My random tales:
One night, playing bunch of Halo, I got an Xbox 360 voice message. “Message to all recent players. Fukushima nuclear power plant just exploded. You should stock up on iodine tablets.” (I almost sent back a message saying “thanks for your concern, but I’m in the Chernobyl fallout zone and I turned out just fine thank you”)
Pluto photographs from New Horizons? Frigging NASA retweet. (Edit: Actually I think it was a retweet of someone making a Disney meme about Pluto the Dog)
Most recently, I got a random Discord message from a British YouTuber I follow saying “the Queen just died, please be respectful and stuff”.
Fucking public freakout weirdly broke a lot of news for me back on Reddit.
George Floyd, the protests, crazy trump news, Myanmar… Strangely what sticks out is the Target fire extinguisher lady on a rascal that ended up being parodied in Atlanta. Like, I saw that shit live completely accidentally.
It was crazy how before something had a chance to hit the news, someone already had a full video (sometimes even with context) posted.
The user base was terrible at times, and likely is now again. But there was a period when so much crazy shit was going on, that it actually had rational takes the crazy was diluted enough.
It was just nuts to have a random Livestream up, and see huge national news stories unfolding live or at least immediately after filming.
I don’t think people realized how all that shit lead to political engagement in 2020, people were fucking pissed and motivated.