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> Everyone is so hostile and eager to end other people. Aren't you just buying into the clickbait/hype here and adding to it? How many people is it really? Ho

> Everyone is so hostile and eager to end other people. Aren't you just buying into the clickbait/hype here and adding to it? How many people is it really? How many people take this as seriously as media stories make it sound? I think you're assuming a very loud vocal minority represents the opinions of everyone. The problem to me is a single digit number of people can have an opinion that they find something is offensive (which is always going to happen when enough people are looking at it), and the news + social media + internet comments magnify and compound this with stories like "you'll never believe what people want to cancel next!!!" and comments like "omg these people are so stupid I hate cancel culture!!!". Also see: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) "According to the 1% rule, about 1% of Internet users are responsible for creating content, while 99% are merely consumers of that content. For example, for every person who posts on a forum, generally about 99 other people view that forum but do not post. "

ajsnigrutin 6y ago
A vocal minority is enough to dox you, to bother your workplace, your school/college, to get you fired/expelled, and alltogether, to make you "too hot" to hire, especially by large tech companies, who have whole departments of "vocal minority" people dealing with tiny stuff like that. Cancel culture has to stop.
- seanwilson 6y ago
  What do you concretely think should be done though? Aren't there already laws about harassing people? I think the news should be more responsible by not reporting that someone was offended by something unless it has serious objective merit because it just gets everyone riled up on non-issues for no good reason. Aside from that, "cancel culture" feels quite a vague topic that would be hard to police in any way because you aren't talking about specific people or specific ideas.
  - klmadfejno 6y ago
    > Aside from that, "cancel culture" feels quite a vague topic A good, frustrating point. A large proportion of complaints of cancel culture are coupled with implications of frustration that they feel they can't say unpleasant things that they would have gotten away with previously. Or people complaining about direct efforts to change social norms that they don't agree with, claiming that due to a status quo bias, change is cancellation and therefore baseless. As with most ideologies, discussing the definition is a fairly pointless task because its subjective and ill-defined, especially by those who feel passionately about it. The term is pointless. What happened in this case sounds bad, at a glance. Let's not generalize it to other things. It'll get nowhere. Whether or not one believes something is a part of cancel culture has no bearing on whether a particular idea to squash something is good or not.
    - seanwilson 6y ago
      > The term is pointless. What happened in this case sounds bad, at a glance. Let's not generalize it to other things. It'll get nowhere. Whether or not one believes something is a part of cancel culture has no bearing on whether a particular idea to squash something is good or not. Yeah, that's how I feel. Arguing or getting outraged about ill-defined things that can't be attributed to specific people doesn't seem productive because there's no way to resolve it or learn anything. Some people exist that get offended by some things other people aren't offended by. So what? It's just noise.
    - free_rms 6y ago
      Who's in charge of "unpleasant things"? Are these things that a vast majority of the anglosphere, including POC, women, etc, wouldn't take offense to? Maybe people are objecting to a tiny % of critical theorists trying to seize control of acceptable language with no mandate.
      - ajsnigrutin 6y ago
        > Maybe people are objecting to a tiny % of critical theorists trying to seize control of acceptable language from the top down. The problem with that tiny % is, that they are loud, and that we give them attention. And by we, i include everyone, from a reddit upvter to mainstream media. It's 2020, milk is racist, rice is racist, syrup is racist,... and all that because of a few loud people powered by the media, grabbing views from the offended few and utraged many.
- sgustard 6y ago
  Can someone give me specifics on who's affected by "cancel culture"? It's a meaningless label to me. I mean, I think Bill Cosby has been cancelled. Colin Kaepernick was for kneeling. And the lady who called the police on the black man in central park. Some of those may be unjustified. Is this really the biggest problem in society?
  - donor20 6y ago
    I had a teacher in high school (black). He was an absolute favorite of students of all backgrounds. Extremely strict, very buttoned up. In the arts department. I think he literally was the advisor for like the multi-cultural club (that did somewhat lame lunch multi-cultural stuff). He put on a performance that turned out was racist or sexist or something. Think les miserable - we were always doing stuff like that, so the stories were very varied. Bam, he was gone. Even the students in the group that should have been offended were like, he's great. But there was a very very vocal very small set of more activist parents (white BTW!) with one or two students who were after him. Reminds me of the (white again) liberals in Portland or Seattle going after the police chief to cut her pay etc (black women). I was like, who cares what two parents and their kids think. But they got in the paper talking about the racist (I think?) environment he created / messages being sent / cultural appropriation etc. This is theatre - people dress up as different characters so no question an identity politics issue was there most likely. And yes - he was gone the next year after something like 12 years of building up this amazing program. His performances were sold out for multiple showings (literally everyone in school, every parent, every relative, randos went). The shows were major. All the context was overlooked (this guy was so formal he was never crude / rude or insulting). He'd spent all these extra hours doing all these things to bring different groups together - through music and more (he was an immigrant). Two to three people, a scared / sensitive admin team, and boom, thousands of folks the worse for his going. Everyone is worse for this. A lot of the categories of offense are extremely broad or very subtle and penalties are very severe.
  - torstenvl 6y ago
    USC professor under fire after using Chinese expression students allege sounds like English slur https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/10/us/usc-chinese-professor-racism-intl-hnk-scli/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/10/us/usc-chinese-professor-raci... SDG&E Worker Fired Over Alleged Racist Gesture Says He Was Cracking Knuckles https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-over-alleged-racist-gesture-says-he-was-cracking-knuckles/2347414/ https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-ove... Professors mobbed, stripped of teaching positions and residential life functions after suggesting students should establish their own social norms rather than having them enforced by administration https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/the-peril-of-writing-a-provocative-email-at-yale/484418/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/the-per...
taneq 6y ago
> According to the 1% rule, about 1% of Internet users are responsible for creating content [...] I wonder how true this is now? Even if we don't count social media as "content" (and some of it certainly is) most web content is participatory in some way and I'd wager a decent percentage of web users (if not internet users) are now contributing.
- seanwilson 6y ago
  I'm guessing this is the same with everyone else, but if you check Twitter and Facebook, most of the people I follow never post anything and a tiny minority post all the time.
- ratww 6y ago
  I wonder if it isn't even more lopsided today, since sharing content is the main activity in most popular social networks today, unlike when this "rule" was coined...
esfandia 6y ago
According to the linked article, it took only 2 reports to lead to an investigation and to the decision that the CoC was violated. So a vocal minority, when not ignored, can sometimes have a big impact.

ajsnigrutin 6y ago

A vocal minority is enough to dox you, to bother your workplace, your school/college, to get you fired/expelled, and alltogether, to make you "too hot" to hire, especially by large tech companies, who have whole departments of "vocal minority" people dealing with tiny stuff like that. Cancel culture has to stop.

seanwilson 6y ago
What do you concretely think should be done though? Aren't there already laws about harassing people? I think the news should be more responsible by not reporting that someone was offended by something unless it has serious objective merit because it just gets everyone riled up on non-issues for no good reason. Aside from that, "cancel culture" feels quite a vague topic that would be hard to police in any way because you aren't talking about specific people or specific ideas.
- klmadfejno 6y ago
  > Aside from that, "cancel culture" feels quite a vague topic A good, frustrating point. A large proportion of complaints of cancel culture are coupled with implications of frustration that they feel they can't say unpleasant things that they would have gotten away with previously. Or people complaining about direct efforts to change social norms that they don't agree with, claiming that due to a status quo bias, change is cancellation and therefore baseless. As with most ideologies, discussing the definition is a fairly pointless task because its subjective and ill-defined, especially by those who feel passionately about it. The term is pointless. What happened in this case sounds bad, at a glance. Let's not generalize it to other things. It'll get nowhere. Whether or not one believes something is a part of cancel culture has no bearing on whether a particular idea to squash something is good or not.
  - seanwilson 6y ago
    > The term is pointless. What happened in this case sounds bad, at a glance. Let's not generalize it to other things. It'll get nowhere. Whether or not one believes something is a part of cancel culture has no bearing on whether a particular idea to squash something is good or not. Yeah, that's how I feel. Arguing or getting outraged about ill-defined things that can't be attributed to specific people doesn't seem productive because there's no way to resolve it or learn anything. Some people exist that get offended by some things other people aren't offended by. So what? It's just noise.
  - free_rms 6y ago
    Who's in charge of "unpleasant things"? Are these things that a vast majority of the anglosphere, including POC, women, etc, wouldn't take offense to? Maybe people are objecting to a tiny % of critical theorists trying to seize control of acceptable language with no mandate.
    - ajsnigrutin 6y ago
      > Maybe people are objecting to a tiny % of critical theorists trying to seize control of acceptable language from the top down. The problem with that tiny % is, that they are loud, and that we give them attention. And by we, i include everyone, from a reddit upvter to mainstream media. It's 2020, milk is racist, rice is racist, syrup is racist,... and all that because of a few loud people powered by the media, grabbing views from the offended few and utraged many.
sgustard 6y ago
Can someone give me specifics on who's affected by "cancel culture"? It's a meaningless label to me. I mean, I think Bill Cosby has been cancelled. Colin Kaepernick was for kneeling. And the lady who called the police on the black man in central park. Some of those may be unjustified. Is this really the biggest problem in society?
- donor20 6y ago
  I had a teacher in high school (black). He was an absolute favorite of students of all backgrounds. Extremely strict, very buttoned up. In the arts department. I think he literally was the advisor for like the multi-cultural club (that did somewhat lame lunch multi-cultural stuff). He put on a performance that turned out was racist or sexist or something. Think les miserable - we were always doing stuff like that, so the stories were very varied. Bam, he was gone. Even the students in the group that should have been offended were like, he's great. But there was a very very vocal very small set of more activist parents (white BTW!) with one or two students who were after him. Reminds me of the (white again) liberals in Portland or Seattle going after the police chief to cut her pay etc (black women). I was like, who cares what two parents and their kids think. But they got in the paper talking about the racist (I think?) environment he created / messages being sent / cultural appropriation etc. This is theatre - people dress up as different characters so no question an identity politics issue was there most likely. And yes - he was gone the next year after something like 12 years of building up this amazing program. His performances were sold out for multiple showings (literally everyone in school, every parent, every relative, randos went). The shows were major. All the context was overlooked (this guy was so formal he was never crude / rude or insulting). He'd spent all these extra hours doing all these things to bring different groups together - through music and more (he was an immigrant). Two to three people, a scared / sensitive admin team, and boom, thousands of folks the worse for his going. Everyone is worse for this. A lot of the categories of offense are extremely broad or very subtle and penalties are very severe.
- torstenvl 6y ago
  USC professor under fire after using Chinese expression students allege sounds like English slur https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/10/us/usc-chinese-professor-racism-intl-hnk-scli/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/10/us/usc-chinese-professor-raci... SDG&E Worker Fired Over Alleged Racist Gesture Says He Was Cracking Knuckles https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-over-alleged-racist-gesture-says-he-was-cracking-knuckles/2347414/ https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-ove... Professors mobbed, stripped of teaching positions and residential life functions after suggesting students should establish their own social norms rather than having them enforced by administration https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/the-peril-of-writing-a-provocative-email-at-yale/484418/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/the-per...

taneq 6y ago

> According to the 1% rule, about 1% of Internet users are responsible for creating content [...] I wonder how true this is now? Even if we don't count social media as "content" (and some of it certainly is) most web content is participatory in some way and I'd wager a decent percentage of web users (if not internet users) are now contributing.

seanwilson 6y ago
I'm guessing this is the same with everyone else, but if you check Twitter and Facebook, most of the people I follow never post anything and a tiny minority post all the time.
ratww 6y ago
I wonder if it isn't even more lopsided today, since sharing content is the main activity in most popular social networks today, unlike when this "rule" was coined...

esfandia 6y ago

According to the linked article, it took only 2 reports to lead to an investigation and to the decision that the CoC was violated. So a vocal minority, when not ignored, can sometimes have a big impact.