eu tinha uma amiga que literalmente todo namorado que ela teve foi alguém com quem ela traiu o anterior e foi uns cinco seguindo esse padrão namorava um traía com fulano (por meses) terminava e começava a namorar o fulano teve um de quem ela até ficou noiva mas traiu esse tbm. acho que até demorei pra cortar a amizade no primeiro eu já tinha ficado sem reação porque a gente se conheceu no ensino médio e ela acompanhou muito meu namoro onde fui traída os 6 anos do relacionamento e aí ela foi fazendo de novo e de novo e eu gente que pessoa horrível

I had this friend where literally every boyfriend she had was someone she cheated on the previous one with, and it was like five in a row following this pattern — she'd be dating someone, cheat with so-and-so (for months), break up, and start dating the so-and-so. There was one she even got engaged to but she cheated on him too. I think I even took too long to cut off the friendship — with the first one I was already speechless because we met in high school and she was very much around for my [own] relationship where I was cheated on, the 6 years of the relationship, and then she went and did it again and again and I'm like, guys, what a horrible person.

The paragraph is a message by a Brazilian woman talking about her cheating friend. Portuguese-speaking women often use "gente" liberally in sentences. There, "gente que pessoa horrível," the closest English translation being "guys, what a horrible person." But gente is doing something unique in Portuguese because it's reflexively invoking the hivemind, as CovfefeAnon put it, in a more natural way.

"gente" literally means "people," but it can also be used as "we." "A gente vai" = "we're going." But "a gente" as we is inclusive, it includes the speaker. So when "gente" is deployed vocatively like "guys," the speaker isn't fully separate like in English. This makes using gente more natural even in internal monologue, which is what Brazilian women (and gay bottom men) often do.

English has similar interjections, "honestly," "I mean," "y'all," "folks," and even something like "chat," which approaches it pretty closely. But none of them are both collective vocatives that are also natural in pure interior monologue. "Honestly, what a horrible person" is invoking an implicit witness, the speaker, which is why saying "honestly," like that in your head feels natural. "Guys, what a horrible person" is invoking the collective, but it's not including the speaker, which is why saying "guys," like that in your head feels unnatural. "Gente, what a horrible person" is invoking both the collective and the speaker, which is why saying that in your head feels natural.

"Chat" is actually the closest, and I can imagine someone saying "chat, what a horrible person" in their heads and it feels similar to gente. But it's not quite the same, because it still doesn't include the speaker, right? Chat remains the external collective, but it approaches it better than anything else. Popularity wise the jury is still out on it. Gente is completely widespread and diffused in Brazilian speech among its targets, chat is very much still tied to online niches I think, although people who live in America, especially among younger people, would be able to tell more clearly than me.

In any case, I don't think sociologically speaking the existence of gente means much, other than perhaps female-oriented brains that happen to speak Brazilian Portuguese can be more prone to reflexive hivemind invocations, but it is an interesting difference between the languages.

Both English and Portuguese are beautiful and flexible languages. Before releasing It Follows I was thinking of translating it to Portuguese. I ended up not doing it because I didn't want people who know me in real life but can't speak English to read my degenerate autofiction porn novel, but I was thinking about how I'd translate the 4chan-like terms the story has. So I ended up researching how the Brazilian incel community communicates to see if they have any particularly funny brazilianized terms. In the end, for the most part, they don't, they just use the English terms directly. Seemingly a lot of Brazilian internet is like this, this tweet being a good funny example of it:

I didn't know this because only recently X has been showing me Brazilian tweets after the auto-translate feature was shipped, and I don't really consume Brazilian internet elsewhere that much. But yea, I see so many funny terms now. Like the other day I read "escravoceta" (literally "pussy slave": escravo = slave, buceta = pussy) and just burst out laughing. I guess English has similar constructions with "ussy," like bussy, and, well, Portuguese also has "boyceta" which is similarly hilarious. Anyway, both languages are rich and interesting. There are many terms and especially expressions that can only exist in English, as Borges points out here:

But there are many that can only exist in Portuguese, the aforementioned "gente" being one of them.