No, I’m not talking about wrestling– at least not specifically– today, though that is their moniker.
I’ve been dipping more and more into Reddit this summer. My old philosophy was to avoid Reddit, as back in my days on Usenet I ended up spending a bunch of time on Usenet groups when I should have been working (actually, I multitask like a pro, so I was never ignoring the work, just slowing myself down). In the days of Usenet, there were trolls– always there are trolls– but for the most part even the most contentious of communities was civil.
Reddit isn’t 4Chan by any means, but there’s a great deal of ill feeling and bad attitude simmering out there. I consider it a product of our time. We have a President who angry Tweets. People are more interested in staring at their phones than talking to people. Most people seem to be on some sort of hunt for credibility through check-down, as if one can snark or insult the way to legitimacy.
Let me offer a few examples from my own posting exploits over the last week.
One is from the wrestling Reddit. Someone posted asking if it was worth watching the WWE Battleground PPV for storyline development purposes. Reddit, as a whole, as taken a pretty serious dump on Battleground. And it wasn’t the best wrestling show ever. But in my opinion, if you are a person who invests the 2 hours a week into Smackdown, it’s worth the 3 hour investment to see the PPV (since the person already had a subscription to the network) to stay up on events.
A person who disagreed with me, instead of making valid points, posted asking me if I had a job and if I had ever seen another wrestling promotion.
Stop for a moment to consider the implications. The person was trying to paint me as ignorant of the wrestling world (jokes on you, buddy!) or I guess as unemployed and hence… I don’t even know. I guess if I had no job I had more time to watch wrestling and post on Reddit?
So I came back at him with logic, explaining why I thought the show was worth watching and asked him why he asked those two questions. He ignored my response and started talking about how much better New Japan is.
For those of you ignorant to wrestling, that is like a hipster walking up to you at a National concert and telling you to go listen to GWAR because they’re better, or a person who tells you that your creme brule sucks so you should try this tostada. New Japan Pro Wrestling is good in-ring wrestling, and I enjoy it in small doses, but the person asking the question was asking as a WWE fan who followed Smackdown, if he should watch the PPV so he knew what was going on this Tuesday. There is no world in which NJPW, Ring of Honor, GFW or even my beloved Lucha Underground could help a person be prepared for the Smackdown storylines better than the Smackdown brand PPV.
Another moment, this time from the Funko Pop subreddit. I get around. There’s a SDCC give-away Night King pop that was sold super-briefly on HBO’s website. The bulk of them were given to people who went to the Game Of Thrones exhibit at SDCC. The ones that have trickled to Ebay are selling for $80-100. I mentioned to another collector that I was going to wait to see what happens when all the people who got free ones decide what to do with theirs/when HBO does an inventory of what they have left. What I was basically saying is “I am not paying $100 for a $15 toy, no matter how bad I want it.” This is my policy to date. In fact just the other day, to memorialize my middle-of-the-year post, I paid not-quite twice retail for a rare Chase Elliot Alderson pop to put on my desk (I’ll post a picture tomorrow).
People went off on me about how I was giving bad advice, how there wouldn’t be more, how the price will go up. Then it turned into a conversation about “flippers.” Flippers are rampant in the Pop community. They’re sort of ruining it, actually. But a conversation that started over me wondering if anyone had a picture of the Pop in the light (to see how translucent it was) turned into a flame war.
I also frequent the Injustice Reddit (not for Injustice– for the game Injustice). Every single post there is full of people just flaming the other posters for the sake of flaming.
This all goes back to something I’ve talked about in my other writings but which is becoming more and more a part of society: the anonymity of the internet leaking into people’s sense of the social contract. I’ve seen people basically trolling in real life, so unaware of their actions that they think conversations work like text messages and can’t be overheard. I see people showing blatant disregard for others. And always with the snark and the anger.
It’s a shame. It’s the evolution of our society, but it’s a shame.
I’m often a quiet person. The reason for that is that I took to heart very early in my life that if I don’t have something nice to say, I shouldn’t say it.
How do these things translate into the real world?
Here’s an example. The other day Julie and I were dining at a less-than-fine fast food establishment. The big attraction of this spot is that it has one of those crazy “make your Coke however you want” machines. And while we were eating, just to the right of the machine, an employee had to refill it.
If you’ve known me for like ten minutes, you know three things are universally true about me in all situations: 1) I try to converse with people like janitors, stock-people, etc. because I know that most people act like they are invisible and I think that’s awful because people are people and we all have a job to do, 2) I love gizmos and 3) I’m curious to a fault about things. Ask my wife how many questions I’ve randomly asked her about Catholicism. I just like to learn new things.
So I started a start/stop conversation with the employee who was refilling the machine. She was trying to focus, so the conversation had lots of lags in it, and I was eating onion rings and I don’t believe in chewing with my mouth open or talking with food in my mouth (both disgusting habits). While we were talking, a woman and her three kids walked by (I presume on their way out). Julie was glancing, from time to time, at the machine as I mentioned things like how much it looked like a printer, how oddly shaped the syrup boxes were, how tough it looked to reload, etc. You know, like you would if your husband was talking to you about something that was close to the floor.
At one point, the woman with her kids walked over and bent down, the glared at Julie until Julie looked up.
Apparently this woman assumed both of us were staring at her child– to abduct it while she was right there, maybe? I don’t know. She was very loud and not super-coherent. I think she said “I’m up here,” before she stomped off. Which is weird, because I don’t think she thought we were looking at her feet. Maybe she had weird feet? I was looking at the soda machine thing and the woman trying to fix it, so I really don’t know.
The angry woman would have had to have been absolutely oblivious to her surroundings to not notice that I was talking to the employee about how the soda machine worked. I was turned facing the machine, away from my table. I was talking about beverages and carbonation and syrups and boxes and printers.
She was in her own world. Because that’s what being an net obsessed, phone staring person does to the brain. And she wanted to be her own special version of a troll. She didn’t notice, I suppose, that her son made a fat joke while staring at me. That would have required her to be observant and to allow other people to exist in the same universe she was starring in. But her argument with us was cut short, as she was ready to argue with the employees at the front desk about the soda machine not working.
Of course she’d have known why the soda machine wasn’t working if she’d been aware of the conversation I was having, or had noted where I was actually looking. It was in fact down from my eye level, but if her kid was in my line of sight, I didn’t notice. And Julie was closer to the machine than me, so I’m not sure how she could have been looking at the woman’s kid, either. If the angry lady had noticed where I was actually looking, she’d have seen the person who could solve her problem. But she didn’t, because as I mentioned, most people don’t notice service employees. She was oblivious to the presence of the very person who could render unto her what she desired, a Raspberry Coke.
People are strange.
If anyone wonders, though, I now know how that weird add your flavors and mix stuff up soda machine works. It is, in fact, like a big printer with moving print heads and sugar ink. And I know how it works because I had a polite, respectful conversation with another human being who is tasked with operating it.
Crazy, right?