Welcome to the trough of disillusionment.

Cognitive dissonance is s real phenomenon.

I like to think I’m right, and really don’t want to be proven wrong. Changing my mind about anything hurts my ego, so that’s why I don’t want to hear about anything that violates my thoughts, beliefs and biases.

See also: Eschatology

According to some religions, the whole world will come to an end sooner or later. Actually, even physics/cosmology says so.

Absolutely! You just gotta involve blockchain, AI and cloud computing. Otherwise, the investors won’t know how hot Reddit is. Slap on some quantum computing, and you’re all set.

We’re just getting warmed up here! There’s so much to do.

How about we introduce several tiers of premium currency, like copper, silver, gold, platinum rubies and diamonds, each with their unique exchange rates.

You could have limited-time awards purchased with one of the premium currencies. Also, add time-gated features, like temporary access to meme subreddits, or comment and post visibility boosts.

Pay-to-win mechanics should be included too. How about time-limited karma boosters?

Oh, and loot boxes! We’ve got to have those too. You could buy basic loot boxes with copper coins, and in those you could find a few silver coins randomly. With the silver coins, you can buy silver boxes, some of which may contain gold coins, and so on all the way to diamond tier. Now that you have a convoluted assortment of different currencies, you can use them to boost your account, posts and comments in different ways. Oh, and Season passes too, can’t forget those!

Ads. So much ads! Of course, you can get rid of some of them, depending on how much you pay and which currency you use. These are all time-limited features, so you better keep those coins and gems flowing every day.

And subscriptions too! Once you subscribe to something like 1231 copper coins a day, you can’t cancel without climbing the mount Kilimanjaro. The only cancel button is physically located on a computer somewhere up there.

And there’s so much more to come.

Maybe you could make a game where you fight some stupid stick figure, but make the mod support of the game so smooth and effortless that all players actually replace Mr. Stick with whoever you want. Basically, when you click play, the game immediately asks which mods you want to load. Anyway, the game devs could also use an anonymous modder account and release an “unofficial mod” that adds Trump and Elon in the game. Is that plausible enough?

It could be a cage fight.

Or let’s say there’s a political/economic disaster caused by the greed and stupidity of…

What disaster? Things have always been like this and our king is a great man. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, or you’ll find yourself in the gulag in no time.

Not just terrifying. This is straight up nightmare fuel.

If such a technology existed, the government and shady companies would do all sorts of awful things with it.

Eventually, there’s going to be a February when they don’t send a bill at all.

We all know that decorating your in-game character with cosmetics is the true endgame.

see also: Off-by-one error & Fencepost error

Lots of things have suffered the same fate. Just think of LOL, 😂, or 🤣 for example.

To me, voting is mostly a sorting tool.

I may upvote to make sure a great comment is higher than the good comments around it. I may even disagree with the comment to some extent, but I’m still going to upvote, because I think it adds something important to the conversation and more people should read it. However, there are also situations when I upvote to show my approval.

There are also trolls who constantly say controversial things. Looking at the downvote counter tells you something.

There are also people who… I don’t really know what’s going in the head of a person who intentionally insult everyone they come across. Did a nefarious little brother hijack that account or is that person really trying get some achievement about maxing out the downvote counter? Some people are a complete mystery. Either way, the downvote counter serves as a red flag.

Dr. Integer Overflow.

My guess is, you’ll need 4 294 967 296 votes to start the boss fight.

Some of that could be karma grinding, but for the most part, that is probably just people having fun. Many come to social media platforms for recreational purposes.

Must confess, those points do seem to wield some strange power over my mind. Kinda scary actually. Some people have disabled those numbers entirely, and I’m beginning to see why.

I thought about that too. If they were completely meaningless then why would they be used for sorting purposes. Turns out, they do mean something and they can be used for something.

What happens to the ultra trolls who have a negative total?