What happened to internet conversations?

Sorry to hear that you feel that way, I do understand

Just sign in and post everyday, avoid the obvious trolls and use the ignore feature for the obnoxious handles...easy peasy👍

Best of luck, hang in there

Let's start with the man in the mirror.

Internet conversations haven't changed. Hollywood (and mainstream media, and western culture) has.

Right now every Hollywood movie is drenched with anti-white politics. It's the movies themselves the ones filled with a political agenda.

To compare, check Asian movies and Anime. In comparison with modern western ones, they barely have politics. A few ones have the usual anti-Japanese, or Chinese nationalist, or some feminism in Anime (particularly 10 years ago). But it's still way far behind the level of politics and rottenness in modern western media.

Now you check internet conversations about Asian movies and Anime, in this forum or others, and besides the usual fanboyism they're usually friendly.

What I mean is that internet conversations are still friendly WHEN the topic is not political.

The problem is that in western countries the political agenda is literally everywhere: in media, in literature, in big companies, in jobs, everywhere. I love scifi, and the Hugo (the most important award) has become a joke, awarded based on political quotas. People are now afraid of saying something politically incorrect even in fucking private whatsapp conversation. Everything is drenched in politics right now in western countries. The problem is not internet conversations. The problem is the recent drift of western countries.

For me it was Ghostbusters 2016, although there were trolls and SJW's who liked to stir problems before that, the GB film probably due to the cast also just muck raking just really pushed it into overdrive on that forum. Those discussions are probably still here as the boards were transferred over.

The middle ground is gone so if you say something that isn't all the way Left or Right you get slammed and people get worked up. I also believe a lot more people come to these sites just to vent and piss others off so the intent to have an actual discussion is gone too now.

Can you explain what you mean by trolling in the force awakens board?

> It was about trolling and that took over IMDB. It's taken over a lot of conversation - if it even happens anymore, many places are simply dead - about movies and TV.

Not just movies and TV. There were a lot of web sites which had forums fifteen years ago and have since had to shut them down.

There have always been trolls on the Internet. I was a moderator on a web site with a chat room in 1998. Most of our work was fending off two assholes who were determined to be as disruptive as possible. But there were only two such problem children. And it was much easier to manage them than it would be today. VPNs and such hadn't come into common use, and so most people could be ID'd by their IP address.

Now it's much easier for trolls to get away with it. And of course there are unhappy people who make themselves feel better by making others unhappy. Nothing new there. But the sheer number of trolls indicates something deeper ...

> Politics, religion, etc. were always divisive and a disaster.

For many people, politics and religion are the same thing. By religion I don't mean a belief in the supernatural, but adherence to a set of shared moral axioms and irrational beliefs. And there's nothing wrong with that. Humans are not rational creatures. We can be at times, but it takes an effort of will and is not the natural human state. So we require a common ground of shared premises to have a stable society. As more than one wit has observed, you can't have a culture without a cult.

The problem is that there are now two strong and quite different religions in Western society. Discussion between those two groups has become futile. Imagine trying to convince a fourteenth century Catholic that parts of the Bible are not factual but merely allegorical. As with any religion, both groups' core beliefs appear ridiculous and bizarre to the other.

How have such conflicts historically played out? Not calmly or gently. We're headed for one hell of a bloodbath.

It was not just TV and movies; it happened exactly the same to video games and comics, and basically any form of entertainment media.

Basically, a bunch of ideology-obsessed malcontents - who will loudly and proudly insist they had always been there, despite those of us who actually were knowing for a fact they either weren't, or were actually blissfully silent - decided that every single piece of entertainment needed to strictly adhere to their precise sociopolitical views, and any failure to do so meant the piece in question was harmful and everyone involved in its creation was a morally abhorrent monster of a human being, and that, needless to say, went double for anyone who had the sheer temerity to question that very premise to begin with.

Regular people, shockingly, didn't take kindly to have their moral fiber called into question over such trivial nonsense as their choices in entertainment, and it all went downhill from there.

Quite why a whole bunch of those people seemed to creep out of the woodworks at around the same time is way beyond me, though.

There is more and more traffic online as regards interaction. So just by the numbers, there will be more trolls and more malcontents. However, quality in tv and film has dropped seriously over the last decade. Pointing out certain flaws isn't "allowed" by modern PC standards so the measure of civility in discourse has had a sensitivity red-shift. There are still normal conversations. The presence of bad actors (perceived or real) doesn't make that go away.