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alphahydra t1_jb034fv wrote

Reply to comment by dc456 in New UN brokered High Seas Treaty Places 30% of Ocean into protected areas by 2030 after decades of talks by AstroEngineer314

Yes, I do. I think there's a few things at play.

For one, things are genuinely getting worse, and we're starting to see the real effects of climate change and pollution become more apparent, which is shocking a lot of people out of their complacency, flipping all the way to the other extreme. From "that's a problem for the future" to "OMG we're all dead".

People are also a bit frazzled and anxious coming out of the pandemic, and now looking at climate change, biodiversity loss, along with the warn in Ukraine, nuclear risk, the increase in worldwide authoritarianism, H5N1, etc. and it's a lot of crises to process at once.

The internet is also hurting people's ability to grasp nuance. It's critical that we understand there are many different possible levels of "bad outcome". Just because we cross the threshold into one bad scenario doesn't mean all is lost, there's no hope for the future, and there's no point striving to prevent things getting yet worse, or that we can't make things better in other ways.

If we don't celebrate the victories and keep striving, then all really is lost.

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dc456 t1_jb05uuz wrote

> The internet is also hurting people’s ability to grasp nuance.

I absolutely agree with this, and I think that extends to logic too. (Too often ‘not A’ is taken to mean ‘B’, when it could be any other letter.)

I also think a factor is that Reddit has attracted more younger people, particularly teenagers, who tend to naturally be a bit more contrarian and absolutist. This means that the top comments often tend to be the opposite of the post.

Which leads me on to my other point which is I think that a lot of the recent influx of users don’t really understand or care about subs, so just see something on their front page and interact with it in the same way.

So a positive sub like this gets doubly hit.

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