saw an interview with a retired soccer player recently and he talked about how the young players would be on their phones during halftime.

“stop reply notifications” is a star in its role

then you’re not flying out any instagram baddies just by sliding into their DMs.

These guys treat instagram as if it was Doordash.

Just sent you a dm 😈

…Not really. Yeah i feel the same way. Gotta stay away. But then again you have KD who stays in the trenches talking shit online lol

No? Humans are incredibly narcissistic. I can’t imagine I would be able to resist the temptation literally ²⁴⁄₇

Not as a professional athlete, but what about a 19 or 20 yo kid that has been a star player his entire life?

Also you have to consider that the way a lot of these young players get hype and attention in hs is with highlight mixtapes and social media branding. NIL and promotionals is also an incentives.

I don’t disagree with you about ignoring it and letting your marketing team do social media. However these young kids do a lot more reckless and immature things than look at social media.

Now go get your ducking shinebox!!!!

Hiring Butters to sift through everything and only give me the good stuff people wrote about me.

20 years old, a millionaire, super successful all your life in the sport you love, adored by fans, most of your friends and family live far away from you, and you think you’re not going to be on social media??!

It’s not like they just land out the womb as a 3rd year player who blew the game, they experienced only the good side of social media for most of their life until they finally get to competition that’s better than them

It’s so much worse with sports betting now.

College athletes are getting harassed because some guys missed their parlays. It’s kinda effed

I’m scared to even read reddit inbox.

If you’re an athlete, and people know your reddit account. You done fucked up.

Inbox? You’re getting messages in there?

I think it becomes a habit more than something they want to do especially with younger players. While they are in their school life, these kids are naturally using social media. Getting to the pros and abruptly stopping is likely hard. We’ve seen times where these same guys were the ones tweeting “bron trash” and shit when they were still in school lol.

A lot players brains are prob legit wired differently. Theyre normal guys in many ways but they a lot of them when you see them talk about sports definitely lack the fear I guess a lot of people have when it comes to this stuff.

It might be unavoidable. Like the Jaylen Brown hair thing became something he couldn’t ignore almost instantly. He played it off pretty well by leaning into it but he didn’t have many other options.

Knowing that you literally make 1000x more than them will help your mentality a lot.

Perfect timing!

and you just know he read all the youtube comments on his podcast

he’s also an expert when JJ used a racial slur against a POC woman at Duke

Long ago, in the before time, I used Facebook.

Later, I used Twitter.

Now, I’m down to reddit.

Speaking of which, time to put my phone away and finish my book. Narnia holds up shockingly well. Actually better as a 30-something than as a kid.

Its crazy how uncensored Twitter is

I saw one post telling Deandre Ayton to kiss himself.

another one saying Risacher should’ve turned into a vegetable on the court from his fall.

Kevin love enjoys trolling fans online, but he got off once they started trolling him for his dad dying this season

Brutal place

Twitter is hands down the worst social media site by far

I just want sports betting ads to be illegal à la tobacco, so stupid to be mad at a team for not playing the way your little app wants them to

Their situation is different because an online perception can influence their career. See Javale McGee and Shaqtin’ A Fool

Because it’s not really the same comparison. Back then there was less exposure to things, no camera phones for photos/videos for any and everything, no online tools for crazy people to use to background check/reverse phone number lookup, and no digital footprint for people to comb through.

So back then when DragonSlayer69 tells you he’s going to kill you of course people aren’t going to think much of it because it was still in it’s early phase where people didn’t understand the dangers of it and there wasn’t as much coverage of it as there is today.

Yeah I always find that stuff kind of funny because if you’re getting roasted on the internet you could always just not get on the internet lol. I get it’s different these days but like you said I think it goes to millennials/x not really taking it as seriously (broad generalization of course). When I was younger you got on the internet with a certain carefree attitude knowing a lot of what you were going to run into was bullshit

Well, a death threat now would also be more serious considering how easy it is to find the addresses of people you don’t even know

The topic of removing anonymity online for accountability reasons was something that came up in one of my undergrad courses. This was before swatting became a thing too

couch potatoes dont punch a clock js

JJ was one of the most positive voices in digital media, he literally left espn talking head shit because he found no value in being negative about the game and players. He always brought in current players to talk about the modern game to expand old heads opinions etc

you can’t win, regardless of how clean your game may be or how spotless your track record is, people will still hate you simply for being successful