[imiric]

I don't think it's just a matter of liking or disliking people. Rather, there's a cultural trend in certain demographics of being highly sensitive and politically correct. Some opinions are "forbidden" if there is a slightest hint that they might be offensive to a proverbial someone, whether real or imaginary.

Then there is the performative aspect of this. One of the unfortunate side effects of our social media virtually hyper "connected" and engagement-driven society are performative thoughts and actions. People will do anything for views and likes, including behaving in ways that mimic certain trends. There are examples of people faking diseases and doing insane stunts all for engagement and a chance at their 15 minutes of fame. This has transformed how our culture operates both online and offline, turning into this weird feedback loop.

To be clear: I'm not downplaying real societal problems like racism, discrimination, and abusive behaviour. But we're too quick to incriminate people for thoughtcrimes. It's truly dystopian if you think about it.

[kachapopopow]

I actually agree with this, a lot of it is just projecting influence for gain. It's one of the primary reasons why I never judge people for laching out, instead I question: are they truly just a bad person of has something in their life caused them to arrive at this opinion? Is it a failure somewhere upstream that we ended up at this situation?

It's really hard to not become hateful towards a group of people when you are shoved information about how x group is doing x which is doing x and causing x (x100 a day), at some point it becomes reality that you believe in.

However, I also started to believe that there is always a natural balancing effect - the more you start to enforce your personal beliefs and ideals the bigger the shadow you cast which manifests in it swinging back and creating groups of people who fundementally dislike the idea, ideology or activity from the way they were brought up, historical experience and even religious beliefs and when there is a group of people that have experienced similar issues end up becoming extremely toxic feeding eachother and reinforcing the false reality.

[imiric]

> It's really hard to not become hateful towards a group of people when you are shoved information

Yeah, psychological manipulation is a large problem that's mostly unacknowledged. Entire industries rely on it (e.g. advertising), and the platforms we've built can be used by anyone to push their agenda.

> However, I also started to believe that there is always a natural balancing effect

That's true, but the thing is that there's so much noise, with everyone pulling in their own direction, and most of it being machine curated and generated, that there's no chance for civil discourse and common understanding to happen. We have no way of discerning fact from fiction anymore, and whether someone is actually being honest, or if we're talking to a real person at all. All of this produces a cacophony of viewpoints where the loudest party "wins". To be honest, I don't think we can get out of this situation, save for backtracking on and strictly regulating many of the systems we have in place today, which has no chance of happening, and could have its own problems. So things can only get much worse, before they get any better, if at all.