Can't wait to be an old person, I already have a "back in my day" lined up.

Back in my day, people on the internet were never wrong, if they sounded too stupid to function it meant they were internet trolls, and we had a saying, "Don't feed the trolls", if you ignore them and don't interact with them, then eventually they give up and go away. Nowadays we don't hear much about internet trolls any more, now everybody's taking everything everyone says at face value. Some might think it's because of video, when all of this was just text and images there wasn't a way to tell when someone was pulling your leg or were totally serious, it's only after video got on the internet that people started to think these guys were serious. But me, nah, video on Youtube is paid for by advertisers, and the algorithm favors the people who stand out. It's hard to stand out with facts and information, you need to know what you're talking about, you need to do research, travel, you often need to have a career in education if you want to be taken seriously on an educational channel, and somehow standing out from the crowd of aging educators? Good luck with that.

It's easier to say things that get people heated, conspiracies and so on, and the algorithm sees these comments as interactions, which are good. More people viewing is also good, and so the algorithm lifts these internet trolls into the spotlight, gives them plenty of money and attention to feed them, and then the internet wonders why there's suddenly so many trash conspiracy theories making the rounds.

So, that's my "back in my day" story, because in a few years we're going to have to explain the concept of internet trolls to people, because they'll have grown up in an internet where we believe everyone is serious about the things they argue about.