I wonder how much of this is a consequence of the fact that in the offline world, rich people usually associate with rich people, and poor people associate with poor people (and when a poor person associates with a rich person e.g. in a role of a servant, the poor person must behave in a way that the rich person finds proper)… but in the online world, we all use the same Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.
So now rich people have a cultural shock of meeting the unwashed masses who don’t give a fuck about their sensibilities, and will even laugh at their faces, protected by (perceived) online anonymity.
It should be possible to create separate gardens for the elites. Like, make a clone of a famous website, but require e.g. $1000 yearly membership fees, and you get rid of the plebs. There already are projects like that. But as far as I know, they fail. On the internet people provide value to each other, so a website for the 0.1 % would have much fewer interesting stories, fewer cat videos, etc. It would be less offensive, but mostly because it would be dead.
It is probably also hard to find the exact line; I suppose the elites would prefer to avoid dealing with people too low below them, but would welcome the presence of people slightly below them—they are not that difficult culturally, and because how the top of the pyramid is shaped, there are lots of them, which means lots of useful content.
So instead, the rich people are trying to kick out the plebs from the online places they like. Using politeness and other things correlated with social class as an excuse.
I wonder how much of this is a consequence of the fact that in the offline world, rich people usually associate with rich people, and poor people associate with poor people (and when a poor person associates with a rich person e.g. in a role of a servant, the poor person must behave in a way that the rich person finds proper)… but in the online world, we all use the same Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.
So now rich people have a cultural shock of meeting the unwashed masses who don’t give a fuck about their sensibilities, and will even laugh at their faces, protected by (perceived) online anonymity.
It should be possible to create separate gardens for the elites. Like, make a clone of a famous website, but require e.g. $1000 yearly membership fees, and you get rid of the plebs. There already are projects like that. But as far as I know, they fail. On the internet people provide value to each other, so a website for the 0.1 % would have much fewer interesting stories, fewer cat videos, etc. It would be less offensive, but mostly because it would be dead.
It is probably also hard to find the exact line; I suppose the elites would prefer to avoid dealing with people too low below them, but would welcome the presence of people slightly below them—they are not that difficult culturally, and because how the top of the pyramid is shaped, there are lots of them, which means lots of useful content.
So instead, the rich people are trying to kick out the plebs from the online places they like. Using politeness and other things correlated with social class as an excuse.