Gimme a break.

But it was a project. I learned a lot from my time here, wrote and published articles about these phenomena, even presented on this research at conferences in my field. There was, and is, a lot to be decoded from the behaviors within communities that once supported semi-anonymous creative production platforms spawned by web2.0 idealism and technofetishism. Those tools, those communities devolved into the morass of social media addiction and consumption-obsessed helplessness catalyzed by facebook, twitter, instagram, tiktok (though at least tiktok encourages a more creative take on content production and sharing than the others) now festering across our contemporary ubiquitous computing networks. It was sad to watch that devolution scale up from sites like ytmnd to the whole damn internet and beyond. But here we are, 15 years-ish later, and look what passes for "creativity" now. All those means of production in the hands of the people and what we got from it is mindless meme reposting, endless scroll syndrome, history's largest panopticon, and the first Pepe President.

Shut up and eat your Netflix binge. Or don't. I don't wanna resort to fat shaming again.

At that point, I forgot that real human tragedy and deep trauma behind the account names and keyboards always drives even the most obnoxious behaviors. I mean, really, can you possibly imagine the scale of abject pathos necessary to be DarthWang? or Uncircumcised? or that barely sentient idiot from Michigan that swooped into shitposting on ytmnd via a dozen+ alt accounts like an army of Trekkies attacking a truckload of Funyuns? Thing is, Wang, evidenced by the fact that he is STILL HERE 15 years later, doing exactly the same thing every single day, proves that he simply cannot help himself. He is just that broken. Same with so many of the personalities that shit up this site for all those years. And as awful as so many of the trolls here were--and, apparently, still are, ffs!--staring into that abyss, it became clear that the abyss stares back. I regularly crossed the line into being exactly as destructive as those that were ruining this place. And you caught a lot of my [subsequent] hypocrisy, as I resorted to my own base instincts and cruelty, taking twisted pleasure in wrecking the experiences of those wrecking the experiences of others. I shouldn't have done that, for many reasons, not the least of which is that it was some basic bitch shit. I come armed with much more ammo than madDogSoldier could ever fathom. Prairiedogeric10, as obnoxious and obsequious as he was, was still just a [dumb] kid. Whatever high ideals I started with when I began to mock the idiots, intending--albeit unproductively--to drive shitty users away, I eventually capitulated to the idiocy myself. The only way to out-troll a troll is to be an even bigger asshole, which is precisely why the more effective method to rid a community of its trolls is to instead ignore them 100%. But I got addicted to that same dopamine rush driving the rest of the armies of mediocrity stomping all over this place. For that, gr33nscr33n was a failed project.

In true tl;dr form, much of the above might be dismissed as rambling, unrelated, tangential, spurious conjecture but, ehh, whatever, who gives a shit. But whether one wants to care or not, there is a through line from the obnoxious forum spamming troll seeking attention, positive or negative--anything! dear god, I am so alone! and bored!--to the megalomaniacal fascist and its armies of equally delusional sycophants that burn to the ground that which they cannot wrestle under their control. The same behaviors that destroy/ed communities, like ytmnd, 4chan, etc are those that proliferate in reactionary politics and thrive on mono-culture war-centric hegemony, celebrated by irl trolls, from the Proud Boys to John Birch Society members to Tea Partiers and Birthers to QAnon morons to the founding ideologues of the KKK, the Christian Identity Movement, and the American Nazi Party. This is why we can't have nice things, whatever "things" we may be referring to.

Thus, my shift from initially good natured, subtext celebrating, wise assed, mostly goofy user here, back in 2006, to troller of trolls, harasser of false idols, and intolerant attack dog in the name of principled content a year or so later. The well of trolls, cheating egoists, dunderheaded racists, spam-happy twits, and whatever the hell madDogSoldier is, it turned out, was bottomless and I gradually morphed from "a ytmnder's ytmnder" to "jesus fucking christ, what the fuck is wrong with you fucking people" intolerance and general disgust for most of you shitfarts here.

You'll have to decide for yourself if you think this is the real gr33nscr33n, who just happened to check on this sad, tragic wasteland of a site on a whim for the first time in half a decade and made (or remade, really) a quick acct to post this comment, or if it is an imposter who likely hangs out here, shitposting all day long, year after year, because mental health is fragile and most people live lonely, desperate lives. I won't promise you anything because the internet is Tim Berners-Lee's greatest aspiration crashed against the rocks of virulent human weakness and, as such, everything here is both truth and lie, priceless and worthless, sincere and cynical at the same time, but I will say this: I'm sorry I was as cruel as I was to people who couldn't control their behavior. Don't get me wrong, I still despise the self-serving, toxic, compulsive behaviors that effectively wrecked ytmnd, and the internet, and our society in general, where unchecked mental health disorders run rampant through every level of our culture, where empathy-less greed and OCD quantitative crunching ignores the nuance of qualitative human experience, where toxic masculinity, self-obsessed dopamine addiction, mediated masturbation, and Amusing Ourselves to Death-centric spectacle drown out any and all efforts to make something "real." I still resent that our society rewards Elon Musk and his ilk with uneven accumulation of wealth, clout, and power, despite their deep lack of compassion for anyone other than themselves--and that, tragically, far more often than anyone wants to discuss, such individuals' selfish behaviors emerge from the unchecked, untreated, undiagnosed personality and spectrum disorders, like narcissism, bipolar, borderline, autism, histrionicism, etc that proliferate in communities, from data-obsessed day traders to rabid gamer fandom to the incel and red pill manosphere to the frickin office of the president.