Amarna Forum

Alternative Title:"Net Necrophying Of Language"
Recently there's been some discussion in that gymnasium of thought known as the shout box about things adjacent to topics I have been thinking about for months maybe over a year now. I hope to illuminate them, or at least give a good shot in the dark. What I wish to discuss today is for lack of a better term I'll call mad libs minds. I call them that because their very though processes remind me of those classic pulp fodder for American children in that their minds work like this:


Where instead of the blanks being spaces for words imagine memes and the sentence as whatever thought process that's been inscribed onto them(Ex:Yank culture).  Now you likely asking that sounds mighty abstract Mr Nuc, how does that look? I'll show you three examples first being from the community of defenders of the West:


The video itself is not that important(Its a higher than effort usual soyjak edit video with the crude ms paint illustrations and animation a cut above but the subject matter typically grotesque you have a likely taken from some photo post up ftm transexual in a sex swing on a stage in front of kids in some sex swing with a drag queen clapping along but then a Hulk like Chud appears and the epic rap music kicks in, quite NSFW. https://booru.soy/post/view/27148). The context in all three cases should not be your focus but rather the replies in question, the reaction to the content on display. Like the threads of soyjak.party itself a (well formulated) sentence is rare its all baying the same slang phrases and showing reaction images at each other. This is what I mean by a mads libs mind, a user whose online activity is this behavior and only this a mind that's ability is purely automatic reaction to content. It's not of course unique to chuddy chuds although I highlight it because such minds get much unwarranted self importance from thinking they are above this or not this. Here's a contrasting example:

A drawing of a even gayer slave version of Miles Morales from the new Spiderverse flick. What is the audience reaction?



At this point I presume a objection "Ok, I kinda get the connection, there's this route faggot seal clapping with  images and phrases and they are kinda similar-but that's typical! How is that spooky or worth bringing up?"
I have two reasons this sort of behavior has been increasing steadily to the point where wherever you go on the surface web this is 3/5 comment sections it feels. The second is this is becoming a default mode of behavior if you look at the online presence of any of the people in that twitter thread its rt's of similar art reactions like that and maybe some blog posting. Same as our soy teens but with a palette swap. When I venture online and see the sea of such accounts under a archway labeled "The radical edgy internet" I feel like the last man alive entering a world of imposters that can only do recordings of speech.

The final example shows this in a different way from the other two


Why the image? Why such a dumb image? Why is it that not just on that infamous site the majority of all private chat rooms especially among the very online all communicate like this and will exclusively do so, attacking anyone who does otherwise with nerd emojis? Is it simply the further degradation of language by plebs of all stripes or a new warped type of mind? My musings have circled around these lines of inquiry long enough that I would like some outside opinions-at least to see if I am crazy or not.

Quote:Is it simply the further degradation of language by plebs of all stripes or a new warped type of mind? My musings have circled around these lines of inquiry long enough that I would like some outside opinions-at least to see if I am crazy or not.

You are not crazy and I understand what you mean. I have thought about some reasons why, but none of them suffice for a total explanation of the phenomenon. There are three factors that I have previously considered, which are the inclusion of the masses, a descent into the primitive, and the problem of redundancy. No one factor can really be said to be isolated from the other, but distinguishing them cannot be harmful in my opinion. It would be better to distinguish them than to make a bold absolute and avoid the depth of the issue.

I don't know how much I should stress this point, as the culture of the Internet has accepted this premise ever since Eternal September, but the inclusion of the masses into the Internet has caused grave issues in communication. There is little reason for text to take precedence over video if the audience is at a high number. There is nothing inherently bad about the sharing of videos, it is simply that it is a preferable form to transmit messages: text files take up little to no space compared to a video file, but the video file can condense the message of the text with a immersiveness superior to the text. Both things can be true: the Internet once housed various people whose attention spans could survive off a primarily textual interface, AND that the Internet did not have a plethora of videos in the 90s purely due to technical limitations. It is inevitable that most sites will be dumbed down further from its expansion.

The second factor is that the facility of language has declined to the point where primitive conceptions of language master the civilized conception: a multitude of words in the English language exist and are mastered by a few, which cannot be said for certain African languages that express only the most basic conditions of a language. This is my least developed point, but I want to submit it here to see some reactions. J.C. Carouthers (referenced in McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy) had published a paper in 1959 relating to certain aspects of nonliterate languages: the two I will mention are the African and Eskimo ones. It was observed among the Bantus (Kikuyus specifically) that there was a deep interest in the power of words and the correct recitation of them. The words of the group are to be regarded as powerful at first impression, and nothing more can be done but to avoid profane utterances. With the Eskimos, their nonliterate language was one centered around direct actions, composed around the concrete and never the abstract. 

Quote:"A rule of Eskimo life is that a man must not keep any thought to himself, for if he does so he will go mad".
A better method for insuring that a man should not develop ideas which are unorthodox within his culture could hardly be devised. [Italics is a quote by the author from another source]

More in line with your post, it seems that some remarks were made by the early anthropologist Sir Edward Burnett Tylor in his work Primitive Culture (1871). I found this when scrolling through Archive.org, but did not progress beyond a few pages after finding this specific quote. Might return to it whenever I have the time, since it does point to less-developed languages having within them a strong focus on repetition/imitation, rather than something like variation.

Quote:It will at the same time and by same proofs appear, that savages possess in a high degree the faculty of uttering their minds directly in emotional tones and interjections, of going straight to nature to furnish themselves with imitative sounds, including reproductions of their own direct emotional utterances, as means of expression of ideas, and of introducing into their formal language words so produced

[Important Edit, 7/6/23: What I meant to say in regards to this quote is that repetition rules earlier languages, either in the case of Tylor's savage or in the groups described above. This can be differentiated from the literacy based languages we are accustomed to now. This is the last edit I'll make]
This could be the maintained struggle of keeping a literate language alive: ensuring that it does not become subjected to a primitivism of thought. It is decidedly a product of the most literate characters in society that instills a gift of language: by their intelligence, by a hardheaded opposition to a primitive animality, and by the already existent tradition of the language that guides them. As we see by the earnest repetition of basic phrases by Internet commenters, there is an awakening of the primitive impulse to follow a set list of words. It certainly helps, too, that those who succumb most to this impulse are ones with the strongest connection to it (not white).

Now to the third point of redundancy. The problem of redundancy is present within the comments you have posted as an example, where all of the replies are shaped into the same mold: if the original poster struck a certain chord in the audience, there are a set of humorous conversation prompts you can send in reply. I feel like I am reiterating the same issue with the old MDE video Sitcom Humor Robots, which is essentially a video of younger Sam Hyde talking about workplace employees saying "TMI" as a set response. It doesn't follow the conditions of the conversation you were just having with the person, it is almost as if the pattern recognition of the person's brain overrode social conduct ("it would be funny if I said that funny line aloud"). This is unrelated to an extent, but Claude Shannon's paper A Mathematical Theory of Communication had made me realize the value of overcoming redundancy:

Quote:The redundancy of ordinary English, not considering statistical structure over greater distances than about eight letters, is roughly 50%. This means that when we write English half of what we write is determined by the structure of the language and half chosen freely...Two extremes of redundancy in English prose are represented by Basic English and by James Joyce's book Finnegans Wake. The Basic English vocabulary is limited to 850 words and the redundancy is very high...Joyce on the other hand enlarges the vocabulary and is alleged to achieve a compression of semantic content.

There is a system of a language hacked down to its foundations, and a work that is the product of an enlarged vocabulary. These are extremes, but a consideration that should be made is that most works of (good to great) literature will gravitate more towards the Finnegans Wake extreme than Basic English; anything that pollutes the shelves of a popular bookstore gravitates to the other side. With the Internet, there is a separate mannerism of an English sentence that falls outside of regular usage. In a sense, many of the essential words used by commenters can be present in IRL conversations, but the circulation of words is different. This is an outdated example, but the word "thing" will take on a new collective meaning "So..that's a thing" for the people who continually hear it: it is repeated, adopted, and spreads to the point where the common meaning is transfigured. It becomes a redundant part of language and can be expressed as such. This perhaps could be why a person might want to repeat twitter phrases like "wait, let him cook" out loud (This happened to me IRL, was dumbfounded). It is at once a phrase of humorous intent and a regular phrase that should be expected, like hearing "Thank you". The result is that the uninvolved person hears a set of alien phrases daily without end.

I hope this can serve as an explanation for this and didn't come off as a rambling shitpost.

I don't think this is an internet-specific phenomenon. I think most people (especially stupid people) have always thought in a hiveminded way, and once they got online, the internet began to reflect this in a particularly visible and ugly way. Most people don't actually need to think deeply to get by, repeating jokes and memes is enough to fit in with the group.

We should be thankful we are at least afforded some virtual space to express meaningful/unique thoughts if we choose to do so, even if they are barely heard. Historically such opportunities may have only been available to aristocracy while other minds were automatically funneled into ideologically subservient NPC roles.

(07-05-2023, 11:57 PM)JohnTrent Wrote: [ -> ]the old MDE video Sitcom Humor Robots, which is essentially a video of younger Sam Hyde talking about workplace employees saying "TMI" as a set response. It doesn't follow the conditions of the conversation you were just having with the person, it is almost as if the pattern recognition of the person's brain overrode social conduct ("it would be funny if I said that funny line aloud").

And now Sam Hyde has become the sitcom dispensing humour to the next generation of robots.

Something I've been saying for a while is that he was big in pioneering unfunny things which are instinctively recognised as "funny" through manipulation of social cues. In particular "Humour Editing", which now has a life of its own beyond him. Call of Duty hit sound effects, vine booms, these are the obvious examples if you don't yet know what I mean. A lot of people who get by as "funny" online I think rely on what is more or less cynical, personality-stripped imitations of MDE presentation. Ssethtzeentach. Not funny, but he speaks with humour-syntax and edits to humour-beats and references 4chan discourse every 15 seconds. Frank Hassle, like Sam Hyde but too dumb to actually make jokes. They succeed, but in the same way the sitcom succeeds when someone says "too much information" and then the laughter plays and the audience feel vaguely stimulated in a way they've come to associate with amusement.

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(07-06-2023, 05:01 AM)Mason Hall-McCullough Wrote: [ -> ]We should be thankful we are at least afforded some virtual space to express meaningful/unique thoughts if we choose to do so, even if they are barely heard. Historically such opportunities may have only been available to aristocracy while other minds were automatically funneled into ideologically subservient NPC roles.

Unfortunately there is one other pre-modern western group whose way of life might resemble our own more than that of the aristocracy.

(07-06-2023, 08:42 AM)anthony Wrote: [ -> ]

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(07-06-2023, 05:01 AM)Mason Hall-McCullough Wrote: [ -> ]We should be thankful we are at least afforded some virtual space to express meaningful/unique thoughts if we choose to do so, even if they are barely heard. Historically such opportunities may have only been available to aristocracy while other minds were automatically funneled into ideologically subservient NPC roles.

Unfortunately there is one other pre-modern western group whose way of life might resemble our own more than that of the aristocracy.

The scholastic turns into the colleges and universities. That’s their spiritual and literal predecessor. We are the Inheritors of the eccentric aristocrats like Kepler who did his own thing by himself totally free and unbound with a small group of friends.

Too many slaves, in short.

The main Question is, is this behavior "gene-locked" and therefore mandatory, or are there ways to stimulate parts of the personality (like disagreeability) to avoid it.

Thank you for this thread. I noticed this phenomenon too.

These people value things that are 'funny' over things that are beautiful. They prefer memes because memes can be understood by simply being on the internet for long enough.

(07-05-2023, 11:57 PM)JohnTrent Wrote: [ -> ]...

Some of the points here were inarticulately delivered, and despite separating some of these explanations, there's still something to be desired here. In line with what I said in the shitbox, I wanted to post here again and expand on my original reply.

There is not a keen separation between the online life and the real life, which might have once existed when computing was less prevalent, or when the Internet wasn't as popular. The emergence of certain behavior that is most amenable to the online environment (and not to real life conditions) was earliest seen through IRL events: Chanology, cringe compilations, and, loosely, certain public protests against SOPA/PIPA. With exception to the cringe example, the others are formed as an online reaction to real life circumstances. It is not a fully exact imitation of online behaviors, but suffices as proof of the online being submerged into real life. This is a gradual transformation which does not cease, and a profound difficulty here can be noticed by the fact that the earliest iterations have little to do with what follows. The wider popularity of certain sites over another (Twitter over 4chan) is a clear break. Before this break, it was understood that the online should be kept separate from the real world, and speaking about 4chan in public was simply stupid to do. People discussing memes in public produced the reaction of "cringe" videos because there was still an underlying revulsion to the thought that both are submerged in the other. "Memes" were viral in nature, yet not viral to the point that each and every person in a given high school classroom knew of it.

A period of total immersion follows around the year 2016 or so, where more and more younger students are able to use Twitter, Discord, etc. Even when Discord is referenced in a derogatory fashion, it is a personal acknowledgement that each person knows what it is — that is what makes the joke work, as opposed to a someone with Asperger's in 2014 referencing a meme. Around the time of GamerGate, there was already a conspiratorial interpretation of what was brewing, where Federal operatives might be beginning to influence "social media" to their own ends. This cannot be isolated from the further popularity of the Internet, albeit on very superficial sites that had little to do with (more influential) predecessors. It is hard to discuss this cultural vacuum because the subculture of SomethingAwful or old 4chan has a textual base, even when it transfers over to pictures. Sites like KnowYourMeme exist because the image can be described in accurate terms, having an archived explanation alongside the later collective effort. The difficulty now is that some posts are deleted on Twitter, but more importantly, the so-called "memes" and phrases used do not have as exact a lineage. There is no direct inheritance from one poster to another, it is a network of posters who arrive at consensus or adopt it at quick speeds, then drop it whenever it becomes stale. It has greater reach at the draw of limited lifespan. Don't think I need to say this point, but to prevent confusion, the Online Nazi [for lack of a better term] does not have to deal with this as much. Their accounts are deleted more rapidly than others on Elonsite, but still have some understood foundation that they can work upon. The rest are vagrants who adopt one phrase and drop it at a moment's notice. In some other ways, they will continue to adopt a certain behavior for much longer, as you will soon see.

The connection to real life is that, since a lot of the vagrant posts are not objectionable in the eyes of the public, they can follow a more steady pattern of mimicry. Those who mention the key phrases in public are not people who create original content, they can merely repeat it in the attempt of humor. This is far more inactive than the times of online-exclusive phrases, being more or less a continual repetition of certain images, behaviors seen in videos, and catchphrases. The soyface is a more traditional example, now transformed into something else:



I already mentioned in the shitbox that this current expression and the Soyface are two sides of the same coin, both an exaggerated form of human emotion. Surely the creator of the video had already been acquainted with the details of Nico Claux, but chose to make these faces during the filming of the video. If you look at the thumbnails, there are variations of this face used for each video, regardless of how "intense" the video itself might be (it usually isn't). It would be one thing if this type of expression was restricted to the YouTube page, but it is not. That is what made the Soyface so popular in the first place, because some tendency that produces exaggerated faces can be found everywhere within developed Western societies. It is definitely inspired by a sea of reaction images, post replies, and other YouTube videos. It is an iron law of repetition that generates certain expressions in certain situations, certain catchphrases to be used when faced with the right prompt. It is a problem in real life as much as it is on various sites.

Nuc has identified something that I've thought about too. This degeneration is natural to language and culture, that it is reduced down to the base elements which excite people. This, like any other example of entropy, can be slowed and at times reversed. The monolithic control that can be exercised over the entire internet as it has now been consolidated allows either for its simple deletion or more complex curation. This control, as of now, is being exercised to scrape untold amounts of data and make millions off of advertising scams and cheap muck to the ever imbecilic users who gather to partake in the "discourse" and laugh at "memes" and smile at "wholesome" content all served to them by algorithms. These algorithms have improved greatly over the last decade, though slowing now as the quality of their creators has been diluted by the expansion of the internet globally, so the cycle of creating new memes, lingo and phrases has accelerated as each is wringed out for all it is worth click-wise all so much faster than the last one. There is no innovation of course, each one is simply a slight spin on a basic reaction image in some form or another. Reaction images in response to reaction images. Reaction images without end.

Apologies for the negro. He is a great example.

With everyone now linked up on an ever decreasing number of platforms you can expect the creation and solidification of a global monoculture within a decade that simply combines the lowest of each racial, sex and sexual category into one. The lizzo-dalit-gutteroil-opiod-chav-fingerwagging-henpecking-blahaj-twink anti-culture.

(08-21-2023, 08:02 PM)Guest Wrote: [ -> ]

When I started reading I expected the "Mad libs" exposition to be directed more towards the irony leftist-adjacent group of shitlibs that plays madlibs on whatever political belief they decide to larp as (i.e MAGA Communism, NATO Socialist Empire, Communist Confederacy). It reminds me of some guy on twitter making an account and going full in on playing political madlibs with them and actually gained a following of them before revealing the ruse.

This post is completely off-topic by the way.

Actually, that sort of behavior I would consider at the very least adjacent. The constant hunting and showing off of the latest freak flag to fly has been a consistent trend on the internet in various ways since the late 2010s, with the rise of the political compass as a True Guide to Beliefs along with Hoi4 modding Wikipedia history moments ifunny memes etc.

(07-05-2023, 09:45 PM)NuclearAbsolutist Wrote: [ -> ][…]being from the community of defenders of the West:


[…] The context in all three cases should not be your focus but rather the replies in question, the reaction to the content on display. Like the threads of soyjak.party itself a (well formulated) sentence is rare its all baying the same slang phrases and showing reaction images at each other. This is what I mean by a mads libs mind, a user whose online activity is this behavior and only this a mind that's ability is purely automatic reaction to content. […]

A drawing of a even gayer slave version of Miles Morales from the new Spiderverse flick. What is the audience reaction?



At this point I presume a objection "Ok, I kinda get the connection, there's this route faggot seal clapping with  images and phrases and they are kinda similar-but that's typical! How is that spooky or worth bringing up?"
I have two reasons this sort of behavior has been increasing steadily to the point where wherever you go on the surface web this is 3/5 comment sections it feels. The second is this is becoming a default mode of behavior if you look at the online presence of any of the people in that twitter thread its rt's of similar art reactions like that and maybe some blog posting. Same as our soy teens but with a palette swap. When I venture online and see the sea of such accounts under a archway labeled "The radical edgy internet" I feel like the last man alive entering a world of imposters that can only do recordings of speech. […]

There has been a lot of speculation in this thread on language decay, but I think it’s quite the opposite. Communication is what is said as much as it is what’s trying to be said. If what your trying to communicate is something not very intellectual then you would not expect it to be that. The first two examples shown are of comments trying to show the users appreciation of the entertainment. These comments can be understood as superlikes: a more personal like to show your enthusiasm as the standard like is too cold and impartial. Like the seal clapping example, there are various ways to show your excitement in a physical setting without complexity. Screaming is one of them. You can see this in the second example with the onomatopoeia “EEEEEK.” The onomatopoeia is then followed by “I LOVE HIM !!!” I believe this is a perfect communication of that commenter’s inner state. 

I know Nuc said not to focus on the content itself and instead the reaction, but this has only caused misunderstandings in attempts to explain the phenomenon. What kind of reaction would you give to this kind of content? Especially if you are instilled with no other feelings but excitement? The soured of this behavior is the mass consumption of this essentially deviant art tier content. This commenting behavior then spills out into other comment sections like nature documentaries where it’s endless “omg, dat monkey be so cute 🥰” 

Going back to the first chuddish example to corroborate my point: a lot of the comments are variations of the “gem” affirmation. These replies fit my concept of a superlike as they are personal and creative, but not with complexity beyond the “ahhhhh” feelings trying to be conveyed. 

Now, this behavior is not strange in itself(subhuman response to shit content), but as Nuc said, the truly scary thing is the mass spread of this behavior. The sentiment of decay was right, but it was a decay of character and person rather then language. These people are only searching for a dopamine rush, not something to truly enjoy. They likely consume things in a fast paced manner like scrolling through TikTok. Short attention span and quick dopamine hits, this is what has caused this phenomenon.

(09-22-2023, 08:42 PM)Guest Wrote: [ -> ]There has been a lot of speculation in this thread on language decay, but I think it’s quite the opposite. Communication is what is said as much as it is what’s trying to be said. If what your trying to communicate is something not very intellectual then you would not expect it to be that. The first two examples shown are of comments trying to show the users appreciation of the entertainment. These comments can be understood as superlikes: a more personal like to show your enthusiasm as the standard like is too cold and impartial. Like the seal clapping example, there are various ways to show your excitement in a physical setting without complexity. Screaming is one of them. You can see this in the second example with the onomatopoeia “EEEEEK.” The onomatopoeia is then followed by “I LOVE HIM !!!” I believe this is a perfect communication of that commenter’s inner state. 

I know Nuc said not to focus on the content itself and instead the reaction, but this has only caused misunderstandings in attempts to explain the phenomenon. What kind of reaction would you give to this kind of content? Especially if you are instilled with no other feelings but excitement? The soured of this behavior is the mass consumption of this essentially deviant art tier content. This commenting behavior then spills out into other comment sections like nature documentaries where it’s endless “omg, dat monkey be so cute 🥰” 

Going back to the first chuddish example to corroborate my point: a lot of the comments are variations of the “gem” affirmation. These replies fit my concept of a superlike as they are personal and creative, but not with complexity beyond the “ahhhhh” feelings trying to be conveyed. 

Now, this behavior is not strange in itself(subhuman response to shit content), but as Nuc said, the truly scary thing is the mass spread of this behavior. The sentiment of decay was right, but it was a decay of character and person rather then language. These people are only searching for a dopamine rush, not something to truly enjoy. They likely consume things in a fast paced manner like scrolling through TikTok. Short attention span and quick dopamine hits, this is what has caused this phenomenon.

This is a very sharp post. Communication is now shockingly dense and complex online. More than most people can understand. Including those doing the communicating. I still post on 4chan, I see it sort of like putting on my pith helmet to observe savages, the trend that sticks out in every thread, every discussion, every board, is that nobody is talking. Nobody posts like I/we do here. The place is not for sharing direct and personal thoughts. But it still never stops moving, posts are constantly being made. The intentions are still communication, but it's all going on below and around direct language. It's a subtle social dance, it brings to my mind things like the absurd backwardness of islamic world social standards which make efficient meetings and business near impossible (excessive ritual and etiquette, direct communication of intentions considered deeply impolite, etc). Important point about that example, I think it's a brown thing. Pigsaw has taken to referring to the place as 4mex, and I think that's right.

It's no longer a place where smart, agitated white nerds go because everywhere else is too slow and retarded. It's now a hazy hovel full of lazing browns who fill their time with pointless and sacred social rituals of call and response, mutual affirmation, affected disagreements, the communication is constant and the words don't matter. If I barge in with my pith helmet on and start trying to have a conversation with these people I get looked at like I've grown a second head. Nobody knows how to communicate back, if asked to actually consciously look at the things they're saying and try to explain themselves in new words people suddenly get anxious and upset, it's a serious breach of etiquette and disruption of the peace.

They are kind of right to react this way, it's going into a place where people go to do one specific kind of thing and challenging them all to do something entirely different. But one could also say that I am right, because I am bring truer to the original spirit of the internet, 4chan, and language and communication. I could share countless screenshots and threads of me experimenting with disturbing the peace. The reaction is roughly the same each time. Lots of crowding and ganging up, hostile reactive noise, but not much being said. When attempts at answering are made it's plain that they aren't used to this, can't resist the instinct to fall into familiar patterns and getting frustrated that I don't give the right response to the established calls. You can say the weapon sandbox is good or bad, but you cannot reject the weapon sandbox as a frame for discussion of an "fps". You're off the rails at that point.

Guest summarised this very well at the beginning of the post. Communication is not really decaying, people don't want to communicate. It's not hard to develop language skills through practice and engagement. What's hard if not impossible to develop is a desire to seriously communicate.

You guys all give the same “💕😭🫠 omg so cute” reaction to epstein furry loli pics on X.

(09-23-2023, 01:03 AM)anthony Wrote: [ -> ]I could share countless screenshots and threads of me experimenting with disturbing the peace. 

Please do, that would be interesting.

To paraphrase someone elsewhere, the reason soyjak posting is so big is it's the imageboard version of the "if they pretend to pay us, we'll pretend to work" mantra that was common during the fall of the Soviet union. In this case, it's about moderators shutting down entire boards and aggressively censoring or "jannying" conversations of people trying to use the website to have conversations about things or share media, while doing nothing about slide threads or BBC spam among other things. This is all while being done under the guise of free speech and allowing discussions online.

In a way, the soyjak spam is "if they pretend to allow conversations, we'll pretend to discuss things". Instead of wasting time and effort to get banned for upsetting the feelings of a 4chan moderator, you can cause maximum anger by taking someone's argument, adding > to it, and whipping out something from your soyjak folder tailored to the conversation.

To add to that, there is no more reward for effortposting or creating something original than there is reposting some old meme to Twitter at best, and almost certainly less. When I used to have a Twitter account I was slacking off in class and I posted some old meme randomly to it. I got like 20 followers and 4k retweets from that old meme. I could never get that much back then doing something interesting and I sure as hell could not do that now in the era of the algorithm and throttling.

(10-04-2023, 05:58 PM)Guest Wrote: [ -> ]To paraphrase someone elsewhere, the reason soyjak posting is so big is it's the imageboard version of the "if they pretend to pay us, we'll pretend to work" mantra that was common during the fall of the Soviet union. In this case, it's about moderators shutting down entire boards and aggressively censoring or "jannying" conversations of people trying to use the website to have conversations about things or share media, while doing nothing about slide threads or BBC spam among other things. This is all while being done under the guise of free speech and allowing discussions online.

In a way, the soyjak spam is "if they pretend to allow conversations, we'll pretend to discuss things". Instead of wasting time and effort to get banned for upsetting the feelings of a 4chan moderator, you can cause maximum anger by taking someone's argument, adding > to it, and whipping out something from your soyjak folder tailored to the conversation.

To add to that, there is no more reward for effortposting or creating something original than there is reposting some old meme to Twitter at best, and almost certainly less. When I used to have a Twitter account I was slacking off in class and I posted some old meme randomly to it. I got like 20 followers and 4k retweets from that old meme. I could never get that much back then doing something interesting and I sure as hell could not do that now in the era of the algorithm and throttling.

I would like to believe this, and think it does happen to some extent, but not really with Soyjak in general. Bane and Sneed to a large extent, yes.

Soyjaks are more like a cast of stock characters who are easily read and understood, easy to modify and personalise, etc. Just very effective cartoons for the internet age. If Soyjak is for spiting 4chan jannies, why do random youtubers (many extreme leftists included) use them constantly?



They're just EVERYWHERE on youtube now. I see them constantly. As you say, it's very rewarding. It clearly works.

As for 4chan specifically, I remember soyjaks starting out on /v/ as a console war thing. The board's "ad" thing or whatever, the warioland 4 car, runner up nominee was a bunch of crying jaks wearing all of the console hats. I'm pretty sure they started out as rage bait. Make a jak for every occasion, attach them to stupid bad faith arguments, own everyone by pretending to be retarded for hours on end for free. They got to twitter and such way later. After a bit more evolution.

speculation: some people funnel humor entirely through a single funny neuron. 'jak gets in the thumbnail because there is a sizeable firing correlation between the 'jak neuron and the funny neuron in a subset of the audience. maybe the tyranny of the intolerant ('jakker) minority comes into play if even 5% of the audience vastly prefer videos with soyjak thumbnails. also it is just low effort for a thumbnail no human photos etc just imagemagick

Yes, what you described about repetition and short segmented language is very true and I have noticed this myself. There are some important points I want to make before I attempt to diagnose the cause of this phenomenon. One is that this isn't limited to just this reaction style content, it's all content and not just content but also the mundane behavior of the average internet user. For instance watch any portion of this video (chosen to fit with the soyjak theme) to listen to the way this guy speaks:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dgg5S7nu5DQ&
You'll notice pretty much immediately this rhythmic and disjointed speech pattern. The reason for this speech pattern is his inability to concentrate on his tone and the words he's reading at the same time. Actually his inability to concentrate is so bad that he has to coax long periods of reading from himself by placing the emphasis on the end, not even of a sentence but rather, the end of a 'segment' of speech. This is because when reading aloud he can't directly read the words on the page but has to memorise them to some extent beforehand with the emphasis coming at the end of a memorised segment. This is due to poor concentration and short term memory both of which are the product of a chronic and sublimated boredom. Which I believe to be the true origin of the manifest psychological woes of the zoomers. <excuse my reddit spacing>
For contrast, remember when your parents read to you as a child. Were they as droning or as monotonous as this? Or were they able to emote and convey what was being described with comparative ease? And keep in mind that your parents likely weren't paid to read text for a living and didn't do it as frequently or as long as this guy does. Therefore this is clearly a generational problem.
Also another helpful contrast which I will link here to demonstrate my point is audiobooks, this is an audiobook of Nostromo by Joseph Conrad a somewhat baroque author as far as modern english literature is concerned, read by what I presume is a boomer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOJJbyyUf-U
Another point to mention is the difference in prose, I understand that the comparison between the two isn't exactly fair but I don't think that anybody will disagree that sentence structure has deteriorated in the last 100 years. In particular you will notice that sentences have shortened, the spoken sentence lilts towards the end, and it begins with hard attack like described in this video: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFZZI7HCp2M
creating a choppy and segmented effect.
This is due to the same effect which forces youtubers like turkey tom to speak in "youtube cadance". In fact you'll probably pick it up reading the last paragraph of text which I have written, as I too am afflicted by a similar canker.
I mention all of this to demonstrate a kind of segmenting of language. This applies in both the content of sentences and the sounds they produce. Furthermore, it's present in the actual day to day experience of conversation, especially in the reflexive referential humour you see everywhere, meme catchphrases, meme words etc.
(I apologise that this section gets into psychology it isn't my favourite subject and I generally find it boring and overly abstract)
So like I alluded to earlier the origin of this I believe to be sublimated boredom. Although I may be using the term 'boredom' somewhat loosely I think there isn't a better term for this pathology.
The body when it is stationary and unoccupied will twitch and move involuntarily because it no longer has possession of the mind (I am using these words metaphorically because I don't believe in a distinction between the mind and body). When this is ignored, for instance through the mesmerising power of the internet the body will repeatedly reassert itself via the disruption of thoughts. Any train of thought you have will be interrupted by a sensation of physical discomfort or fatigue. However the internet is largely full of content that is attention grabbing so when you would otherwise be distracted from a train of thought by physical discomfort the break in concentration merely results in greater attention being given to the internet. 
A train of thought in reality is not is not a train but rather a dyke, and an incomplete one at that. For instance you will notice that often there are several flows of thought occuring in your mind simultaneously beneath one conscious mode of thought. So when your attention is broken from this conscious mode it will be redirected in a latent and unconscious direction. This process repeatedly occurring in quick succession breaks your ability to concentrate due to your brain literally changing to accommodate intense fluctuations in activity like this. After months or years of this occurring one's ability to concentrate is severely diminished resulting in reduced language forming capacity and general segmentation of thought. A small segmented system of thinking will inevitably result in repetition due to the limited number of concepts available to you.
Now you might be curious as to why I say the body tries to assert itself over the mind, for now I think it's enough to say this is imminently available to you if you try to remain perfectly still without moving at all for 5 minutes. Therefore, I don't need to argue its truth.