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First off, Idle Forums is the only form of social media (if you could call it that) that I have ever used so please forgive me if I have a naive perspective on this topic or come off as pretentious. In the years since social media first became a thing, it has been really interesting to observe how discourse between people has changed. Like, it's fucking terrifying if you really think about it. Before the mass adoption of social media (and the internet, but to a lesser extent I think), people had a much smaller sphere of influence and most interactions tended to take place face to face. It actually took effort to maintain relationships and you only had a finite amount of time to spend with the people you valued the most. Trends and fads stuck around for longer and information moved a hell of a lot slower. Now, almost every human being with access to the internet is active or at least exists on some form of social media. The average number of friends some people have on Facebook or following them on Twitter is fucking staggering. Personal and mass communication between friends happens now with minimal effort and fads and memes come and go in the blink of an eye. While I think there are a large number of very positive benefits that have come from social media being widely adopted, I can't help but feel that it is also doing a lot of damage to the way we interact with and understand each other as humans. Interacting with people and presenting opinions through text (often limited to 140 characters) is very different from doing the same thing with other physical human beings. There is just so little room for nuance and much less incentive to exercise restraint. It is much more common for people to be instantly judged as horrible human beings because of vile opinions they may spout on the internet. In a lot of cases, yeah, people that act this way on the internet probably aren't very nice people. But I think the increased tendency for people to categorize other people into neat little boxes based on what they have said on the internet is a significant downside to the broad adoption of social media. Although maybe there is an argument to be made that it is fair for people you have only interacted with on the internet to be fully defined by the words they type. When I talk to people in real life, there is just so much more complexity to the interactions that I think gives me a much more informed and fair opinion on who they are. Hearing people's voices and seeing their body language as various topics are discussed makes for a much richer interaction and makes it much harder for me to instantly write someone off as a shithead. I will often find that I share a lot of the same opinions with a person and get along with them really well only to find out later they like to casually throw around racist remarks and have fairly shitty opinions on a lot of other subjects. When this happens with people I interact with face to face, I find it much harder to just categorize them into that nice little box that I might if I only knew them as a random internet person. They are more complex and there are factors and influences that go into forming their shitty opinions. In person, there is at least some chance of coming to understand some of those factors and maybe even adding your own positive influence to that person. The chances of this happening with some random asshole on the internet? Slim to none.