by ruszki | 2025-09-02 13:12:07+00:00
It doesn't help. Unfortunately, we either get used to this, or just start to ignore public spaces more and more. Sensible discussion was probably always the exception, but at least it was easier to find pockets of sanity 10 years ago. Misinformation, disinformation, and other reality distortion effects basically made finding those almost impossible. It's steadily getting worse since at least 2014.

One of my favorite random topic discussion places was /r/hungary, my country of origin's subreddit. In 2015, at the height of immigration "crisis", we had very good discussions about the whole topic, even when most Hungarians were, and are clearly racists, and we had very differing views. We discussed pros and cons, we pushed statistics here and there. And we weren't assholes with each others. Even when we were at different places on the political spectrum. And generally every topic could be discussed, without real retorsion.

In 2018, the number of people who has only faith and nothing else increased. That was the first time when, it started to bug me.

In 2020, the number of fake information about COVID, was already about 50-50 with real information. Simple facts which were against their faith were tolerated rarely. For some reason, I still thought that it's just an ephemeral thing, because they're afraid. I was wrong. Oh god, I was very-very wrong. For most people, this was the trigger to go into full unsubstantiated conspiracy theory field.

In 2022, the sub clearly started to be controlled by political parties. There were several obviously paid accounts by several parties.

Nowadays, it's fully controlled by a political party. Dissenting views are barely tolerated. And basically all views are based on faith, and faith alone. There is no - not just sensible, but simply - discussions anymore. Whoever wants to discuss Hungarian affairs sensibly, long left that place.

I've seen the same thing regarding my friends, and people who I followed on Twitter. Most of us just left public spaces all together. We don't follow news anymore that closely either. And who do, slowly go into a very dark place. One of my friends started with "classical liberalism". Nowadays, outspoken Nazi. One other was afraid of COVID, and started to share bullshit D-Vitamin spam blog posts. Nowadays, he's full blown antivax. Another, was deep into depression, after the amount of alt-right bullshit he consumed. Luckily, he got out from there, but there were times when I thought that I lost him. My mom doesn't know what's happening in the country where she lives. My dad knows, follows the news, and he's halfway into depression for the past years. And there are those people who I followed on Twitter, because they argued sensibly. They are either not there anymore, or slowly their fact based opinions were replaced by faith. They maybe still on the "right" "side", but it's more rarely a conscious decision. It's only a matter of time before they will slip, and even now sensible discussions are impossible with them.

I don't know what good solutions there are. I hate that I'm turning more, and more inwards, creating a bubble again, after I forcefully cut it open completely about 15 years ago. But unfortunately, it's worth less and less to read random people's opinion... or at least what many try to sell as opinion.