Hank: Good morning, John, I'm going to Comic-Con.  But we need to talk, and maybe we should have been talking about this for a while, and I know it's not super fun, but the internet has become like, a less kind place.  It's unpleasant to admit, as a person who really loves the internet, but it would appear that we've entered into a bit of an age of outrage.  

This is not a problem with humans or with the internet, it's a problem of humans mixed with the internet.  I think that we'd all kind of like to talk as much as we're listened to, which works if it's a two person conversation, like one person talks, the other person talks, 50/50 split is a pretty good thing, and I think we've all felt this with like a six or eight person conversation, that it can get a little frustrating when you can't get a word in edgewise, 'cause you're just not the loudest or most eloquent person in the room.

In a billion person conversation, and yeah, I'm in San Diego now, 'cause I had to get on my plane, it's more like just a deafening roar accompanied by feelings of powerlessness.  I think we are in the first age of the social internet, and the job of that age is to suck us in and capture our eyeballs and keep them as close to those revenue generating advertisements as possible.

Research has shown that even over cute things or inspirational things or amazing things, angering things, things that outrage us, that's what our brains on average are most prone to sharing.  Problem is, whether it makes us angry definitely matters to whether we share it, whether it's true or not, whether it's productive or not, not really a factor.  

Maybe we need to enter a new stage of the social internet, one where we choose and we create places on the internet that aren't just addictive or distracting, but instead bring personal and societal satisfaction.  Throughout our lives, we know this, we have to work to keep ourselves healthy and to keep our relationships healthy, and to keep our communities healthy, and the internet is a huge part of our communities now, and a lot of it is unhealthy.  

These things don't take care of themselves, and we had this idea early on that they would, but the land in my city is not responsible for the well-being of the community that exists on top of it.  Keeping that community healthy is the job of the government and the citizens, and so keeping internet communities healthy is the job of the leaders of those communities, whether they're the owners or the people working for those communities, or the leaders in those communities, and also the citizens of those communities.  

Without conscious leadership, these communities decay and they destroy themselves and they leech out into the real world where they harm actual individual humans and our culture.  I've linked to a couple of videos in the description that help me think about this stuff well, if you wanna watch some other perspectives on it.  

I've been so inspired by seeing the positive effects of the plus-ing that we've been doing.  For me, the best comments are content themselves, they add instead of just react.  So I've been loving it, but there are some people who have pointed out problems with plus-ing, particularly that it makes discussion more difficult when it's in a sea of plusses.  For those people, a Nerdfighter named Melvin created a Chrome Extension that will remove the plus comments from YouTube comments.  So that's--Thank you, Melvin!  

I've always been proud of this community, and I've known that it's composed almost entirely of kind, thoughtful people.  I know that because of the comments section, I know that because I've met so many of you in the real world, I know it because of VidCon this year, we had volunteers going around and giving these wristbands to anyone who would donate to help the families and the victims of the Pulse Nightclub shooting, and then VidCon and Universal Talent Agency and YouTube all matched those donations until we raised almost $40,000, and we actually have some left over, so if you want to continue supporting that effort, you can go to DFTBA.com where they're for sale for $5.  

But in the end, in a world of infinite content, when shareability is king, sometimes kindness and empathy don't play particularly well and so we start to forget that they exist.  But I do think that we're gonna start heading into a new age of the social internet, and it's not gonna happen immediately or anything, where platforms and the users of those platforms work together to actually promote good community and kindness and empathy and that's certainly happening in certain corners of the internet, and I'm very proud that it's happening right here.

John, I'll see you on Tuesday.