Well, it turns out I'm a troll. All these years I didn't know it but there's no doubt about it. I just love satire, inappropriate sarcasm, inventing the most ridiculous characters and acting like them on the Internet... Sometimes I do it unconsciously, and sometimes I just like to test the limits of human tolerance.

You know that /s mark that was invented a few years ago? It's nothing new. Variations of "sarcasm marks" have been proposed and/or used for hundreds of years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_punctuation
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Sarcasm%20Mark

In the last week, I started procrastinating a lot due to anxiety, and I started browsing many forums and subreddits that I casually found while browsing other things. I used to be a lurker before and didn't post or comment a lot. But having started doing it a lot (in 2018) in order to grow certain social networks (including this one), it's become a part of me to respond to anything I see that creates any kind of emotional connection (be it positive or negative).

The deed

This last week, as I browsed, I've started responding to people, but not in a serious way all the time, although most of the time that is the case. I've created some very hateable characters promoting all kinds of barbarities which, if they aren't identified as satire or sarcasm, are considered hate speech and definitely bannable offenses. Predictably, I have been banned from 5 subreddits in the last 7 days and a few Telegram chats.

Don't get me wrong, I love it. I love making people feel outraged. It's like the smell of a fresh garden. Through this exercise in futility, I've discovered that people simply can't take a joke. People take life too seriously. That's something I had been intending to touch on this blog by creating the Garden of Life series.

Life goals vs. trolling

However, regardless of how happy I am nowadays due to how many people are angry at me, I have to admit that I am deviating from my main course. I haven't done any of the tasks I set for myself at the beginning of this year. I intended to have finished a lot by the end of September, but having wasted all January waiting, and the latter half of February trolling on the Internet, I now see that this is not very profitable unless I make some changes.

Among the solutions that I designed, I want to use a secondary Steem account (perhaps Hive account@fsm) to post any time I feel the urge. I won't troll here, not too much, and won't post much satire, because hey, this is my money piggy, I can't endanger it by having people not take a joke and downvoting me to $0. However, I do want to start posting some variety and using the small format which was more common a couple of years ago.

Censorship on the Internet

Among the advancements toward censorship I see on the Internet, a notable one is the most recent move by Reddit to threaten people for upvoting "questionable" content (whatever the QA team decides). Some Reddit users have been getting these messages (thankfully I haven't):

It seems that Reddit and I are moving in opposite directions. I'm thankful for Steem right now, and I hope it's uncensorability stays up. With Justin Sun moving in and witnesses proposing to censor him, I'm not sure if that's the right move. On the other hand, Justin Sun is Chinese and works with the Chinese government, which is notable for being one of the biggest censors in the whole world, maybe second only to North Korea. We'll see where this develops. I think Steem will stay one of the freer platforms for speech for a long time, though. We'll see.