I'd argue that the public has been souring on those attitudes as well, but also have been locked into various social media ecosystems through network effects. Now, the same (or similar) people have come out demanding hundreds of billions of dollars to upend humanity, while displaying all the same attitudes, but emboldened by their previous financial successes. Unsurprisingly, people don't like this.
I rediscovered my university revision notes recently and I don't think it's a coincidence that the year I got my best grade was the year I went to town on very neat, carefully laid out lecture notes. Whether I was taking exquisite care over circuit diagrams or deciding which colour to make streamlines and velocity gradients, it helped bury the facts in my brain.
Cars are actually a great historical example of this. The car was invented, and people saw the benefits, but some parts of the world went so car-mad that they started bulldozing entire neighbourhoods and deprioritising anything that wasn't a car. Decades later, you see the knock-on effects of those decisions, with high traffic levels, pollution, people spending hours in cars because it's the only way to go shopping, see friends, or take the kids to school. Places that took a more cautious approach still gained the benefit of cars, but kept the choice and quality of life for others
It depends on which subreddit you're on. Reddit has this strange dynamic where it's simultaneously a series of web forums, and a single feed scrolling app. Some subs have more of a community feel and they can encourage longer form posts depending on the subject matter.
What's really notable is how the tone of a small subreddit post changes completely if a post gets boosted to everyone's front page. There's a small cycling sub I read with good posts about routes, tips, and advice. When something reaches the front page, it becomes a shitshow of car v bike culture war bullshit.
Until I gave up on Reddit this year, I was solely on small hobby subs. I hadn't even seen the big general subs since sometime before Covid. And yet all of those small subs I was on had degenerated into insubstantial comments and image posts. Posting substantial comments, the kind that used to be normal, started making one look like an autistic-infobombing weirdo.
Substantial discussion of some hobbies has moved from Reddit to invite-only WhatsApp groups, precisely because Reddit went downhill. (This is true for long-haul bicycle travel, for example.) Unfortunately, on WA, too, everyone is on their phone, so messages are on average too short for comfort, and also there is no FAQ culture so people just ask the same questions again and again.
> First, if someone's profession has been vastly transformed, and not necessarily in pleasant ways, they're allowed to have feelings about that
Of all the things that rile me up in this current landscape, the pervasive tone of "why aren't you happy? I'm happy! You should be happy about this" is the most infuriating.
It's one person's personal blog. You can complain that you see too many of one type of blog entry, but that's a result of whatever happens to be upvoted.
Like, I'd be tempted to write something like this just to crystallise the stance in my own head (i.e. writing is thinking) but if it got voted to the top of the front page, that doesn't mean I suddenly meant it as a world-bending thesis.
While we're on the subject of gripes with the modern internet, the fact that most social media sites that publish to a single feed flatten reality into a single format. People then apply uniform judgement to content with wildly different purposes (and subconsciously people ascribe more purpose to posts that happen to rise up the frontpage, even when the blog in question was just some thought somebody threw out in ten minutes)
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