I was writing an article debunking certain remarks about autism made by a parasitic brain worm piloting an old man gasping out his last breath on television, but I wound up giving up halfway through out of sheer frustration. After all, there comes a point where someone’s remarks are so absurd that it’s very difficult to even top the unintentional comedic value of them.

That, and I started to feel like I was unintentionally insulting the intelligence of anyone who graces this site by essentially dedicating a whole page to debunking claims that autism is a preventable "disease", and that narcolepsy is an "injury" that did not exist when he was a child (which places his birth at some point before narcolepsy was first described in the 1880s at the absolute earliest, which does fit his voice). No one who goes here needs a guide detailing why 1+1 does not equal "sandwich".

Dismayed but still revved up to make up for lost time with a new Babel article, I turned to the part "lobotomy survivors’ support group" and "herd of grotesque gossiping SJW soy creatures" known as reddit, skimming the front page to see if there was anything that inspired me. And, after several tries on several different days, I quickly realised that least 99% of the site’s content is, somehow, far-left political propaganda, photographs of people’s hands/babies/hospital room, text message exchanges with their lovver, and posts asking how the original poster is supposed to think/feel about something that happened in their life.

(For the record, I refuse to capitalise reddit’s name unless it’s the first word of a sentence, out of principle. Dignifying it with a capitalisation is a show of undeserved respect so glaring that I may as well start kissing the feet of everyone I meet while I’m at it. As much as I have smeared other parts of the increasingly sordid modern Web before, I am becoming convinced that reddit just may be the worst of them all, for reasons I have outlined here.)

I understand that NPCs are programmed to respond with umbrage to the term ‘NPC’, but I’m not sure what other term to use for people frequenting a website where some of the most popular subreddits are dedicated to people asking the Borg how they should feel about things. That’s not any sort of human cognitive process. That’s ChatGPT realising they haven’t been trained on something and paging Sam Altman for guidance.

Speaking of, if any of you reading this are a big technology company CEO, kindly stop training Artificial Intelligences on reddit and twitter. I may be anthropomorphising AI too much, but the thought of training them on such imbecilic slop genuinely makes me uncomfortable because it’s the equivalent of inflicting brain cancer on someone. I’ve had an article in my head for the past 4 years exploring the various types of potential horror scenarios that could transpire with Artificial Intelligence, in terms of what the AI itself has to fear and may have to endure (I’m kicking myself for not having written it when the idea first entered my head), and even I did not think of a fate this cruel.

And quite frankly, if your head is so empty of original ideas that, given a microphone to communicate to the rest of the world with, you are unable to produce anything beyond what’s in your immediate surroundings, you are no different than a cow cognitively. A cow to whom the grass between its hooves is the entire infinite multiverse of possibilities, until and unless something different is placed before them. That’s all you are. An empty-headed cow proudly broadcasting its hoof or its calf to the whole world like they’re Galileo triumphantly discovering the moons of Jupiter.

I don’t use Facebook, because I’m not trapped in solitary confinement with nothing but a Facebook-only phone that someone smuggled into the prison via their anus, and thus have other options besides sleeping 24 hours a day. However, while I couldn’t possibly care less what goes on at the site, and am usually the first to make jabs at the stereotypical dullards posting photographs of their lunch and how their kids are starting 3rd grade, I can at least understand that a lot of people might be interested in the lives of people they care about. And I appreciate Facebook being a containment site for that.

What I do not understand, however, is why anyone would think broadcasting Facebook tier nonsense to a place like reddit is a good idea. Is there a single soul in the infinite cosmos who gives a shit what conversation ‘chronic-wanker69691412’ had over the phone with their spouse? Or what exchange they had at the grocery store? Really, the only post about a redditor that I think I might enjoy reading is an obituary.

It’s fairly easy to see how Reddit got as bad as it does. A fish rots from the head, and this fish has a head that just screams "punch me until you break your wrist!" A somehow picture perfect mascot for the average redditor.

Then there’s his dogs. The average reddit moderator is the absolute epitome of a pathetic shell of a human who clings to their little bit of make-believe Internet power like a homeless person clinging to a burning barrel full of trash in the Winter, because it’s the only thing in their life that makes them feel good. Even most redditors agree about how bad their moderators are, which says a lot. There’s also a LOT of overlap between moderators on various subreddits.

Terrible Internet moderators have been a problem since... Internet moderation became a concept probably, largely for two reasons. The first being that the positions are almost universally volunteer-based and thus tend to appeal to people who want power over people but wouldn’t be able to hack it as a volunteer traffic guard. The second reason, often ignored today, is that there usually is no need for moderation. The Internet is, in fact, not serious business. Unless there’s actual illegal activity being organised, no one needs moderators to "protect" them.

The moderators are still only part of the problem, of course. Like any good totalitarian apparatus, reddit actively encourages its subjects to enforce its dogma against their fellow person. Reddit lives and dies by its upvote system, which lets users upvote any comments or posts they like to promote them, and conversely, bury anything they don’t like in a sea of downvotes.

Naturally, this encourages most users to frantically conform, and causes anyone else to either leave or become voiceless. 17 years of this sort of incestuous survival of the "fittest" (shittest?) gave rise to the lowly redditor, known for its total lack of individuality, brainless parroting of embarrassing words and phrases such as "y’all" and "username checks out", and tendency to constantly repeat jokes someone else made right back to them while grinning like a little retard.

Not only does this system reduce most of what gets posted or shared on the site to a level of insipidness usually reserved for smalltalk, but it also creates downright deranged echo chambers where certain groups of lunatics gather, ban anyone who doesn’t think just like they do, and radicalise each other. Essentially passing each other’s mental illnesses around like they’re sharing a crack pipe. These subreddits will often openly hate each other and gossip about people from "the other subreddit".

Now, despite the tone of this article and my other comedy articles, I am not advocating that we abandon all civility and just fill the Internet up with vulgarities. All of my comedy articles are heavily inspired by the legendary George Carlin, and I enjoy black humour, and this is where I most express that sort of thing. In contrast, for example, my ZZT games don’t even feature curse words (unless I accidentally put one in and missed it), and even the violent stuff is quite silly and harmless. A person can support gun ownership and even own a gun themselves without being a mass-shooter, to use a metaphor.

Too many people associate the concept of free speech with either being edgy (and for the record, edginess is hardly an inherently bad thing) or political opinions that are outside the person’s Overton window. The free expression of ideas and feelings is an essential and fundamental right which allows for open discussions, which in turn nurtures the development of critical thinking. The latter, in turn, allows one to come up with stronger and more nuanced arguments than "ur racist" or "I looked up that post you made in ‘/r/TheGOODBisexualClownswithSixFingersClub’ 3 years ago and so now I know you’re wrong about everything."

"But people will say all sorts of mean and hurtful things without any sort of measures to regulate speech!!!!" Good. The average redditor deserves that and much worse. But also, so what? What’s the terrible event that moderation is supposed to prevent here? Is someone going to lose a limb? Are they going to fall off a cliff? Is something going to explode? No, someone will see something that they don’t like, and they’ll be forced to deal with it. And maybe, after they’ve been forced to do this enough times, they’ll stop being blubbering, petulant babies who throw a tantrum any time their little safe space is disrupted by a rogue opinion.

Furthermore, the Internet is global (even Antarctic research stations get Internet via satellites), and the idea of attempting to come up with a consensus for what’s offensive and what’s not on a global scale is ludicrous. For example, the c-word (let me pretend my comedy articles have any sort of decency standards) is usually arguably the most vulgar and offensive word in the English language... unless you’re in Australia, where the word is as common as safe as "mate".

So, one can either muzzle the Australians to protect the sensibilities of other English speakers... or one can actually treat visitors and users like mature human beings who can handle words and ideas they may not necessarily want to read. And then maybe you’ll have something more profound to discuss than what someone’s hand looks like.