Old school forum bans vs. today's cancel pile-ons

Back in the early 2000s on Something Awful, mods would just permaban someone with a one-line reason and everyone moved on. Now a single hot take from a nobody in Ohio can get screenshotted across four platforms and become a week-long talk topic. Do you think the format itself, like Twitter's quote retweet, is what turned minor slip-ups into full cancel events?

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the_charlie6d ago

And honestly, the real difference is back then a permaban was like getting kicked out of a dive bar, you just found a new hole in the wall and moved on. Now your life becomes a five act play where random strangers on TikTok are doing dramatic readings of your dumb tweet. Twitter really turned every stupid take into a group project where everyone gets a participation trophy for being mad. Plus now screenshots last forever, so one bad joke from 2013 can haunt you worse than a bad haircut in your yearbook. The problem isn't that people make mistakes, it's that we built a whole entertainment industry out of watching them crash. Kinda miss when being a jackass just got you banned and not a Netflix documentary.

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