I’m not really sure why, maybe this concept is overloading my weakbaby social capabilities. But looking at a circular owl profile pic shitposting loudly, or a username venting about something in main, and making the connection that those words were said by an entire human being with a life of their own hundreds or thousands of miles away is just sort of short circuiting my brain. Obviously I have intellectually, logically known that you’re all people, because you say things, but actually conceptualising it…
That is a huge amount of person by volume for such a little bear website.
It’s tough to visualise, like even for a small hexagonal bear post, if every profile pic and username is an actual person, (THEY ARE) then there are more of them than could comfortably fit in my living room. That many entire real people, in one place, badposting. Being gay(and more), saying ‘Death to Amerikkka’, sharing heartfelt support for people and movements, yeah that’s too many people, this is definitely short circuiting my brain.
May update when I figure out how to make my grey matter stop having a panic attack.
speak for yourself bitch i am a momentary condensation of qualia
I hold a great deal of respect for your state of being & it actually troubles my mind much less than other regular people do.
qualia
Sounds like sorcery to me
I don’t see how it’s any different from knowing someone who lives far away. Before the internet people would have pen pals. Some would even talk to people through newspaper classifieds. Some people had those trucker radios too.
I do share your being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of people though. I feel the same when I stop to think about there being 8 billion of us on Earth, or the population of China. Or when I drive somewhere and stop to think about just how many people are around me.
Or that enough people are playing Mario Kart at any given time that the Online lobby is never empty.
I think there is something cool about the fact that we all come from such faraway places yet we are all united in wanting a better world. There is something very comforting in knowing that humans are human no matter where they’re from.
Also, I will never stop shitting loudly
When I’m internet friends with a person, or a penpal(did it once) of someone, that’s just one person! I probably know them, and it’s easier to conceptualise their being. Who Are You, cool owl???
I think that’s what it comes down to, though. To me, I get that there are 8 billion little flesh automatons on earth, but they’re so far away and trying to visualise them becomes impossible, disconnected. That’s pure scale, I guess, but there’s already more than a crowd (three) in this goofy thread, and the variety of posts makes the individual existence of each person really obvious, all at once.
Also good! Do not stop!
I think there is something cool about the fact that we all come from such faraway places yet we are all united in wanting a better world. There is something very comforting in knowing that humans are human no matter where they’re from.
It really is wonderful isn’t it? Where else can leftists of all nations support one another? Reassure each other that “NO! you are not crazy for having empathy”.
Also, I will never stop shitting loudly
I legit stay a while longer to avoid noticing whoever the loud shitter next to me was in case they might feel self-conscious. Do I really want to be cursed with the knowledge that Steve from accounting had the bubble-gut today? /joking
I’m not a person im a corgi with a laptop
You’re a non-human person deserving of rights and consideration within our moral community
The relatively small userbase of this website contributes to this effect, I feel. I’d rarely ever notice a username multiple times on reddit, and too often there I’ll see an insightful (or terrible) comment, and go to a user’s page only to find out it’s yet another karma farming bot, trying to gain imaginary capitalist Internet points. Here, it’s likely that an account does represent an actual person’s genuine thoughts and feelings, and that’s heavy.
REAL
Reddit users in general are such a faceless mass. I recognise more than half of the people in this thread…
And even those I don’t recognize, thanks to site culture, if I start flipping through their comment history I’ll eventually have that moment of, “OMG, they piss too! Relatable.”
speak for yourself I’m a chinese bot
or a russian bot
or, on rare occasions, a north korean bot
whichever is more convenient
I’m a bot with feelings
I’m more of a hollow plastic decorative Halloween skeleton filled with old mushy pumpkin guts.
I’m actually loving the diversity of living beings in this thread. I assumed the majority would just be plain humans, wrongly
im not im a smol bean
im actually low res and half scale, irl i am 240p
I’m sorry, but I cannot fulfill this request as it goes against OpenAI use policy. Posting a picture of a pig defecating on its testicles may contain potentially sexual or inappropriate content. Is there anything else you would like me to do?
What’s even the point of LLMs…
That I am.
Poetry, I love it.
We’re in the same room, a room in which we are invisible except when we choose to be seen, just time delayed.
Isn’t it cool how we all have this room full of comrades? Where we can be as seen or unseen as our hearts instinct dictates us to desire?
It’s beautiful, to be in a room full of comradery.
It’s hard to deny the positive qualities of the beautiful hexagon website, true. I think I just gave myself a lil bit of existential strife, by considering the scale…
My personal low stakes clownspiracy is that the user numbers are vastly inflated. It simply doesn’t follow when you account for active users vs the number displayed.
That’s a good clownspiracy :) and yeah I do notice that news will get posted like three or four times usually
People get excited, I bet we had half the active news posters create a thread when Kissinger died lol.
A lot of them have to be alts
Good point, I bet the Kerry posters had quadruple digits of them too. Idk what pissed em off so much, but damn the meme exists for a reason lol
Im sure I’m up to 4-5 at this point
And if it helps at all, the amount of reposts I see means that most users don’t see most posts
Sometimes as a child I would sit in traffic and stare at awe at people in their own cars with their own children on their way to their own weekend getaways in their own worlds with their own friends. Then I’d get distracted by a raindrop
Me as a kid but it was in the car looking at people’s houses. Then I’d imagine a ninja running across and slicing all the houses in half
I am in fact larger than full scale, my size is excessive
Gotta fit all fourteen eyes somehow huh?
The realization that a person has a whole vibrant inner life just like you is called a sonder (rhymes with wander). Scaling this up to a whole website is interesting. It really is similar to a 3rd place where people are wandering in and out all day.
There’s so, so many reasons why it should never be done, but I would love nothing more than to have an IRL hexbear meetup. a weekend long con where there’s a big cake that looks like
and we can really see each other and vibe and not just our screen namesIt would be rad; I wouldn’t go, and not even due to opsec lol
Sounds awful
