YouTube comments.
Some anthropologists in the distant future are going to look back here to what's written and be deeply depressed.
I'm pretty sure we don't need to look that far into the future.
A lot of people are depressed already looking at them.
Yes, but... well - it's just, history as it's being practised is filled with primary sources which express the acme of that particularly civilization. Of course, 99% of people played no part in this whatsoever, so their mental diarrhea has largely gone unrecorded. Now we're getting a portrait of what humanity is capable of when millions can read and have easy access to the media. We have space shuttles and skyscrapers, advanced scientific knowledge and the industrial proficiency to produce more in a few days than in centuries of human labour. Observing the past 100 years critically and it would be difficult to label this period as anything short of miraculous... and yet... ten minutes on Youtube and you wonder if there's bleach in the gene pool.
Rather than the trolls getting fewer in number, I think we're sinking down to their level. Eventually we'll create some kind of digitized neural network like in whichever cyberpunk book you can think of, and humanity will be lost forever in a hell of our own devising. Stupid irrational arguments and statements repeated over and over again, poorly composed and filled with flaming rhetoric. We'd be forced to kill ourselves just to make it stop.
That and the pop-up ads and spam would be a bitch.
