found each other on the soyjak blog website and proceeded to powerlevel in the sharty thread.
Holy shit, a fate worse than death. Of all places to meet your one true love, why do it in the equivalent of the internet's sped daycare?
relationships like this are ridiculed and rightfully treated as grooming hotspots
Yeah, there are certain places you just
should not be hitting people up on. What I can't understand is how fucked up the internet's definitions for those places became. A lot of normal people think it's perfectly fine to hit up strangers on Discord/social media, where grooming is such an enormous and active problem that it's become a meme that almost every other underage user is preyed upon, but forums or sites where you talk like normal people are somehow completely taboo and should be ridiculed.
Not that forums are completely off the hook; there is obviously enormous reason to be wary of the kind of relationships you can get out of those, but I find it insane that people think it's more acceptable to start trying to flirt on doomscroll sites dedicated to political flame wars and fetish porn art than hobby areas dedicated to certain subjects. I guess it's just because the latter is so rare now, I don't know...
We are living in a time where everyone is sick of the Internet and its possibilities, being offline is the new counterculture.
And yet, it's nowhere near comparable to the power of the internet at this point. I know I've personally had great difficulty with finding any offline socialization with people my age, and I've heard others express the same sentiment too in more rural areas. I can imagine this kind of working if you live in a huge metropolis, but if people are struggling to find equally-aged groups in even smaller cities then what the hell is it going to take for an offline counterculture to really take off? Everyone says they hate Discord and social media and such, but 99% of the people who say that don't do shit about it and just keep letting themselves be addicted to those platforms instead of going out and trying to make a change irl.
I can only hope that it's a temporary issue that will be resolved with time, and not the new normal.
I think being able to easily send money online changed things. Brought out the scammers, madr it more corporate.
Maybe so, but wasn't this already a possibility by the mid-to-late-90s? It took until the introduction of the iPhone to make the internet truly fucked up (not in terms of content but in terms of tone), so I think the introduction of mass herds of normal people into the space fucked things up way more than monetary exchange. Both definitely played a part though.
