The Internet has its share of problems, such as trolls and other trouble makers, but there are also some other general trends that are emerging that are very irritating. Herein, five bad internet trends will be explored and discussed.

Bad Internet Trend 1: Power Abusing Admins

As a general rule, whenever someone on the Internet gets in a position of power they act like a complete jerk. The reason for this is that they are perfectly safe to dish out whatever punishments they wish in their own little microcosm of power without potential repercussions. A boss in a real life organization at the very least has social costs, the potential for workers strikes or even to be punched in the face, but the Internet admin has little to none of those. Furthermore, these people are EVERYWHERE. Online gaming is rife with them, forums are rife with them, and basically anywhere you can potentially communicate with other human beings is rife with them.

Bad Internet Trend 2: The Net Nannies

The Net Nannies are people that believe discussions on the Internet should contain no offensive or controversial content whatsoever, including any sort of heated debate. They will go to all lengths to snuff out any discussion they consider offensive or controversial, including using far more offensive or controversial tactics to do so. Unfortunately, I personally feel that this trend really began to take off when women started using the Internet more and quite honestly is more prevalent in communities with a large female user base than those that have a strong male majority.

Bad Internet Trend 3: Banning/Blocking/Muting/Comment Deletion

While the internet is basically the greatest communication device developed by humanity, our ability to use it to discuss topics relevant to the world is being completely choked by a huge amount of people tending towards banning or blocking anyone who holds an opposing view. Are the egos of people so fragile that they cannot stand even vaguely negative comments on the internet?

Bad Internet Trend 4: The Hierarchies

On almost every community there is a general hierarchy with whoever has administrative privileges on the server/website/forums at the top, their favored group below them, then the regulars followed by newbies and lastly the outcasts. If you happen to fall into the newbies group, who have committed the crime of being new, or if you happen to fall into the outcasts group, who have committed the crime of being honest, you will almost invariably be in trouble within that community. This is despite you having done nothing particularly wrong or socially unacceptable. You will have disobeyed the rules in some way solely because you are disliked.

Bad Internet Trend 5: Digg

These social book marking sites like Digg may have some positives aspects, but ultimately are a very stupid idea. The idea with Digg is that you submit an article that gets voted on, if an article receives enough votes the article goes to the main page where the article get voted on further to rise in the dig rankings. Ultimately, what this results in is people getting their friends to vote to jump over the first hurdle to get on the main page, wherein the article will receive its own momentum due to the sheer volume of people that come by it and vote for it. Overall, this is a ridiculous system and when it comes to delivering quality information Google simply does it better. Why bother with dig?

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