfort zone. That's what I think a lot of Redditors might be missing. Because Reddit can be a timesink. It can be fun. But it's not art, right?
So yeah. My soapbox here is just... you know. Live life, experience art, spend more time outside of the childish fandom world. If that doesn't describe you, then just ignore what I said, obviously.
You guys are always reading the room
Now I've talked about this before, but one of the big issues I have with the internet is there's a bunch of dorks who kill time just by trying to look cool and smart by spouting correct opinions on movies and such things in random comment sections. And how to determine the "correct" opinions? Duh. Just say what someone else already said.
So the super-fans really set the tone, because they're the first to comment. And slightly more casual fans, sometimes they're not as confident. Or they're just not as active online. Then there are the youth who don't even realize that they kinda just go along with whatever someone else said. Well, I assume it's mostly young people who are like that, but who knows.
Yes, it's human nature to want to fit in. But if we all just assimilate into having one opinion about a movie, then we just have erased all our differences and all the valuable learnings we might potentially gain from different points of view.
I know what I'm saying should be obvious. But the Internet just remains obsessed with finding consensus. Is Thing Good? Or is Thing Bad? Choose your side.
Ask questions other than "good or bad?"
Really, everywhere you go online it's just people arguing about whether a thing is good or whether it's bad. Is that the only question you know to ask? Good or bad? Grow up, man.
You'll never get a good grade on your Literature paper if you just write "This book was trash, because of the pacing." I mean didn't they ask you to talk about (gulp) themes?
I feel like the Internet has absolutely no awareness of the idea of discussing a work of art without letting people know if it's good or not. It's sort of funny when you think about it. Like even if someone brought up themes, they would be using them as evidence that "This thing is good!"
I dunno man. I guess what I'm saying is, it feels like a lot of us have not matured enough to be able to analyze a work of fiction without immediately devolving into a discussion on if it's Good or not. That's the only lens we know. And I'm no different.
Well anyway. I feel like there was something else I was going to add. But I forgot what it was. So for now I'm just going to end this post. And maybe I'll remember later. Or not. It's cool either way.