8 ms·

Outrage culture is out of control

236 points by ilamont 8y ago

linuxlizard 8y ago
There's a great Bloom County from way back that summed this up. https://www.gocomics.com/bloomcounty/1982/11/14/ https://www.gocomics.com/bloomcounty/1982/11/14/
- effingwewt 8y ago
  I don't remember to whom it was attributed, but this always reminds me of the quote 'offense is taken, not given'. This is weird, things have flipped. I moved from California to Texas recently and TX now feels more liberal than CA, in that here different opinions feel more respected, as does personal choice, etc. CA felt like it had become fascist, too easy to be jumped on for wrongthink. ESPECIALLY in the educational system. I swear growing up it was the opposite. I was kicked out of school until I cut my hair, my gay friends were genuinely oppressed and harassed, I was fired for getting my ears pierced, I received $250 tickets regularly for skateboarding and rollerblading inside the city limits,TX was terrible growing up in the 80s-90s. Now it's much more chill and you couldn't pay me enough to move back to California. Weird rant I know, just saying this stuff is weird and has far and deep reaching effects. /rant.
- hprotagonist 8y ago
  i’m offended we didn’t even get to discover this level of offendedness ourselves! That’s ageism!
NedIsakoff 8y ago
This always happens with whatever movement that is hip the current day in your location. Regardless of what movement, #MeToo or Red Guards or etc, this will happen. Your only hope is to follow it and make a profit at it, which is what I'm doing.
- koverda 8y ago
  How are you profiting and from what movement?
  - NedIsakoff 8y ago
    I own a business that is selling a lot of #MeToo merchandising. High demand and profitable.
Y_Y 8y ago
Trying to control culture is difficult.
- agumonkey 8y ago
  more manual work and isolation
  - ainiriand 8y ago
    Is that you Dwight?
PaulHoule 8y ago
First people are outraged about X. Then people are outraged that people are outraged about X. Sooner or later people won't remember what they are outraged about but they will still be outraged. That's the power of "fake news"; it doesn't matter what X is at all.
- Udik 8y ago
  > Then people are outraged that people are outraged about X. Sorry to disagree, but this is not really happening and I think it's one of the reasons for the current madness. People who are outraged first claim some type of victim status, and this is enough to force other people to support them. And anybody who might disagree is silenced by moral blackmail- how dare you voice an opinion against somebody who is a victim? There are at least a couple of things that seem lost to public ethics: 1) the victim of some injustice is not on the right side of any possible dispute, nor is he/she free from the normal obligations of civility towards anybody, including the perpertrators. 2) the magnitude of some perceived injustice should be measured by some objective standards, not by how much someone is "crying, shaking".
cdubzzz 8y ago
This is almost entirely unrelated to the topic, but it's interesting to read these musing on addiction from a person who benefits (for now, at least) from a coffee business. As I read this I actually wondered at a few points if it was satire. > Because we need that next hit, we need it right now. Being in a constant state of emergency — a condition in which people notoriously make terrible decisions — is like having a fire raging inside the body, one that needs to be fed. It needs new fuel, and so we seek new enemies.
- shin_lao 8y ago
  Come on, he's selling coffee, not opium.
  - cdubzzz 8y ago
    I 100% agree that it is somewhat unfair, but I don't think it is entirely so. I had this on mind, for example, because a few weeks ago a co-worker had to leave work early one day because she had a terrible migraine that wouldn't go away. She was out of the office for the next few days and even went to a doctor because it just would not subside. What she eventually discovered is that she accidentally bought a decaf coffee. When she switched back to regular, the migraine completely subsided and she has been fine since. Her experience really struck me. It's not really a subject I have ever thought about before, but I wonder how prevalent that level of addiction to caffeine really is.
    - cglace 8y ago
      I quit coffee in one week. I went from 4 cups to 1 cup to half caff to decaf. Its not that hard. Headaches are a thing if you quit too fast but they usually only last a few days. For me the worst part is losing the rituals of coffee. It's hard to give up years of routine.
    - tumahimikka 8y ago
      what an utterly stupid comment
- 8y ago
bArray 8y ago
The LA Times talking about outrage culture being out of control.. Just yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19219089 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19219089
akhilcacharya 8y ago
I think outrage over “outrage culture” is out of control. It’s quite remarkable to see how much ink the elite media give to things like this and the whining over college speakers being disinvited.
- cglace 8y ago
  I think concerned is a better way to frame it than outraged.
seibelj 8y ago
Brave of the author to standup for what she believes in, risking and ultimately destroying the family business. Many others have families and careers and just stay quiet, which is the rational move. Would I ever do what she did for anything I believed if it were so controversial? No way, I have bills to pay...
- NedIsakoff 8y ago
  The rational move is to be active in the outrage culture and profit. She's a journalist so if she starts going all outrage and getting more readers, it's good for her.
  - AstralStorm 8y ago
    It would be rational if you knew the outcome, not before. It is a one way move unless you write under a pseudonym.
vimy 8y ago
"For many of us, such one-off encounters have become a regular—sometimes even daily—form of “debate,” especially on social media, whose dynamics encourage rhetorical stakes-raising. The idea that two people acting in good faith can look at the same set of facts and reach different conclusions has gone from unspoken assumption to exotic claim. People aren’t just wrong on this or that issue: They’re morally flawed. They don’t have bad politics: They’re bad people. On Twitter, you actually find college professors and politicians using Nazi analogies to attack people who disagree with them on mundane points of policy." https://quillette.com/2019/02/21/what-my-days-as-a-marxist-taught-me-about-modern-political-cults/ https://quillette.com/2019/02/21/what-my-days-as-a-marxist-t... The "social justice" movement has turned into a church where everyone who disagrees is a heretic that has to be burned at the stake.
- mnsc 8y ago
  It sounds like The "social justice" movement is made up of some pretty bad people burning innocents as "heretics". We really should do something about that, do you have any suggestions?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - justaman 8y ago
    I'll get down voted for this one but here goes.... One thing I've noticed of the social justice crowd is the ever shifting goal posts. Anyone to the right of you is an enabler of malicious ideas. Hardly ever are people criticized or ostracized for being to the left of you. There is a way to respectfully disagree but only when both parties actually respect each other. Labeling someone a nazi for voting for a right wing candidate results in the dehumanization of that person, thus removing any respect. (Here is the part where im going to get down voted). I live somewhere EXTREMELY liberal and if I go any direction for 10min it gets EXTREMELY conservative. I see both sides daily. One thing I realized is the lack of masculine social norms on the left and feminine cultural influence on the right. The right seems to have a minimal respect for how things 'feel'. They won't care if you are offended and rarely try to buffer any tumultuous conversations. The left has minimal respect for authority leaving the louder individual as the person more likely to be heard And listened too. Lefties also embrace the idea that words can be violent and that if someone is allowed to say something entirely opposed to their beliefs then responding with physical violence is okay because that person was violent first. Its rarely an issue on when both parties are on the left because the capitulation to the louder individual in addition to the seemingly similar trajectory of thought patterns. To create a more harmonious society the left needs to dig its feet in the ground and hold their position stronger against the more fringe radical members that would like elimination of ulterior ideas altogether in favor of a homogeneous and bland society. The right needs to listen to feminine influence more frequently to understand that sometimes the fear of violence can create a situation where violence otherwise would not occur.
mnsc 8y ago
This is the current pitch of mainstream culture, where voicing an opinion is the only thing that matters. Why else would someone with "a 15-year-old business with a spotless track record" publish obviously controversial opinions for the world to see. She wants to matter. And now her opinions is on the first page of HN and I'm reading it. Congratulations Nancy, you are now a player in a game with no winners.
- tziki 8y ago
  Did you read the article? It wasn't the person with 15-year-old business publishing those opinions.
- JazCE 8y ago
  Her husband's business, not her's, but otherwise i agree.
- vasilipupkin 8y ago
  To be fair, the business was her husband's, not hers. he didn't publish any controversial opinions - she did. having said that, baristas quit? hire new ones, sorry, I am not feeling the outrage regarding this outrage.
  - tlear 8y ago
    It’s going after the wholesale customers that did the trick. Lots of those must be catering to the SJW demographic. Easy target. He should turn it around and go all MAGA. Some rebranding and you have a true red blooded American coffee ;) with wife as journalist they can probably spin it into a decent speaking gig too. In current America you are either MAGA/fascist/sexist/whateverist or you are SJW/commie no other choices.
    - vasilipupkin 8y ago
      or you don't spout your useless political opinions that nobody cares about and you are just a regular citizen
  - 8y ago
FactolSarin 8y ago
Her examples of "innocent" people are the MAGA hat wearing kids who surrounded a Native American vet doing tomahawk chops and fake "Indian" chants and John Wayne, a self-avowed white supremacist.
- leereeves 8y ago
  The students from Covington Catholic didn't "surround" anyone, Nathan Phillips approached them.
- AlexB138 8y ago
  I know nothing about John Wayne, but the MAGA kids thing was basically a hoax. It's the definition of "fake news", a term I hate, but it applies there. It's a perfect example, and the fact that you still believe the completely baseless narrative highlights why.
  - FactolSarin 8y ago
    That's their narrative. In the video they're doing racist fake "Indian" chants at the guy. Whatever happened before that doesn't excuse their clearly racist actions.
    - malvosenior 8y ago
      That's not their narrative, that's people watching the video for themselves. It's not even worth debating at this point, because if you don't see two grown men barging into a group of kids that they have nothing to do with and getting in the face of one of them while the other shouts actual racist things at them (watch with sound), then no amount of factual information is going to change your point of view.
josteink 8y ago
It certainly is. As shown with BLM, the MAGA-teens and now the Smolett-case, people will even manufacture things to be outraged about, just to justify their own virtue. While I consider that scary enough by itself, what I fear even more are the (guaranteed to come) counter-reactions. It’s not going to be pretty.
- pjc50 8y ago
  Do you think all of BLM is manufactured? Smolett it now seems was faking it, but what conclusions are you drawing from that?
  - throwaway20998 8y ago
    Black people have some very legitimate complaints they can make about the police. Laquan McDonald is the first one that comes to my mind. BLM as an activist group was really built on two cases though: Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. In both cases, the truth of the situation was grossly distorted in the initial media reports, and never really got corrected in most people's minds. The summary truth of Michael Brown is that he was in the process of being caught for a robbery, he fought with the officer for his gun, and got shot. The summary truth of Trayvon Martin was that he was in the process of being caught for burglary, he fought with the neighborhood watch guy, banged his head against the concrete, and then the neighborhood watch guy pulled out his gun and shot him. The criminal justice system actually worked in all three of these cases. Darren Wilson was not charged, George Zimmerman was acquitted, and Jason Van Dyke was convicted of 2nd degree murder.
    - brianpgordon 8y ago
      Where did you get the idea that Trayvon Martin was committing burglary when he was shot?
  - leereeves 8y ago
    What I find disturbing about events like the Smolett case (also Covington Catholic, "A Rape on Campus", etc) isn't that one person would fake such a thing, but that so many would eagerly promote and support a claim that fit their agenda without questioning it.
save_ferris 8y ago
It's out of control largely because it's arguably what social media is best at facilitating. Legitimate discussion and debate are drowned out by insane verbal "body-slams" on Twitter, because Twitter doesn't really exist to promote legitimate discussion. And with the endless amounts of content and data we consume daily, we place far more importance in services like Twitter to help us navigate the sea of noise instead of taking the time to dig deeper into issues. It's far easier to just attack someone on Twitter if you disagree than it is to thoroughly debate why you disagree with them. Ultimately, one gets the sense that there isn't enough time to have a complete and nuanced conversation about a controversial topic because there are so many other things vying for our attention.
- porpoisely 8y ago
  Is it social media or the news? Is it CNN, Foxnews, NYTimes, BuzzFeed, Huffpo, MSNBC, etc or social media? Did rolling stone intentionally lying about campus rape cause the problem or social media? Is the media constantly peddling lies like "campus rape crisis", "racist attacks", etc the problem or social media? I don't remember social media having this level of problem until the news industry forced it's way into social media. The outrage isn't being driven by social media. It's being driven by the news industry and the media in general. But I guess blaming russia hasn't worked so now we can scapegoat social media. From UVA to Covington to Mollett and everything else, is it the platform or the journalists, celebrities, etc creating the message.
  - malvosenior 8y ago
    This is very true. It's also easy to blame this on profit motive and clickbait driven advertising but a lot of these journalists are ideologically motivated in large part due to their ironically upper middle class liberal arts education (read privileged).
    - save_ferris 8y ago
      I'm not a journalist and I've only ever worked for one news publication in my career, so I obviously can't speak for all journalists. That said, we can't ignore the impact that traffic quotas have had on the industry since the collapse of print media. I worked for a paper in 2016 on their software team and saw how much of an impact that Trump's name in a headline had on the traffic an article received. Everyone on the outside was screaming about why the media was giving him so much attention while the industry, in the middle of a financial crisis, was less than interested to leave money on the table. In the age of internet journalism, orgs are heavily incentivized to produce what they think the community wants, and that has some really dangerous long-term implications. People don't realize how bad the financial situation is for newspapers across America, and how desperately print media orgs are trying (and in many cases, failing) to stay afloat.
strikelaserclaw 8y ago
First rule of business, don't get involved in politics which are regarded as "sensitive" subject matter and have no impact on your bottom line.
leftyted 8y ago
> Meanwhile some of us are watching from the sidelines, trying to stay out of the way, hoping not to be next. (Good luck with that.) The author of this article didn't stay on the sidelines, which is why she got dragged into this mess. Most people stay on the sidelines. The author of this article hosted a podcast called "Me Neither" and, predictably, her life was consumed by a shistorm. One almost feels like this is what she wanted. I'm not saying anything about that is good -- I'd rather live in a world where people could disagree about whichever issue without anyone's business being ruined. But we don't appear to be living in that world and, for almost everyone, it's totally possible to stay on the sidelines of "the culture war" and just go about your life.
- beaner 8y ago
  I don't think starting a podcast means you want to be pulled into shitstorms.
  - dwild 8y ago
    A podcast accusing people of lying about rape? Sorry but that's as much into the shitstorms that you can be.
- malvosenior 8y ago
  It's her husband's business that got destroyed though. He was on the sidelines.
  - dwild 8y ago
    Seems like she was actually in that business too. https://www.oregonlive.com/news/2019/01/part-owner-of-portland-coffee-company-questions-accounts-of-sexual-assault-survivors-on-youtube.html https://www.oregonlive.com/news/2019/01/part-owner-of-portla...
    - malvosenior 8y ago
      As a part owner (which you would think would be the default definition of the spouse of the owner). It doesn't change what I said though. He didn't say anything and his business was ruined.
0_gravitas 8y ago
It seems to me that outrage culture is more or less a byproduct of the whole "post-truth" era, actual fact-based arguments are ignored for little more than political reasons. At this point, the only way to win an argument is to shout louder than everyone else, and I feel like I see it everywhere. It's one of the (many) reasons I don't watch/pay attention to the news anymore, it's just so draining to see.
- Zelphyr 8y ago
  I think the news is perpetuating it. They're not stupid. They know they can tap into all this outrage for their own benefit. Once people are riled up they are sadistically attracted to things that will fuel that rage and the news media outlets are all too happy to oblige. That's not to suggest in any way we as a society, or that our government should try to stifle the media. But the media outlets, from the journalists all the way to the owners need to take heed their power and use it responsibly and constructively. And that's something they've been ignoring for far too long.
  - CompanionCuuube 8y ago
    Fully agree. The same is happening at the social media level. They get much more engagement with this kind of rage. But any organization that chooses to act ethically is handicapping themselves because of how profitable outrage is for engagement and page views. We can allow them to self-regulate but if they refuse to do so, we should take measures to put organizations acting ethically on the same footing as the unethical actors.
plasticchris 8y ago
This sums up the causes pretty nicely: http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/life-online http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/life-online
castlecrasher2 8y ago
I'm certainly guilty of this. My two cents on the topic are 1) that people are generally bad at letting other people feel and think on their own, 2) as the article suggests, tribalism is now manifesting in schools of thinking, and 3) life is so easy, to the point that others' opinions and emotions can appear hostile. Point 1 I realized recently when I discovered my family is especially good at emotional gaslighting, where I would complain about something and the family member (any of them, practically) would argue against what I said, in favor of whatever I was complaining about. It was a mix of the Mr Rogers' documentary and a falling out with the family that made me realize empathy means letting others feel, letting others talk, and truly understanding them. Once you're both on the same page emotionally you can offer suggestions or advice, but if you're not on the same page you're denying that person's personhood. 2 and 3 are an interesting combination that I think has led to society at large condemning not-niceness and leaving us in the newer generation either to not have strong opinions or to have VERY strong opinions, pretty much on any topic. I'm sure this happened in generations before but now it's so easy to see one lunatic on Twitter and subconsciously think "that whole group is just like that." I think social media is a mistake, and it will be interesting to see how it pans out in the future.
- skohan 8y ago
  > life is so easy, to the point that others' opinions and emotions can appear hostile. I have a different take on this. I think part of the reason people seem more hostile and or threatening to one another is because we have more access to each-other. 30 years ago, you probably didn't have too much of an idea what other people really thought unless you knew them personally or they were some kind of a public figure. Now you can go online and have immediate access to in-group conversations you're not a part of - including the conversations of groups who might consider you their enemy. I think we might need a few more decades to develop the social tools to handle this without being at each other's throats all the time. I suspect another element, at least in the US, is the subtext that the explosive growth in terms of the material well-being of the middle class which was enjoyed in the post-war period through the 90's has slowed. I think in times of scarcity, or perceived scarcity, people tend to emphasize devision and find more reasons to bludgeon the groups they're not a part of.
folkrav 8y ago
"Outrage culture" is a child spawn of political correctness. Quite like Steve Hugues's bit on the subject. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceS_jkKjIgo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceS_jkKjIgo
ergothus 8y ago
When I was in middle school, I wrote an essay about how outrageous it was that someone would get upset at me for holding a door for them. That was over twenty years ago, before online communications were commonplace. Somewhere between then and now I realized this had never happened to me. In fact, MOST of the outrage people complain about is always third-hand. Certainly you can see it online, but even most of that is outrage over outrage. If we look at the actual encounters we have in meatspace...there are plenty of wrong idiots, but somehow they are always smaller in number and importance.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  I don't think it's all 3rd hand. There's definitely a lot of 2nd hand outrage. Look at Reddit. There's tons of popular subs that exist for no reason other than to shit on other people for doing certain things. Every now and then we get a HN thread where it's basically just everyone bitching about whatever thing the article is about. I'd call that 2nd hand outrage.
skohan 8y ago
Two thoughts: 1. I wonder to how much an extent this "outrage culture" is a natural result of click-based revenue models. The game at the moment is to get the most number of people to click on a headline as possible, and it turns out that pushing people's emotional buttons (especially fear and anger) is really effective at getting attention. Sure media has always been able to sell outrage, but with modern analytics and AB testing, it's possible to hone in on the perfect rage-inducing message much more quickly. 2. Twitter is such a strange thing. Most people I hear talk about it suspect it does not make them happier, and we've got this weird social contract right now where whatever you say, or have ever said on there, regardless of context, could potentially result in real-world repercussions including loss of one's livelihood. If there were any other technology which could get you fired from your job for 15 seconds of indiscretion during a night of drinking, or while sitting on the toilet I would guess people would stay the hell away from it.
- brlewis 8y ago
  >I wonder to how much an extent this "outrage culture" is a natural result of click-based revenue models. What's that quote about bots noticing that people look at highway accidents and thinking people need to be shown more of them?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- repolfx 8y ago
  Twitter is indeed a very strange thing. I have mixed views on it. The character limits clearly contribute to the fact that it's so overrun with drama. It literally prevents anyone from writing a long form, nuanced thought, let alone an essay. Yet this is also why it's so popular - it lowers the bar to a point where everyone can take part on a level playing field, without feeling outcompeted by skilled writers who have time on their hands (consider how few people blog vs tweet). And you know, the original dream of the internet was that everyone could publish, everyone would be a creator. With things like Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, we're there. The internet achieved that dream. It just turns out that sometimes what people create isn't very appealing. Well, that's humanity. It's hard to criticise the internet or social media for that. I think Twitter has had another effect, which is that it's revealed to the whole world, practically for the first time, the extent to which the social elites are no better thinkers than anyone else and often seem to be worse thinkers. Historically, certain social classes have been able to work together to present a very polished, very glossy exterior. This was especially noticeable with politicians and corporations before the Twitter age where people often complained that they were fake, spoke in soundbites, were just faceless party apparatchiks and so on. Journalists would claim a moral high ground in which they claimed to be totally politically neutral and trustworthy, bureaucrats and academics would claim to be scientifically disinterested in anything except their narrow domain and of course completely above any suggestion of bias or impropriety, corporations would only speak in terms of carefully worded press releases, politicians would change their positions totally and claim they hadn't changed views at all, and so on. But now every politician, journalist and half of the corporate world blurt out whatever random thought pops into their head to the entire world without a seconds hesitation and it's recorded forever. And guess what, journalists turned out to have extreme political biases, many academics turned out to have crazy opinions on everyday topics, government bureaucrats likewise, a politician who contradicts themselves will be immediately skewered by some ancient YouTube video of them saying the opposite, and so on. The whole facade of intellectual neutrality fell apart completely once Twitter gave us direct insight into the minds of these people. To take an example from a couple of days ago: https://order-order.com/2019/02/20/adam-boulton-accuses-tory-brexiteers-far-right/ https://order-order.com/2019/02/20/adam-boulton-accuses-tory... Boulton is a Sky News journalist who is required by UK law to be politically neutral in his reporting, yet here he tweeted that he believed members of the government that support Brexit (i.e. all of them, given their manifesto commitments) are "far right". So now people see this sort of tweet, and next time Sky News tells them about the "far right" they'll remember this tweet and recall that these people believe the UK is in fact run by an officially far right government. And then they'll ignore it. Is this for the better or for the worse? I think it's for the best. Yes, it leads to a lot of outrage and drama for a whole lotta years as people adjust to the idea that every segment of society that claimed to be trustworthy isn't, and a whole lot of new groups and ideologies jostle for power and prestige in the vacuum that remains. But in the end social media didn't create this problem, it just revealed what had always been true.
pjc50 8y ago
Vital author background: https://www.oregonlive.com/news/2019/01/part-owner-of-portland-coffee-company-questions-accounts-of-sexual-assault-survivors-on-youtube.html https://www.oregonlive.com/news/2019/01/part-owner-of-portla... She's talking about "outrage culture", but she herself was clearly trying to monetise anti-outrage-outrage by running a video show accusing other people of lying. She could have chosen to, you know, not do that.
- CompanionCuuube 8y ago
  Shame on her like those people "intolerant of intolerance".
Zelphyr 8y ago
"Offense is taken, not given. No need to disarm the world. Just make yourself bullet proof. Sticks & stones people. Block. Unfollow. Laugh." -- Ricky Gervais
- AstralStorm 8y ago
  And this is how you lose touch and get trapped in an echo chamber, another thing current social media are great at. (I presume you keep the access available for people agreeing with you.) Unfortunately, most vocal are people with too much free time and not much else to do, or wannabe political activists. And of course tools, trolls and provocateurs.
  - 50656E6973 8y ago
    Its not an echo chamber if you just block people who rely simply on ad hominem attacks, its filtering, as long as you aren't just blocking people who disagree with you. The algorithms are the much greater contributors to echo chambers than individual peer blocking.
jimejim 8y ago
She decided to go public on a podcast with shitty opinions and then is angry that she's being judged by them or that her business is affected by it. This isn't "outrage culture." That's what is supposed to happen. Shitty people should be shunned.
- malvosenior 8y ago
  Her opinion was rational, valid and shared by millions of people. She also didn't do anything to anyone she just spoke about what she believes in. Then her husband's business got attacked by an outrage mob. > This isn't "outrage culture." That's what is supposed to happen. Shitty people should be shunned. This is literally outrage culture in its purest form.
giffarage 8y ago
Anybody know why this was removed from the Hacker News feed? When I saw this post, it was at the very top of the feed. A few minutes later I refreshed the feed, and it was gone.
- thinkingemote 8y ago
  users can flag posts and there is a flame-o-meter for comments
- yetihehe 8y ago
  Too much outrage probably, this post attracts lots of flamebait. Also, my response will soon be downvoted too, just because people don't agree with me.
- pjc50 8y ago
  It's outrage-bait.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
iicc 8y ago
A somewhat related video: "This Video Will Make You Angry" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc Script: https://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/this-video-will-make-you-angry https://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/this-video-will-make-you-angry Linked Paper (from video description): "What Makes Online Content Viral?" https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1528077 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1528077
- tilolebo 8y ago
  How dare you!
mduerksen 8y ago
Journalists: Please stop taking social media seriously. It vastly misrepresents the importance of issues. People that actually have opinions worth talking about don't have time to engage heavily in it, either because they are experiencing real difficulties or are too busy actually being productive. Traditional channels (radio, the pulpit etc.) all have some sort of barrier for those who wish to broadcast. Some kind of credibility, accomplishment or urgency has to be present for the chance to be heard. This is a feature. Posting a tweet has no credibility whatsoever. Just treat it like 4chan.
kenneth 8y ago
Seems this thread was killed by flags. @dang — curious what the reasoning is here. It's not a pleasant subject to discuss but it's a very important topic these days. I understand the concerns about generating flame wars, but I'd love to see a way for civil discourse on this to be allowed to exist.
- yellowapple 8y ago
  I don't know if civil discourse here is possible to achieve or sustain, given how emotionally-charged these topics can be.
  - smush 8y ago
    I tend to agree with you in principle; this particular thread is (granted I'm reading top-to-bottom, not all the way through it yet) is somewhat restrained compared to the usual black-grey-black-grey-grey-grey-deleted-black-grey-grey-black-deleted text walls some flamewars tend to lean towards.
- alecco 8y ago
  Indeed, it was flagged within an hour. HN policy is hijacked by extremists, adding to the claim of the article.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Vaslo 8y ago
So weird, I just read this on Quillette. More detail on this story in there by the way. The LA Times article is definitely more to the point. https://quillette.com/2019/02/18/the-internet-locusts-descend-on-ristretto-roasters/ https://quillette.com/2019/02/18/the-internet-locusts-descen...
charliebrownau 8y ago
This is what happens when for 30 year you create stupid people via western mainsteam Media ---------------------- Western mainstream Groups FAILING because of the LEFT, feminism and diversity and post modern Marxist brainwashing * TV & Movies * Music * News * Scifi * Comedy * Comics * culture cons * AAA video gaming * AAA video game reviews * Culture games (MTG/etc) * Scouts * Government * Universities * Education * Marriage * Housing sector * Banking Sector * LAW * Courts * Family courts ----------------------- Then again wasnt the GOAL of Feminism and the LEFT was too * Destroy Western Society * Destroy Free Speech * Destroy Western Marriage/family unit * Replace men with state so women rely on state for resources/money
mancerayder 8y ago
Folks, Tech is being accused of tearing our societies apart. We're told it's causing yelling over rational discourse, a feedback loop on both sides of the spectrum that amplify the feeling of being wronged on either end, and a shifting of the magnetic poles such that a side traditionally associated with freedom of speech is now associated with Puritanism, and vice versa on the other side. We're asking whether clickbait profit motives are causing this, whether it's the demise of the print media, and so forth. This is a technical conversation about morality as it tries to answer some real world problems. And we have the arrogance to flag the conversation? If we don't take it up, lawmakers surely will. It's already happening in the EU. Please don't flag important conversations. It's not all about Node.js and the annoyance of whiteboard interviews, is it?
Chazprime 8y ago
Can't say I disagree - we're in a climate where the "And Twitter Users..." stories are commonplace that I completely understand why people are starting to delete their social media profiles.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

236 points by ilamont 8y ago

There's a great Bloom County from way back that summed this up. https://www.gocomics.com/bloomcounty/1982/11/14/ https://www.gocomics.com/bloomcounty/1982/11/14/

effingwewt 8y ago
I don't remember to whom it was attributed, but this always reminds me of the quote 'offense is taken, not given'. This is weird, things have flipped. I moved from California to Texas recently and TX now feels more liberal than CA, in that here different opinions feel more respected, as does personal choice, etc. CA felt like it had become fascist, too easy to be jumped on for wrongthink. ESPECIALLY in the educational system. I swear growing up it was the opposite. I was kicked out of school until I cut my hair, my gay friends were genuinely oppressed and harassed, I was fired for getting my ears pierced, I received $250 tickets regularly for skateboarding and rollerblading inside the city limits,TX was terrible growing up in the 80s-90s. Now it's much more chill and you couldn't pay me enough to move back to California. Weird rant I know, just saying this stuff is weird and has far and deep reaching effects. /rant.
hprotagonist 8y ago
i’m offended we didn’t even get to discover this level of offendedness ourselves! That’s ageism!

NedIsakoff 8y ago

This always happens with whatever movement that is hip the current day in your location. Regardless of what movement, #MeToo or Red Guards or etc, this will happen. Your only hope is to follow it and make a profit at it, which is what I'm doing.

koverda 8y ago
How are you profiting and from what movement?
- NedIsakoff 8y ago
  I own a business that is selling a lot of #MeToo merchandising. High demand and profitable.

Y_Y 8y ago

Trying to control culture is difficult.

agumonkey 8y ago
more manual work and isolation
- ainiriand 8y ago
  Is that you Dwight?

PaulHoule 8y ago

First people are outraged about X. Then people are outraged that people are outraged about X. Sooner or later people won't remember what they are outraged about but they will still be outraged. That's the power of "fake news"; it doesn't matter what X is at all.

Udik 8y ago
> Then people are outraged that people are outraged about X. Sorry to disagree, but this is not really happening and I think it's one of the reasons for the current madness. People who are outraged first claim some type of victim status, and this is enough to force other people to support them. And anybody who might disagree is silenced by moral blackmail- how dare you voice an opinion against somebody who is a victim? There are at least a couple of things that seem lost to public ethics: 1) the victim of some injustice is not on the right side of any possible dispute, nor is he/she free from the normal obligations of civility towards anybody, including the perpertrators. 2) the magnitude of some perceived injustice should be measured by some objective standards, not by how much someone is "crying, shaking".

cdubzzz 8y ago

This is almost entirely unrelated to the topic, but it's interesting to read these musing on addiction from a person who benefits (for now, at least) from a coffee business. As I read this I actually wondered at a few points if it was satire. > Because we need that next hit, we need it right now. Being in a constant state of emergency — a condition in which people notoriously make terrible decisions — is like having a fire raging inside the body, one that needs to be fed. It needs new fuel, and so we seek new enemies.

shin_lao 8y ago
Come on, he's selling coffee, not opium.
- cdubzzz 8y ago
  I 100% agree that it is somewhat unfair, but I don't think it is entirely so. I had this on mind, for example, because a few weeks ago a co-worker had to leave work early one day because she had a terrible migraine that wouldn't go away. She was out of the office for the next few days and even went to a doctor because it just would not subside. What she eventually discovered is that she accidentally bought a decaf coffee. When she switched back to regular, the migraine completely subsided and she has been fine since. Her experience really struck me. It's not really a subject I have ever thought about before, but I wonder how prevalent that level of addiction to caffeine really is.
  - cglace 8y ago
    I quit coffee in one week. I went from 4 cups to 1 cup to half caff to decaf. Its not that hard. Headaches are a thing if you quit too fast but they usually only last a few days. For me the worst part is losing the rituals of coffee. It's hard to give up years of routine.
  - tumahimikka 8y ago
    what an utterly stupid comment
8y ago

bArray 8y ago

The LA Times talking about outrage culture being out of control.. Just yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19219089 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19219089

akhilcacharya 8y ago

I think outrage over “outrage culture” is out of control. It’s quite remarkable to see how much ink the elite media give to things like this and the whining over college speakers being disinvited.

cglace 8y ago
I think concerned is a better way to frame it than outraged.

seibelj 8y ago

Brave of the author to standup for what she believes in, risking and ultimately destroying the family business. Many others have families and careers and just stay quiet, which is the rational move. Would I ever do what she did for anything I believed if it were so controversial? No way, I have bills to pay...

NedIsakoff 8y ago
The rational move is to be active in the outrage culture and profit. She's a journalist so if she starts going all outrage and getting more readers, it's good for her.
- AstralStorm 8y ago
  It would be rational if you knew the outcome, not before. It is a one way move unless you write under a pseudonym.

vimy 8y ago

"For many of us, such one-off encounters have become a regular—sometimes even daily—form of “debate,” especially on social media, whose dynamics encourage rhetorical stakes-raising. The idea that two people acting in good faith can look at the same set of facts and reach different conclusions has gone from unspoken assumption to exotic claim. People aren’t just wrong on this or that issue: They’re morally flawed. They don’t have bad politics: They’re bad people. On Twitter, you actually find college professors and politicians using Nazi analogies to attack people who disagree with them on mundane points of policy." https://quillette.com/2019/02/21/what-my-days-as-a-marxist-taught-me-about-modern-political-cults/ https://quillette.com/2019/02/21/what-my-days-as-a-marxist-t... The "social justice" movement has turned into a church where everyone who disagrees is a heretic that has to be burned at the stake.

mnsc 8y ago
It sounds like The "social justice" movement is made up of some pretty bad people burning innocents as "heretics". We really should do something about that, do you have any suggestions?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- justaman 8y ago
  I'll get down voted for this one but here goes.... One thing I've noticed of the social justice crowd is the ever shifting goal posts. Anyone to the right of you is an enabler of malicious ideas. Hardly ever are people criticized or ostracized for being to the left of you. There is a way to respectfully disagree but only when both parties actually respect each other. Labeling someone a nazi for voting for a right wing candidate results in the dehumanization of that person, thus removing any respect. (Here is the part where im going to get down voted). I live somewhere EXTREMELY liberal and if I go any direction for 10min it gets EXTREMELY conservative. I see both sides daily. One thing I realized is the lack of masculine social norms on the left and feminine cultural influence on the right. The right seems to have a minimal respect for how things 'feel'. They won't care if you are offended and rarely try to buffer any tumultuous conversations. The left has minimal respect for authority leaving the louder individual as the person more likely to be heard And listened too. Lefties also embrace the idea that words can be violent and that if someone is allowed to say something entirely opposed to their beliefs then responding with physical violence is okay because that person was violent first. Its rarely an issue on when both parties are on the left because the capitulation to the louder individual in addition to the seemingly similar trajectory of thought patterns. To create a more harmonious society the left needs to dig its feet in the ground and hold their position stronger against the more fringe radical members that would like elimination of ulterior ideas altogether in favor of a homogeneous and bland society. The right needs to listen to feminine influence more frequently to understand that sometimes the fear of violence can create a situation where violence otherwise would not occur.

mnsc 8y ago

This is the current pitch of mainstream culture, where voicing an opinion is the only thing that matters. Why else would someone with "a 15-year-old business with a spotless track record" publish obviously controversial opinions for the world to see. She wants to matter. And now her opinions is on the first page of HN and I'm reading it. Congratulations Nancy, you are now a player in a game with no winners.

tziki 8y ago
Did you read the article? It wasn't the person with 15-year-old business publishing those opinions.
JazCE 8y ago
Her husband's business, not her's, but otherwise i agree.
vasilipupkin 8y ago
To be fair, the business was her husband's, not hers. he didn't publish any controversial opinions - she did. having said that, baristas quit? hire new ones, sorry, I am not feeling the outrage regarding this outrage.
- tlear 8y ago
  It’s going after the wholesale customers that did the trick. Lots of those must be catering to the SJW demographic. Easy target. He should turn it around and go all MAGA. Some rebranding and you have a true red blooded American coffee ;) with wife as journalist they can probably spin it into a decent speaking gig too. In current America you are either MAGA/fascist/sexist/whateverist or you are SJW/commie no other choices.
  - vasilipupkin 8y ago
    or you don't spout your useless political opinions that nobody cares about and you are just a regular citizen
- 8y ago

FactolSarin 8y ago

Her examples of "innocent" people are the MAGA hat wearing kids who surrounded a Native American vet doing tomahawk chops and fake "Indian" chants and John Wayne, a self-avowed white supremacist.

leereeves 8y ago
The students from Covington Catholic didn't "surround" anyone, Nathan Phillips approached them.
AlexB138 8y ago
I know nothing about John Wayne, but the MAGA kids thing was basically a hoax. It's the definition of "fake news", a term I hate, but it applies there. It's a perfect example, and the fact that you still believe the completely baseless narrative highlights why.
- FactolSarin 8y ago
  That's their narrative. In the video they're doing racist fake "Indian" chants at the guy. Whatever happened before that doesn't excuse their clearly racist actions.
  - malvosenior 8y ago
    That's not their narrative, that's people watching the video for themselves. It's not even worth debating at this point, because if you don't see two grown men barging into a group of kids that they have nothing to do with and getting in the face of one of them while the other shouts actual racist things at them (watch with sound), then no amount of factual information is going to change your point of view.

josteink 8y ago

It certainly is. As shown with BLM, the MAGA-teens and now the Smolett-case, people will even manufacture things to be outraged about, just to justify their own virtue. While I consider that scary enough by itself, what I fear even more are the (guaranteed to come) counter-reactions. It’s not going to be pretty.

pjc50 8y ago
Do you think all of BLM is manufactured? Smolett it now seems was faking it, but what conclusions are you drawing from that?
- throwaway20998 8y ago
  Black people have some very legitimate complaints they can make about the police. Laquan McDonald is the first one that comes to my mind. BLM as an activist group was really built on two cases though: Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. In both cases, the truth of the situation was grossly distorted in the initial media reports, and never really got corrected in most people's minds. The summary truth of Michael Brown is that he was in the process of being caught for a robbery, he fought with the officer for his gun, and got shot. The summary truth of Trayvon Martin was that he was in the process of being caught for burglary, he fought with the neighborhood watch guy, banged his head against the concrete, and then the neighborhood watch guy pulled out his gun and shot him. The criminal justice system actually worked in all three of these cases. Darren Wilson was not charged, George Zimmerman was acquitted, and Jason Van Dyke was convicted of 2nd degree murder.
  - brianpgordon 8y ago
    Where did you get the idea that Trayvon Martin was committing burglary when he was shot?
- leereeves 8y ago
  What I find disturbing about events like the Smolett case (also Covington Catholic, "A Rape on Campus", etc) isn't that one person would fake such a thing, but that so many would eagerly promote and support a claim that fit their agenda without questioning it.

save_ferris 8y ago

It's out of control largely because it's arguably what social media is best at facilitating. Legitimate discussion and debate are drowned out by insane verbal "body-slams" on Twitter, because Twitter doesn't really exist to promote legitimate discussion. And with the endless amounts of content and data we consume daily, we place far more importance in services like Twitter to help us navigate the sea of noise instead of taking the time to dig deeper into issues. It's far easier to just attack someone on Twitter if you disagree than it is to thoroughly debate why you disagree with them. Ultimately, one gets the sense that there isn't enough time to have a complete and nuanced conversation about a controversial topic because there are so many other things vying for our attention.

porpoisely 8y ago
Is it social media or the news? Is it CNN, Foxnews, NYTimes, BuzzFeed, Huffpo, MSNBC, etc or social media? Did rolling stone intentionally lying about campus rape cause the problem or social media? Is the media constantly peddling lies like "campus rape crisis", "racist attacks", etc the problem or social media? I don't remember social media having this level of problem until the news industry forced it's way into social media. The outrage isn't being driven by social media. It's being driven by the news industry and the media in general. But I guess blaming russia hasn't worked so now we can scapegoat social media. From UVA to Covington to Mollett and everything else, is it the platform or the journalists, celebrities, etc creating the message.
- malvosenior 8y ago
  This is very true. It's also easy to blame this on profit motive and clickbait driven advertising but a lot of these journalists are ideologically motivated in large part due to their ironically upper middle class liberal arts education (read privileged).
  - save_ferris 8y ago
    I'm not a journalist and I've only ever worked for one news publication in my career, so I obviously can't speak for all journalists. That said, we can't ignore the impact that traffic quotas have had on the industry since the collapse of print media. I worked for a paper in 2016 on their software team and saw how much of an impact that Trump's name in a headline had on the traffic an article received. Everyone on the outside was screaming about why the media was giving him so much attention while the industry, in the middle of a financial crisis, was less than interested to leave money on the table. In the age of internet journalism, orgs are heavily incentivized to produce what they think the community wants, and that has some really dangerous long-term implications. People don't realize how bad the financial situation is for newspapers across America, and how desperately print media orgs are trying (and in many cases, failing) to stay afloat.

strikelaserclaw 8y ago

First rule of business, don't get involved in politics which are regarded as "sensitive" subject matter and have no impact on your bottom line.

leftyted 8y ago

> Meanwhile some of us are watching from the sidelines, trying to stay out of the way, hoping not to be next. (Good luck with that.) The author of this article didn't stay on the sidelines, which is why she got dragged into this mess. Most people stay on the sidelines. The author of this article hosted a podcast called "Me Neither" and, predictably, her life was consumed by a shistorm. One almost feels like this is what she wanted. I'm not saying anything about that is good -- I'd rather live in a world where people could disagree about whichever issue without anyone's business being ruined. But we don't appear to be living in that world and, for almost everyone, it's totally possible to stay on the sidelines of "the culture war" and just go about your life.

beaner 8y ago
I don't think starting a podcast means you want to be pulled into shitstorms.
- dwild 8y ago
  A podcast accusing people of lying about rape? Sorry but that's as much into the shitstorms that you can be.
malvosenior 8y ago
It's her husband's business that got destroyed though. He was on the sidelines.
- dwild 8y ago
  Seems like she was actually in that business too. https://www.oregonlive.com/news/2019/01/part-owner-of-portland-coffee-company-questions-accounts-of-sexual-assault-survivors-on-youtube.html https://www.oregonlive.com/news/2019/01/part-owner-of-portla...
  - malvosenior 8y ago
    As a part owner (which you would think would be the default definition of the spouse of the owner). It doesn't change what I said though. He didn't say anything and his business was ruined.

0_gravitas 8y ago

It seems to me that outrage culture is more or less a byproduct of the whole "post-truth" era, actual fact-based arguments are ignored for little more than political reasons. At this point, the only way to win an argument is to shout louder than everyone else, and I feel like I see it everywhere. It's one of the (many) reasons I don't watch/pay attention to the news anymore, it's just so draining to see.

Zelphyr 8y ago
I think the news is perpetuating it. They're not stupid. They know they can tap into all this outrage for their own benefit. Once people are riled up they are sadistically attracted to things that will fuel that rage and the news media outlets are all too happy to oblige. That's not to suggest in any way we as a society, or that our government should try to stifle the media. But the media outlets, from the journalists all the way to the owners need to take heed their power and use it responsibly and constructively. And that's something they've been ignoring for far too long.
- CompanionCuuube 8y ago
  Fully agree. The same is happening at the social media level. They get much more engagement with this kind of rage. But any organization that chooses to act ethically is handicapping themselves because of how profitable outrage is for engagement and page views. We can allow them to self-regulate but if they refuse to do so, we should take measures to put organizations acting ethically on the same footing as the unethical actors.

plasticchris 8y ago

This sums up the causes pretty nicely: http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/life-online http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/life-online

castlecrasher2 8y ago

I'm certainly guilty of this. My two cents on the topic are 1) that people are generally bad at letting other people feel and think on their own, 2) as the article suggests, tribalism is now manifesting in schools of thinking, and 3) life is so easy, to the point that others' opinions and emotions can appear hostile. Point 1 I realized recently when I discovered my family is especially good at emotional gaslighting, where I would complain about something and the family member (any of them, practically) would argue against what I said, in favor of whatever I was complaining about. It was a mix of the Mr Rogers' documentary and a falling out with the family that made me realize empathy means letting others feel, letting others talk, and truly understanding them. Once you're both on the same page emotionally you can offer suggestions or advice, but if you're not on the same page you're denying that person's personhood. 2 and 3 are an interesting combination that I think has led to society at large condemning not-niceness and leaving us in the newer generation either to not have strong opinions or to have VERY strong opinions, pretty much on any topic. I'm sure this happened in generations before but now it's so easy to see one lunatic on Twitter and subconsciously think "that whole group is just like that." I think social media is a mistake, and it will be interesting to see how it pans out in the future.

skohan 8y ago
> life is so easy, to the point that others' opinions and emotions can appear hostile. I have a different take on this. I think part of the reason people seem more hostile and or threatening to one another is because we have more access to each-other. 30 years ago, you probably didn't have too much of an idea what other people really thought unless you knew them personally or they were some kind of a public figure. Now you can go online and have immediate access to in-group conversations you're not a part of - including the conversations of groups who might consider you their enemy. I think we might need a few more decades to develop the social tools to handle this without being at each other's throats all the time. I suspect another element, at least in the US, is the subtext that the explosive growth in terms of the material well-being of the middle class which was enjoyed in the post-war period through the 90's has slowed. I think in times of scarcity, or perceived scarcity, people tend to emphasize devision and find more reasons to bludgeon the groups they're not a part of.

folkrav 8y ago

"Outrage culture" is a child spawn of political correctness. Quite like Steve Hugues's bit on the subject. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceS_jkKjIgo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceS_jkKjIgo

ergothus 8y ago

When I was in middle school, I wrote an essay about how outrageous it was that someone would get upset at me for holding a door for them. That was over twenty years ago, before online communications were commonplace. Somewhere between then and now I realized this had never happened to me. In fact, MOST of the outrage people complain about is always third-hand. Certainly you can see it online, but even most of that is outrage over outrage. If we look at the actual encounters we have in meatspace...there are plenty of wrong idiots, but somehow they are always smaller in number and importance.

dsfyu404ed 8y ago
I don't think it's all 3rd hand. There's definitely a lot of 2nd hand outrage. Look at Reddit. There's tons of popular subs that exist for no reason other than to shit on other people for doing certain things. Every now and then we get a HN thread where it's basically just everyone bitching about whatever thing the article is about. I'd call that 2nd hand outrage.

skohan 8y ago

Two thoughts: 1. I wonder to how much an extent this "outrage culture" is a natural result of click-based revenue models. The game at the moment is to get the most number of people to click on a headline as possible, and it turns out that pushing people's emotional buttons (especially fear and anger) is really effective at getting attention. Sure media has always been able to sell outrage, but with modern analytics and AB testing, it's possible to hone in on the perfect rage-inducing message much more quickly. 2. Twitter is such a strange thing. Most people I hear talk about it suspect it does not make them happier, and we've got this weird social contract right now where whatever you say, or have ever said on there, regardless of context, could potentially result in real-world repercussions including loss of one's livelihood. If there were any other technology which could get you fired from your job for 15 seconds of indiscretion during a night of drinking, or while sitting on the toilet I would guess people would stay the hell away from it.

brlewis 8y ago
>I wonder to how much an extent this "outrage culture" is a natural result of click-based revenue models. What's that quote about bots noticing that people look at highway accidents and thinking people need to be shown more of them?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
repolfx 8y ago
Twitter is indeed a very strange thing. I have mixed views on it. The character limits clearly contribute to the fact that it's so overrun with drama. It literally prevents anyone from writing a long form, nuanced thought, let alone an essay. Yet this is also why it's so popular - it lowers the bar to a point where everyone can take part on a level playing field, without feeling outcompeted by skilled writers who have time on their hands (consider how few people blog vs tweet). And you know, the original dream of the internet was that everyone could publish, everyone would be a creator. With things like Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, we're there. The internet achieved that dream. It just turns out that sometimes what people create isn't very appealing. Well, that's humanity. It's hard to criticise the internet or social media for that. I think Twitter has had another effect, which is that it's revealed to the whole world, practically for the first time, the extent to which the social elites are no better thinkers than anyone else and often seem to be worse thinkers. Historically, certain social classes have been able to work together to present a very polished, very glossy exterior. This was especially noticeable with politicians and corporations before the Twitter age where people often complained that they were fake, spoke in soundbites, were just faceless party apparatchiks and so on. Journalists would claim a moral high ground in which they claimed to be totally politically neutral and trustworthy, bureaucrats and academics would claim to be scientifically disinterested in anything except their narrow domain and of course completely above any suggestion of bias or impropriety, corporations would only speak in terms of carefully worded press releases, politicians would change their positions totally and claim they hadn't changed views at all, and so on. But now every politician, journalist and half of the corporate world blurt out whatever random thought pops into their head to the entire world without a seconds hesitation and it's recorded forever. And guess what, journalists turned out to have extreme political biases, many academics turned out to have crazy opinions on everyday topics, government bureaucrats likewise, a politician who contradicts themselves will be immediately skewered by some ancient YouTube video of them saying the opposite, and so on. The whole facade of intellectual neutrality fell apart completely once Twitter gave us direct insight into the minds of these people. To take an example from a couple of days ago: https://order-order.com/2019/02/20/adam-boulton-accuses-tory-brexiteers-far-right/ https://order-order.com/2019/02/20/adam-boulton-accuses-tory... Boulton is a Sky News journalist who is required by UK law to be politically neutral in his reporting, yet here he tweeted that he believed members of the government that support Brexit (i.e. all of them, given their manifesto commitments) are "far right". So now people see this sort of tweet, and next time Sky News tells them about the "far right" they'll remember this tweet and recall that these people believe the UK is in fact run by an officially far right government. And then they'll ignore it. Is this for the better or for the worse? I think it's for the best. Yes, it leads to a lot of outrage and drama for a whole lotta years as people adjust to the idea that every segment of society that claimed to be trustworthy isn't, and a whole lot of new groups and ideologies jostle for power and prestige in the vacuum that remains. But in the end social media didn't create this problem, it just revealed what had always been true.

pjc50 8y ago

Vital author background: https://www.oregonlive.com/news/2019/01/part-owner-of-portland-coffee-company-questions-accounts-of-sexual-assault-survivors-on-youtube.html https://www.oregonlive.com/news/2019/01/part-owner-of-portla... She's talking about "outrage culture", but she herself was clearly trying to monetise anti-outrage-outrage by running a video show accusing other people of lying. She could have chosen to, you know, not do that.

CompanionCuuube 8y ago
Shame on her like those people "intolerant of intolerance".

Zelphyr 8y ago

"Offense is taken, not given. No need to disarm the world. Just make yourself bullet proof. Sticks & stones people. Block. Unfollow. Laugh." -- Ricky Gervais

AstralStorm 8y ago
And this is how you lose touch and get trapped in an echo chamber, another thing current social media are great at. (I presume you keep the access available for people agreeing with you.) Unfortunately, most vocal are people with too much free time and not much else to do, or wannabe political activists. And of course tools, trolls and provocateurs.
- 50656E6973 8y ago
  Its not an echo chamber if you just block people who rely simply on ad hominem attacks, its filtering, as long as you aren't just blocking people who disagree with you. The algorithms are the much greater contributors to echo chambers than individual peer blocking.

jimejim 8y ago

She decided to go public on a podcast with shitty opinions and then is angry that she's being judged by them or that her business is affected by it. This isn't "outrage culture." That's what is supposed to happen. Shitty people should be shunned.

malvosenior 8y ago
Her opinion was rational, valid and shared by millions of people. She also didn't do anything to anyone she just spoke about what she believes in. Then her husband's business got attacked by an outrage mob. > This isn't "outrage culture." That's what is supposed to happen. Shitty people should be shunned. This is literally outrage culture in its purest form.

giffarage 8y ago

Anybody know why this was removed from the Hacker News feed? When I saw this post, it was at the very top of the feed. A few minutes later I refreshed the feed, and it was gone.

thinkingemote 8y ago
users can flag posts and there is a flame-o-meter for comments
yetihehe 8y ago
Too much outrage probably, this post attracts lots of flamebait. Also, my response will soon be downvoted too, just because people don't agree with me.
pjc50 8y ago
It's outrage-bait.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

iicc 8y ago

A somewhat related video: "This Video Will Make You Angry" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc Script: https://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/this-video-will-make-you-angry https://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/this-video-will-make-you-angry Linked Paper (from video description): "What Makes Online Content Viral?" https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1528077 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1528077

tilolebo 8y ago
How dare you!

mduerksen 8y ago

Journalists: Please stop taking social media seriously. It vastly misrepresents the importance of issues. People that actually have opinions worth talking about don't have time to engage heavily in it, either because they are experiencing real difficulties or are too busy actually being productive. Traditional channels (radio, the pulpit etc.) all have some sort of barrier for those who wish to broadcast. Some kind of credibility, accomplishment or urgency has to be present for the chance to be heard. This is a feature. Posting a tweet has no credibility whatsoever. Just treat it like 4chan.

kenneth 8y ago

Seems this thread was killed by flags. @dang — curious what the reasoning is here. It's not a pleasant subject to discuss but it's a very important topic these days. I understand the concerns about generating flame wars, but I'd love to see a way for civil discourse on this to be allowed to exist.

yellowapple 8y ago
I don't know if civil discourse here is possible to achieve or sustain, given how emotionally-charged these topics can be.
- smush 8y ago
  I tend to agree with you in principle; this particular thread is (granted I'm reading top-to-bottom, not all the way through it yet) is somewhat restrained compared to the usual black-grey-black-grey-grey-grey-deleted-black-grey-grey-black-deleted text walls some flamewars tend to lean towards.
alecco 8y ago
Indeed, it was flagged within an hour. HN policy is hijacked by extremists, adding to the claim of the article.

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Vaslo 8y ago

So weird, I just read this on Quillette. More detail on this story in there by the way. The LA Times article is definitely more to the point. https://quillette.com/2019/02/18/the-internet-locusts-descend-on-ristretto-roasters/ https://quillette.com/2019/02/18/the-internet-locusts-descen...

charliebrownau 8y ago

This is what happens when for 30 year you create stupid people via western mainsteam Media ---------------------- Western mainstream Groups FAILING because of the LEFT, feminism and diversity and post modern Marxist brainwashing * TV & Movies * Music * News * Scifi * Comedy * Comics * culture cons * AAA video gaming * AAA video game reviews * Culture games (MTG/etc) * Scouts * Government * Universities * Education * Marriage * Housing sector * Banking Sector * LAW * Courts * Family courts ----------------------- Then again wasnt the GOAL of Feminism and the LEFT was too * Destroy Western Society * Destroy Free Speech * Destroy Western Marriage/family unit * Replace men with state so women rely on state for resources/money

mancerayder 8y ago

Folks, Tech is being accused of tearing our societies apart. We're told it's causing yelling over rational discourse, a feedback loop on both sides of the spectrum that amplify the feeling of being wronged on either end, and a shifting of the magnetic poles such that a side traditionally associated with freedom of speech is now associated with Puritanism, and vice versa on the other side. We're asking whether clickbait profit motives are causing this, whether it's the demise of the print media, and so forth. This is a technical conversation about morality as it tries to answer some real world problems. And we have the arrogance to flag the conversation? If we don't take it up, lawmakers surely will. It's already happening in the EU. Please don't flag important conversations. It's not all about Node.js and the annoyance of whiteboard interviews, is it?

Chazprime 8y ago

Can't say I disagree - we're in a climate where the "And Twitter Users..." stories are commonplace that I completely understand why people are starting to delete their social media profiles.

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