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The first "social network" I had joined was a chatroom owned by MSN. It was free at the time and I met a lot of interesting people then. Some occasional troll would come on and we would all jump on them. They would eventually leave. In a time where it was mostly intelligent people who owned their own computers were chatting. We had a lot of interesting discussion. Some arguments did arise, but it was rare that you would see the useless "You're an idiot" "Nuh-uh, you're an idiot" type of argument.
Then there was ICQ and some community chat room where your Avatar would show up in a "Room", a 16x16 bmp avatar that you could design in paint and upload. I completely forgot the name of the chatroom because I would look it up to see if I can still download it, even if it's for nostalgic reasons.
ICQ was the first VoIP I used. But I didn't chat too much on there. That's when I started to notice a lot more, shall we say, not so intelligent people signing on. They weren't necessarily trolling, but assumed that every woman on the internet was only for sex chatting. Sexting was common long before it was called "sexting".
I joined Modblog in 2005. It was like Myspace, only better. Unfortunately, it was sold to an incompetent company and it died, as the bugs were not being fixed. I still miss that site and I bet it would have been what Myspace is if it stuck around.
People were still pretty civil then. As a matter of fact, I'm actually friends with one them on facebook - the same guy who quite socialist from England. If you don't know me well enough, my views more align with the libertarians (with maybe a few exceptions), so you can imagine what kind of discussions we would get into, but at the end of the day, we were still internet friends.
Then came YouTube. This is when I saw most of the haters. Granted, I may have not been on websites that had many haters, or I have been "lucky" enough to not encounter many, but on YouTube, it was the worse I've seen. It bugged me, but not because it was offensive or it hurt my feelings, I actually have a pretty thick skin, but it bugged me because I could not believe that people were intentionally looking like idiots in text. I didn't even think it was possible to look like Not only did they look like idiots, but they seemed to be oblivious to the fact.
I got used to it and moved on. I became more patient with people who really couldn't see what I was trying to say, after all, without facial expressions, or body language, or even tone of voice, you can't always get what a person is saying. I got used to the haters, too. I've come to realize that they're more than likely kids who are not allowed to even express their anger at home, so they do it online under the "safety" of anonymity.
I'm also a lot more patient with people who don't grasp concepts. It sometime drives me crazy when I see a post that could very well pertain to them. Knowing their mental capabilities, I usually don't say anything. When I do say something, they usually don't respond, but my comment stays, so maybe, just maybe, they'll come around.
So now, I have one more personality type to deal with... Willfully ignorant people who are proud of the fact. These are the people who when losing an argument will delete all of the comments, then post something to the extent of "I decided I don't want any negativity on my blog/forums/wall/comments so I deleted the post - then proceed to continue with a comment that invites negativity.
Just a FYI: If you think I'm talking about you... you aren't the first one who did this.
It's akin to someone putting their hands over their ears and saying "lalalalalala! You are just
And yet, there's that possibility that they might come around, which is a lesson I haven't learned yet, as of just recently, I stopped treating someone who did that just that with respect and called him out on my facebook post. I apologized to him about doing that, but I still have no respect for him. None. However, that does not excuse my actions. I shouldn't have called him out, but not because he didn't deserve it (maybe he did, or maybe he didn't) but it does reflect on me as someone who has been working on self control and as a Christian.
I could blame it on the pregnancy. After all, hormones have a way to make it even more difficult to resist temptation to act out on an emotional rampage.
Whatever my "excuse"... He unfriended me. So any example I have to set, any possibility to open his eyes, at least through my posts, won't be there for him to see, all because I let my emotions get the better of me.
It's just one more personality type I have to deal with and learn from.
I better learn fast.
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