Ridiculous Opinions #224
Remember a few weeks ago where I spoke of building an online audience on Reddit. Well, Girdner has learned the first lesson of being online too much, as the mighty Maurice the Beaver comics have sunk to new lows. Whereas I was riding high on comics for a while, receiving my largest viewership just a few weeks ago…
Things have now sunk to this…
What is the cause? What could be doing this? Why did it happen?
I made fun of people who have Android based phones.
As far as I can tell, that’s the cause. Sure, some would say that they weren’t funny (and some of them aren’t…they can’t all be winners), but the minute I made fun of Android phones was the minute that my upvotes went to zero. The freakos came out of the woodwork to pile-on.
This is what I’ve been responding to all week.
Interesting stuff. But some people were VERY upset…
There are hundreds of these comments. I only grabbed the first few that I saw.
The lessons to be learned are that:
You will never win on the internet. It’s like a casino. The house always wins. Just because you think you’ve nailed someone with a clever little comeback doesn’t mean that there aren’t seven-hundred other people standing in line behind them to take up the fight.
People get upset over the weirdest things. It kind of speaks to the sickness of our current culture and how online some people are. Honestly, I think people are lonely and they have their tribes on the internet. The minute you insult that tribe is the minute you have made a personal attack that cannot be forgiven.
Time does not exist online. There’s no longevity with what you put on the internet. The only thing that exists is the here and now. It’s all about the moment. I made fun of Apple products for more than ten comics before my Android comics. That didn’t matter. I was an instant Apple shill because the people on Reddit only see what is right in front of them. The algorithm is designed that way.
Don’t make fun of Android phones.
All of this ties into the notion of what the internet has become over the last few years. I think that we’re moving away from centralized spaces on the internet. The demise of Twitter (which is having serious problems as of this weekend because of it’s owner’s idiocy and racist tendencies) was the first warning sign that the internet as we knew it was dying.
This is actually a good thing. Somehow over the last few years, people have been bristling at the notion of centralized spaces online. We have allowed ourselves to be hoodwinked into going to one place for all of our information. That’s partly because we’re lazy. We don’t want to have to go to nine billion spaces on the internet to get our information. It’s nice when everything goes to one place and we can spend all of our time there.
But as we allow that to happen, we allow certain corporations to control what we read. It’s been fascinating to watch the demise of Twitter over the last year. I stopped using Twitter as soon as Elon took over, but I kept my account there…just in case. When I realized that it was not going back to what it was, I deleted my account permanently…an account I’d had since 2008.
But it’s been interesting watching other people hedge their bets on Twitter. Some people I follow continued to use the platform; probably because they had so many followers. It’s hard to give up that audience. It’s hard to move on from something that has been integral to your every day. It connected many people and, as I said before, that tribalism is important to those people because in this lonely society of phones and screens and the inability to speak with others directly, getting rid of that centralized space where one feels like they’re a part of a community can be a very hard thing.
But it’s happening. The demise of Twitter was the death knell of the internet as we knew it. Now, those tribes that all went to one location will be seeking out other locations. Maybe it’s Threads. Maybe it’s Bluesky. Maybe it’s all of them. But the way I see it, things will become more and more fractured.
The reasons one can’t rely on those centralized spaces are the exact same reasons that I illustrated above. I was flying high, averaging about 100K views with each cartoon. But I pissed off a certain subset of people and that was it. I was downvoted into oblivion by a group of people that just didn’t like what I was saying.
The whole point of the comic that I made was to compare the use of Android phones to the zealotry of the current Republican party. Clearly, I was onto something…
The internet is a weird, weird place, folks.
EPILOGUE
All of that being said, I realized that I was doing the same thing with Maurice Comics that I am railing against. So, I’m starting a newsletter solely for my comics. I will still post in the same places, but this will allow me to have more control over my audience, which is a good thing.
If you’re interested in subscribing, then go here:
SUBSCRIBE TO THE MAURICE COMICS NEWSLETTER!
I will be sending out an email once a week containing whatever Maurice Comics that I published that week. It’ll be a hoot!
