How pathetic of me. I have apparently reached the point where I need the internet equivalent of a shock collar.

Reddit finally annoyed me enough that I wired up a Chrome extension so that if I try to go there, it immediately redirects me to: https://www.nooooooooooooooooooooooooo.com/

That is where I am now. Not meditation. Not discipline. Not “just don’t click it.” Nope. None of that, I had to build a tiny digital cattle prod to stop myself from wandering back into a toxic glowing human filled cesspit/landfill.

And honestly, that’s probably the most embarrassing part. Not that Reddit is awful. Everyone already knows that. Not that the site has become ideologically captured by the left. That’s been obvious for years. Not that you can barely push back on the approved narrative without getting buried under a pile of smug lectures from people who all somehow sound like they were assembled in the same factory.

No… The embarrassing part is that I kept going back.

I knew exactly what would happen. Yet I couldn’t stop myself because I had this glimmer of hope that THIS time, it will be different.

Let me set the stage; I’d see some wildly dishonest framing of an issue or person. Some “every decent person agrees with this” kind of post. Some smug little morality play where the villain is anyone who asks a basic follow-up question. And I’d think, “Well, maybe I’ll just add one reasonable comment or maybe I’ll just gently push back. Maybe this time people will actually talk like adults.”

Then, of course, the machine does what the machine does. You don’t get a conversation. You get a dogpile.

You get people arguing against things you never said. You get the worst possible motive assigned to you immediately. You get called stupid, evil, ignorant, hateful, brainwashed, privileged, bigoted, sexist, racist, nazi or whatever the preferred ad hominem accusation of the day happens to be.

And the weirdest part is how predictable it all is. It’s like there’s a script.

You question the framing, they question your character. You ask for nuance, they accuse you of bad faith. You say, “I don’t think it’s that simple,” and they hear, “I am declaring myself the enemy.”

That’s not conversation. That’s a purity test.

And yeah, Reddit is especially bad about this from the left. Not because everyone on the left is like that. I know plenty of reasonable left-leaning people. But a lot of Reddit has become so captured by one ideological lane that it doesn’t feel like a discussion forum anymore. It feels like a church for people who don’t believe they’re religious.

There is doctrine. There is heresy. There are rituals of public shaming. There are approved phrases, approved enemies, approved conclusions, and approved emotional reactions. And if you step even slightly outside the boundary, the response is not curiosity. It’s enforcement.

That’s what bothers me. Not disagreement.

I do not need people to agree with me. I don’t even want everyone to agree with me. A world where everyone agrees would be boring, brittle, and probably fake. Disagreement is healthy. Disagreement is how people sharpen ideas. Disagreement is how you find the weak spots in your own thinking.

But that only works if people are still willing to treat each other like humans. What we have now is something different.

A lot of social media does not reward thoughtfulness. It rewards performance. It rewards dunking. It rewards the fastest, nastiest, most morally inflated response. It rewards people for turning every disagreement into a trial, where they get to be prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner in the span of three comments.

And the whole thing is backed by a dopamine hit. That little burst of satisfaction when the likes roll in. The upvotes. The pile-on. The “owned him” replies. The feeling that you didn’t just disagree with someone, you defeated a bad person in public. You’re the hero!

That’s the hook. And I hate how easy it is to get pulled into that. That’s the part I have to own.

Because as much as I can complain about Reddit, Facebook, Twitter/X, or whatever other platform is currently melting everyone’s brain, the truth is: I kept choosing to walk into it.

I kept choosing to read the thread. I kept choosing to see what people were saying. I kept choosing to type a reply, even knowing full well it was probably going to be received in the least charitable way possible.

So fine. Apparently I need a shock collar.

Apparently I need my own browser to grab me by the throad and say, “No. Absolutely not. You have been here before. You know what this is. Go do literally anything else.”

Read a book. Go outside. Talk to a real person. Build something. Touch grass. Stare at a wall.

Anything would be better than voluntarily climbing back into the outrage grinder and acting surprised when it grinds.

Because the thing I’m realizing is that these places are not designed to make us wiser. They are designed to keep us engaged. And outrage is engagement. Contempt is engagement. Tribal hostility is engagement. That little twitch in your brain that says, “I have to respond to this because it is so wrong” — that’s a deviously baited hook.

And I’m tired of taking the bait. I’m tired of watching people confuse cruelty with intelligence, of watching people confuse consensus with truth, of watching people confuse disagreement with violence.

I’m tired of watching grown adults act like being challenged is the same thing as being attacked. I’m tired of feeling like I need to explain basic human charity to people who have no interest in practicing it.

And mostly, I’m tired of being upset by it.

So yes, I made the extension. Yes, it redirects me to a screaming “no” page.

Yes, that is ridiculous. Yes, that is funny. And yes, it is also a little sad that I had to build a technological guardrail to stop myself from entering a place that consistently makes me think less of people.

But maybe that’s the right lesson. Maybe the answer is not to win the argument but rather to stop feeding the machine.

Maybe the answer is to recognize when a place has stopped being a forum for conversation and has become a factory for resentment.

So… Yeah. They can have it.

They can have the dogpiles. They can have the purity tests. They can have the fake consensus. They can have the smug mobs congratulating each other for being brave while saying the safest possible thing in the room, truth be damned.

I’m done volunteering my attention to people who treat disagreement like a crime.

And if I need the internet equivalent of a shock collar to remember that, then so be it.