Voice of freedom.
I'm all for justice, anyone who knows me knows this.
So I'm in favor of freedom of speech, and the internet serves that well.
But people forget that your freedom should end when it crosses the barrier into someone else's life.
I'm a silent reader. I read web comics, my discussion groups, among some other things, but as a silent reader I only comment or say anything when it becomes clearly relevant.
While I can ignore most inane comments in most places, I sometimes have to raise and join the band to say that the internet has in some ways gotten some people more dumb.
I can let the awful grammar slide, even though I should not.
I can look away from the pointless spamming just for the fun.
But it really gets under my skin when I go to newgrounds.com or youtube to watch something funny and for some reason end up reading the comments.
I do recognize there are some insightful comments, and some are at least a simple representation of one's opinion. But most of them... and I mean MOST of them, are pure babbling about how stupid some one is, or how they praise something REALLY stupid.
The need to say incongruent words, to curse needlessly, to criticize for the sake of saying something is the worse thing to happen to the internet.
Come on, didn't anyone else's mom say to them that if they don't have something useful to say that they should (jump off a bridge) shut up?
I keep hoping that people will realize this. XKCD put it in great perspective with this comic strip: http://xkcd.com/481/
I ask if the people behind this are 8 year old kids, or maybe someone that has REALLY nothing better to do with their lives than to try to demean others', or maybe it is someone with no intellect that feel superior by doing this. By searching for flaws in others and pointing, so that they never have to look to their own flaws.
This is something I like to tell.
When I was little, insulting someone 10 years older meant pummeling. Simple and hard. And we knew it, we respected older people, and they mostly left younger ones alone.
Nowadays you see a 8 years old insulting people as if he/she was the dictator of a country with a million man army behind him/her. I don't know if it is the way kids are raise, the game/TV/movies they come into contact, or if the social pressure in school has risen to the point where this is a mean of survival. All I know is that it is wrong.
You know that feeling of wanting to toss someone in front of a bus?
Humans will never learn to respect the unknown this way, because they don't fear the consequences anymore.
Pitiful.