What happened to the internet to make it so that you now have to say “I’m not a medical expert, a beauty expert, an underpaid Walmart cashier struggling just to make ends meet just to lose my job to a robot or a piercing expert so take my advice with a grain of salt, but yeah, I think it would be wonderful for you get your ears pierced”?
I’m probably aging myself here, but it’s mildly annoying to see so many words for something that should just be assumed until someone explicitly says “I’m an expert, make sure you clean them regularly or don’t get them at all”.
The earrings are just a random example I thought of just now.
(This is somewhat satire, somewhat curiosity and somewhat ranty lol)
EDIT: Thanks for the insightful history lesson guys! I actually learned a little bit about the internet (at the risk of really honing in on my age lmao). I feel I should clarify, though. The issue I want to address isn’t the use of disclaimers in general, but rather the need for exceptionally long ones like my example above where the disclaimer is like 5x longer than the actual comment, which, btw, thank you all for commenting at least 5x more information than disclaimers lol
There’s actually several overlapping societal issues at play.
First, a distrust of experts. Especially doctors unless it’s doctors giving away medical advice or confirming biases like “sure, you like butter? Im a doctor, butter makes you healthy. Eat more butter.”
Next, both the availability of research and experiences online does mean it IS actually easier to find, validate for yourself, and share knowledge. But thats also mixed up in people that feel close enough to knowledgeable experts after dabbling in something 2 or 3 times.
Both of these things are also in the context of, for lack of a better term, the overall entitlement of people online to seek and deserve to find easy solutions that make them feel good. So when experts chime in with technical, rational, or sophisticated options that truly are better, they might expect to get blasted as “gate keeping” and be disincentivized from being post of a community, leaving the sophomoric “I’m no expert” crowd as the loudest group that’s barely competent enough to impress newbies and no one else.
Yeah, I find it funny (in a nervous chuckle kind of way) that a bunch of people distrust experts (especially doctors) until they offer their services for free and it’s suddenly “good” advice even when it’s not.
The “gate keeping” part is horrible
Yeah, it’s a big part of why I stopped participating in reddit. Any hobby or skill subreddit has driven off anyone truly knowledgeable and is a constant flood of images of someone doing the “Fisher Price My First _____” level thing and a title like "guys, am I doing this right? :3” for karma. Actual questions bring out toxic opinion-farmers. It’s pointless.