It has been interesting to witness the rise of a kind of perma-ignorant peanut gallery both on Twitter and Hacker News - a new class of user who seems to only weakly (meaningfully) interact with the legacy users who desired to not look like fools all the time. They do not appear to read or look things up when confused, exuding a desire for spoonfeeding: "but you're wrong because you haven't explained this to me". Prior to 2023 there would of course be a lot of ignorant posting, but it was less likely to go unchecked. Some hypotheses as to why this might be happening:
- a more universal demand for profilicity, in text form, even from people who are not any good at it
- a decreased demand for profilicity from the old posters who have mostly exhausted its possibilities
- increased information hoarding in the post-ZIRP economy; reduced desire to correct the ignorance of apparent outsiders
- reduced resources to moderate posts in the post-ZIRP economy, leaving people in insufficient fear of bad posting
- the reinforcing negative feedback loop of more of the remaining competent people migrating to DMs and group chats
- the iPad/YouTube generation starting to post without having read anything good from the old blogosphere, or being fully literate now
- other places like reddit becoming worse, with their users coming to Twitter or HN to not have their posts deleted
- a desire for connection in the post-COVID environment, even if through bad posting