The Lost Blog of Krypton

July 14th, 2026

Why do I worry so much about what other people like?

I wanted to share a recent thought I had, but I quickly realized that I don't have anywhere to actually write it down. I could write it down in a traditional journal, pen and paper, but I thought that maybe my thinking could be useful to someone, so I decided to make a small blog page.

The main idea of this post is this: why do I worry so much about what other people like? I asked myself that after I noticed that before consuming media I would check reviews, comments, scroll through feeds of user-made scores, to see whether something is good or bad. Then, after receiving an answer, I would ultimately decide if I want to try a new piece of media out for myself. I would spend long hours scrolling through never-ending reddit threads, reading opinions of people throwing them into the void.

Life wasn't always like this.

People now are very much worried about being perceived as “cringe”, including myself. Whenever I see something I love get called “cringe”, I feel like I'm in the center of a circle of people laughing and pointing at me. It doesn't feel good. We got so invested in deciding if something is “cringe” or not that we made a source of joy that are books, movies, video games, music into fashion pieces that we did not want to be considered “out of season”.

Social media can be a truly wonderful thing. As a person who has moved from place to place more than an ordinary human probably should, social media has allowed me to stay in touch with dear friends, thousands of kilometers away. Social media could be one of the most enriching experiences for humanity. But unfortunately, the corporations and CEOs have different priorities.

Social media, as of this point in time, has been hijacked by people who do anything and everything to squeeze out every last cent out of the attention market. From the red notification icon to the endless swiping of reels, akin to pulling the crank on a slot machine, the attention economy has been integrated into every single popular social media that we use. The main moneymaker for social media companies is not the quality of time spent on a platform, but the quantity of time spent. The comment section is one of those attention grabbing inventions of the attention economy.

When I was a kid, I didn't have these kinds of problems. Despite being on YouTube all the time, I had no interest in the comment section. Why would I read something boring when I can watch Angry Birds Gangnam Style videos (I don't know why I loved these videos as a kid). The only interaction that was happening was between myself and the content that I was consuming. And I didn't have such problems with picking media to consume, I just chose something if it looked cool, and then I made up my own opinion through experiencing it (like the time I got Pokemon Sun as a 10 year old, not because someone on the internet told me it was a good game, but because the legendary pokemon looked cool).

Before I made social media accounts, my friend groups would generally be limited to my schoolmates, who I saw on a routinely basis, who were available for conversation at limited amounts of times and who would respect (most of the time, we are talking about 4th grade here) social norms and manners.

There are several main differences from the common comment section that I would like to point out.

First, my time with my friends was limited. I would only see them 5 times a week, if not less because of sick days or other business. During the 5 days of interaction, only a fraction of the day would allow to focus primarily on just goofing off with your friends (recess or team-based projects). After 5 days of school, I would have 2 days completely disconnected from them, for me to enjoy time by myself or with the company of my family. This model gave me time for solitude, and this solitude allowed me to sit in silence and process everything that has happened to me, including conversations.

During these periods of solitude, I would process what was said to me, how it compared to my opinion, whether or not either of the comments said about something are constructive, and if I should accept a new variant of thought or toss it aside. Plus, during these periods of solitude, I could only depend on myself for forming opinions about things, I couldn't just ask my friends their opinions.

With the constant connection to social media and the comment sections, we do not have the time (thanks to the attention economy convincing us that being connected to others constantly is good and that your'e weird if your not doing that) to ponder silently on our own opinion of something and how it coexists with other opinions. Now, we only interact with foreign opinions, with no attention to our inner self.

Secondly, close knit communities depend on manners and politeness to exist, while vague social network connections allow anonymity and freedom from punishment, that push people to forget about social norms that would otherwise be needed for survival in a tribe. This creates space for statements that are far from constructive and behavior that would, in real life, cause them a lot of trouble because of the emotional impact it can inflict on others.

Thirdly, opinions from close people are supported by personalities and prior knowledge of their personas. If you have a group of good friends, you might have one friend who really likes sports and thinks fondly of sport-simulation games like NBA 2K or the Madden games, but might not find RPGs very interesting. You might also have a friend who is very much into story-driven games, like the Legend of Zelda, but have a dislike for fast-paced, online-only FPS games. Because we know them as people and we acknowledge their personalities and interests, their opinions make more sense for us. We know how they might compare one thing from another, how excited they're going to be when describing something they like, how open they are to try new things. This allows us to fully use their biases and personality to level out objectiveness and subjectiveness.

On the other hand, a user that we have never met before, who has no bio, no posts, no profile pictures, a closed account, and no prior interactions with you, gives us nothing to work with. When we hear a close friend describe something as “the best thing ever”, then we know that it is the best thing ever in the limits of their interests and personality. When we see a complete stranger with no personality markers online describe something as “the best thing ever”, we don't know in what limits they are using this description. But because we have gottten used to constant monitoring of people online, we now recognize everyone as someone worth listening to, even if we never had a conversation with them.

I am not saying that different opinions are bad. Quite the opposite, echo chambers is a very horrible thing for the human experience and should be avoided at all costs. What I am trying to say is that allowing others to choose your opinion for you will lead people to a lot of sadness. We should let ourselves wonder around and discover good and bad media for ourselves, form our own opinions and taste, let ourselves enjoy media that some might consider as “bad”, and then constructively debate other people in a respectful manner to truly enjoy media.

As a final note for this post, I wanted to also note that, in my opinion, rating scores can't be the sum of all human experience towards a piece of media. We, humans, are.. well, weird. We are basically ghosts piloting giant flesh mechs. You can't make an exact theory or equation for love or hate. Therefore, how can we rate art something out of 5? How can we summarize all the emotions felt by one person into a single-digit number?

Sorry if this post was a little bit too preachy, or badly written, I just always enjoyed writing essays in English class, so this was very fun to me. Hope you enjoyed my rambling :)