[bko]

That's partly true, but it's also true young people look out for adventure and meaning. They've been fed the story that they can delay starting a family until well into your 30s. Dating apps don't help. They're overeducated and underemployed.

So you have young people in their 20s with no sense of purpose. Why not LARP on twitter and pretend you're saving the world by trying to ruin the lives of people you don't agree with?

[zamfi]

> So you have young people in their 20s with no sense of purpose. Why not LARP on twitter and pretend you're saving the world by trying to ruin the lives of people you don't agree with?

I’m not sure if you’re suggesting this, but I think it’s more about attention and feelings of social acceptance, than it is about purpose.

[bko]

Maybe. The reason I think it's more about purpose than attention and social acceptance is that Twitter is probably the platform with the most vocal social activism and its relatively pseudonymous. So your Twitter profile doesn't really carry any weight in real life social interactions, so it's less signaling than something like Instagram. And twitter is pretty ephemeral as well, so attention doesn't stay. I've seen someone with 15 followers dunk on some popular figure on Twitter, get mentioned in the NY Times (which is pretty weird) and they gain maybe 5 or 10 followers. I'm not even exaggerating. So it's not even 15 minutes of fame. It's nothing

People find purpose in dunking on others and they do it almost as a job. They even give up other social obligations and post regularly between certain hours.

[Covzire]

People like this are easy to manipulate in the extreme, I fear we're in the midst of a pandemic of sociopaths practicing their art, more than anything. There's no end in sight either.