This is my least favorite episode of the season. And yet it’s much better than I remember. The into is also a lot darker than I remember. I think this one benefits from rewatching. The more you see it, the more details you pick up, and the more fleshed-out the world gets.

Details like all the stuff being typed on the main feed. You can see commenters getting into fights with each other.

The police badge is an upvote and downvote arrow superimposed on one another. You are judged by the sum of your total score.

When they make a picture of Lamar as a fat kid, one of the upvoters says “if we downvote him he might get fat again.”

On the surface, it’s a super simple what if…? episode, but it does have some depth to it. And it’s always good to see Steven Culp.

We also get Bortus’ foreboding comment; “I sing.”

If I am honest, I skip the episode every time.

It just seems like a snotty and kind of cheap commentary on current life that makes no real attempt to understand how current life works. It’s like Seth and his writers looked at Twitter et al and thought “Oh, I’ve seen one or two bad incidents of something like this happening, so lets blow it up into something it isn’t”

It kind of annoys me, and appeals to the idea that the internet is a “bad thing” ™ that is going to be the end of society and destruction of civilisation.

Which, as I said, annoys me.

For a series that I really like (and I do really like it) it’s the one episode I really can’t stand.

I don’t think I dislike this one as much as many others. That said, it definitely serves LaMarr poorly. He’s more “dick” than “charismatic dick”. Nothing he does in the episode is particularly funny, most of it is just inane and unserious. A lot of people ended up hating the character as a result. I do like LaMarr … in any other episode of the show.

We must bring some preconceived notions about a society built on upvotes/downvotes coming in from … well. I think they could have found a better metaphor by using something a lot of us have experienced here or the old place: sometimes you’ll get downvoted for saying something reasonable but unpopular. Obviously, correction is bad, but it’s mostly presented here as an overly severe punishment for doing something legitimately wrong.

Another problem with voting to rank people/Internet comments is that it punishes minority views regardless of whether they’re in the minority because they’re wrong or because they’re different. Inherently, this is a system that promotes conforming to what we used to call the “reddit hivemind”. Obviously there’s worse systems, but it’s a flawed one and the episode doesn’t really explore it with the nuance it could have.

MacFarlane has talked about the book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed and the Justine Sacco incident as inspirations for the episode. That’s probably why the episode focuses mostly on overreactions to genuine slights. As far as that’s what it was going for, it’s fine, but I would have liked it to pry a little deeper.