Had one of those days where the whole Internet felt like it was being negative today, so I've been mostly "offline", and deliberately stopping myself from doing shit like looking at my phone and whatever. It's good to do that now and then; it's a nice reminder that sometimes, it really is just okay to sit back and enjoy things without worrying what other people think.
I do find myself wondering how we can possibly get out of the "rut" that online discourse is in, though. Negativity is the default these days, it seems, and if you say that you like something you're much more likely to get a hundred people telling you how wrong and gay you are for liking that thing rather than anyone backing you up and saying "yeah, that thing was pretty all right".
Trouble is, from social media's perspective, negativity breeds "engagement" — and as we've established pretty firmly by this point, "engagement" doesn't have to be a positive thing, hence the existence of clickbait and hatebait. All that matters is that you got eyes on a page and fingers a-clickin' — how the owners of those eyes and fingers actually end up feeling is completely irrelevant so far as "engagement" metrics are concerned.
Normal people shouldn't care about this; it's something I wish that marketers didn't have to care about either, but certainly your average member of the public shouldn't be thinking about how they get more "engagement" on their "content". Trouble is, they are; that's why you get 12 year olds posting provocative nonsense on Twitter in the hopes that they'll be quote-tweeted by adults telling them to stop being twats; that's why there are endless "discussions" over matters like lolicon and the like that never actually discuss anything; that's why people argue in quote-tweets rather than replies (or the lost art of private messages). It's all about that precious engagement.
Today is a day where I have felt precisely no need for "engagement" whatsoever. So I took myself out of it all, ate some nice food and played Atelier. And it was nice. I might do the same again tomorrow! I can recommend it.
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