As a zoomer, it felt like I was born with an iPad in my lap, playing Minecraft Pocket Edition and watching YouTube videos of adults playing Minecraft and putting on an act for a living to kids like me. Who doesn’t love video games? You can just fall right into them, escaping from the real world if you’re not “ready” for the real world. I guess I wasn’t, and I’m still working on that. I realized there are entire Internet communities that I’ve just never interacted with in my life ever before, for multiple reasons. What if they’re mean and have some kind of hate towards an outgroup? What if my ingroup is their outgroup? What if I find it horrible that I actually agree with any of the terrible stuff they’re saying, and I just never would’ve said it out loud myself but secretly thought? I guess everyone’s free to have thoughts of all kinds, bad and good. Only pass judgment on actions.

Popular, mainstream social network sites/apps/services have regulations and policies in place to protect users of all ages from seeing potentially triggering things that they’re probably not ready for. Things that nobody should have to see/hear/experience. I guess that only leads to the tough question of how to decide what’s appropriate or not, and who’s your target audience. Some places leave it like the wild west, and others have definitive leanings towards certain kinds of thinking and values, influencing who will crowd together with whom.

Will I corrupt my pure, virgin eyes with the sweeping heaps of raw human opinions on the internet? Does your online behavior say more about your inherent nature as a person, or does it say more about the culture that you were raised in, guiding you to senses of right and wrong? Do you live a two-faced life, being good and lawful during the day and a freak on the internet at night? What’s safe or not safe anymore?

It’s always easy to point out the problems and flaws in the services today, but it’s so much harder to come up with and implement better and better solutions. What even is an “idealized” meeting space on the Internet? When you smash together so many different people from different walks of life…shit hits the fan, you’ll get amazing collaborative efforts producing grand works but also $Shit^2$ if you’re not careful.

Who will dominate online spaces more, the humans who already dominate the physical world with powerful verbal and social abilities, or the quiet people in the corner who can write eloquent, sometimes mind-blowing stuff? idk, I hate and love stereotypes at the same time. I sometimes wish there truly was a God to keep order, but then they’ll always be people who want to be a Godslayer. Can I blame them for wanting glory and trying to take on an interesting and seemingly impossible task? No. Just because I think I can understand someone, and try to imagine living decades in their shoes, I really can’t believe some of the things people say. The existence and lack of neurodiversity truly are surprising and entertaining in so many ways. God, I love the Internet.