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Disproportionate amount of bad online behaviour stems from psychological issues

• sva_ 5y ago
  I'm just glad that there finally seems to be a backlash against all this nonsensical internet-hate-mob stuff. Like a big wave in the ocean that finally recedes. Hopefully.
• tus89 5y ago
  Did you know the background of unherd? If you did you might not have regard for this.
  • dbrueck 5y ago
    I don't know the background - tell me more. Also, your comment comes across as an ad hominem attack, not sure if I'm just misreading it though.
    • tus89 5y ago
      It was created to promulgate extremist Christian-right propaganda - the kind that is "un-heard" in the mainstream media in the UK apparently. There are a lot of such organizations that don't openly declare their ideological background, and funding sources.
      • Mediterraneo10 5y ago
        Can you cite that UnHerd was founded by and funded by “extremist Christian-right propaganda” forces? Considering that its executive editor has frequently featured commentators who are downright anti-religion (e.g. Richard Dawkins), and various commentators who subscribe to old-school 20th-century leftism including its antipathy to religion, that is a claim hard to believe.
        • tus89 5y ago
          So I search google for "undherd Richard Dawkins", first link: https://unherd.com/2021/04/why-the-atheists-turned-on-richard-dawkins/ https://unherd.com/2021/04/why-the-atheists-turned-on-richar... "Why the atheists turned on Dawkins - They care more about social justice than whether or not God exists" Written by: Ben Sixsmith is an English writer living in Poland. He has written for Quillette, Areo, The Catholic Herald....
          • Mediterraneo10 5y ago
            Yet at the same time, there is this [0] posted by a higher-ranking staff member. That you have found an article written by a contributor who has also written for a Catholic publication does not served as proof of your claim in the GP that UnHerd was founded to push “extremist Christian propaganda” – the whole point of UnHerd is that it draws on writers from a range of ideological outlooks. And FWIW, the idea mentioned in these links that early-millennium New Atheism eventually evolved into the current wave of social-justice activism, is something that has been often set forth by people here on HN and is not exclusive to any particular religious or anti-religious viewpoint. [0] https://unherd.com/thepost/richard-dawkins-scientism-is-a-dirty-word/ https://unherd.com/thepost/richard-dawkins-scientism-is-a-di...
            • tus89 5y ago
              > the whole point of UnHerd is that it is includes people from a range of ideological outlooks. You keep saying that. Let's like at some random headlines from their "contributors" page: > Ideology should not trump children’s health (anti-trans) > France’s mega-mosque problem > The emptiness of ‘British values’ > The death of American patriotism > The problem with male feminists > Universities have destroyed feminism > Can Labour be saved from the hard Left? > Labour isn’t working > Why liberals are scared of football > Is Labour dead? > America attracts the wrong immigrants
              • Mediterraneo10 5y ago
                Again, the whole point of UnHerd is that it includes people from a range of ideological outlooks, who ordinarily would be opposed to one another, because they share some concerns and can forge a common cause in publishing. None of the headlines that you cite are specific to “extremist Christian-right propaganda”, indeed these are themes are commonly discussed by those who identify as leftist and unreligious, but feel that certain things that are presently insisted on in leftism as de rigeur, are not part of the leftist tradition they recognize from a few decades back. For example, with regard to being “anti-trans”, there are a lot of soixante-huitards who find the current focus on trans activism on the left excessive and even problematic, because it was utterly foreign to their struggle against rightist forces. You have still not brought forth any proof of your claim above that UnHerd was founded and funded expressly for “extremist Christian-right propaganda” purposes. The gentlemanly thing to do would be to back up that claim, or retract it.
  • version_five 5y ago
    The article isn't a study or something that needs institutional credibility, it's just an opinion piece. Anyone interested can just read it and decide what they think of it.
  • exolymph 5y ago
    People are capable on judging an argument on its own merits. After all, if you don't think HN readers possess that capability, why bother associating with the commentariat on this website?
    • defaultname 5y ago
      A sizable number are never going to read the article or judge its merits. Instead they'll click an arrow based on whether the title matches their biases. "Yup, people I don't like have psychological issues..." For the few that might it is generally worth knowing whether it's actually worth the time. If the writer is someone considered and knowledgeable, on a credible venue, for instance. I know nothing about this site/writer so I'm not commenting on that, but generally that is an input before one spends the time on an essay.
    • anotherman554 5y ago
      I guess it'd argue you can't judge an argument on its own merits unless it's a philosophical argument. For example the best published scientific studies can't be judged on their own merits because you have to trust that the scientists actually conducted the studies and didn't fake the data. So you basically have to fall back to some assumption over whether the scientist is honest, not on the merits of what they wrote in the study.
  • jchw 5y ago
    I Googled it and wasn’t able to find anything terribly interesting. From a brief look at the Wikipedia page I can’t find anything unusual, other than the most recent vandalism: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:MobileDiff/1029634916 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:MobileDiff/102963491... ... which isn’t exactly terribly substantiated on its own. Furthermore, unless this opinion piece is demonstrably in bad faith I dunno why that would detract from viewing it in a fair light.
• exolymph 5y ago
  Relevant classic post: Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People, https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most_of_what_you_read_on_the_internet_is_written/ https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most... ^ previously on HN twice, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18881827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18881827 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25600274 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25600274
  • jchw 5y ago
    “Insane” is mostly meant in jest here, not to imply that heavy contributors are mentally ill. The examples they picked out are pretty ridiculous but are also the biggest outliers. The real point here is that <1% of the users account for ~99% or so of the consumed content. Which is interesting in its own right.
    • exolymph 5y ago
      I think "insane" in both contexts mainly denotes being a cognitive outlier.
      • jchw 5y ago
        Ah, but "insane" is not used by the article - the term "psychological issues" is, to imply some kind of mental unwellness. OTOH, the Reddit post explicitly clarifies: > Edit: I guess my tone-projection is off. A lot of people seem to be put-off by my usage of the word "insane." I intended that as tongue-in-cheek and did not mean to imply that any of them literally have diagnosable mental illnesses. I have a lot of respect for all of the individuals I listed and they seem like nice people, I was just trying to make a point about how unusual their behavior is. Unusual behavior? Yes. However, I think you can see how that would not fall into the same bucket as the implication of "psychological issues." This nuance is likely why people have grown to dislike words like "insane" and "psychopath," since these unintentional connections might warp people's perspectives.
• bingidingi 5y ago
  >About 70% of DID patients are also diagnosed with BPD, and the two conditions are often considered part of the same spectrum. >I’m certainly not saying that all trans people have personality disorders or that being trans is a mental illness. A little bit of whiplash on this one. Despite the sentence or two claiming what the author is purportedly not doing, the rest of the article seems to indicate otherwise. If you don't want an article that makes you look like you're conflating trans people and mental illness... don't use a trans person as a springboard to talk about mental illness.
  • slver 5y ago
    So we can't discuss trans people as a category and their correlations? There's a line between avoiding harmful stereotypes that lead to unfair discrimination and willful ignorance or misrepresentation of facts in service of political correctness. It's extremely hard to say where this line is. But we still have to be aware of its existence.
    • bingidingi 5y ago
      I'm not saying it can't or shouldn't be discussed, but the author was so conscious of the correlations made in the article that they felt the need to literally write that they're not trying to make those correlations. There's no shortage of people linking transgendered people and mental illness, just as there's no shortage of people linking homosexuality to mental illness. If you're not trying to strengthen those assumptions, then use different examples... it seems lazy to just try to hand-wave it away in a sentence rather than using a different example.
      • rbanffy 5y ago
        Considering the amount of discrimination, harassment, and hostility these people endure every single day, I would be surprised if they remained perfectly sane.
  • zepto 5y ago
    Lots of trans people in fact are mentally ill. Given the additional stresses and oppresive social experiences trans people face and are outspoken about, this is entirely unsurprising.
• chrismeller 5y ago
  This is one of the main reasons I feel like the current culture of never disagreeing with anyone so you can never possibly offend anyone is ultimately toxic. As a person with (currently treated and doing fine) psychological issues I don’t expect any single comment to get through to you, but if there are never any negative indicators that you are the problem, rather than everyone else… there is a mathematically insignificant chance you will ever realize something might be wrong. Particularly so in the case of the unfortunate stereotype of lonely loser who lives in his mother’s basement and spends all his time on the computer.
  • bluefirebrand 5y ago
    > if there are never any negative indicators that you are the problem, rather than everyone else… there is a mathematically insignificant chance you will ever realize something might be wrong. Then again, depending on the psychological issues it doesn't matter how many negative indicators there are that you are the problem. Some people just seem unable to accept they have issues, or unable to correctly process that people's reaction to them is in fact negative. There's just such a wide range of things here.
    • emerged 5y ago
      Narcissists consider both positive and negative interactions to be positive, and narcissism has been on the rise for years owed primarily to social media.
  • news_to_me 5y ago
    I totally agree. In my friendships, I highly value people that will tell me when they disagree, and I try to avoid people who are hard to disagree with. Some of my favorite people are stereotypical “New York” types.
  • 3grdlurker 5y ago
    > the current culture of never disagreeing with anyone so you can never possibly offend anyone I'm not sure what you're talking about--I wonder if this is just your extremely subjective experience of the internet? Because I thought that the internet lately has been nothing but disagreement.
• droopyEyelids 5y ago
  The article's actual title is "Are Twitter trolls mentally ill?" It makes me want to talk about how the concept of the troll has evolved from something specific to something very general. I glanced through the article and none of the behaviors it listed are what I'd consider troll behaviors. They're just the patterns of mild mental illness. Trolls, in my old-man's definition, are almost a type of hunter, looking to bait and confuse their victims. Trolls wouldn't be the hoards suffering from "sanctimony, emotional aridity and ideological orthodoxy", and exhibiting BPD/DID behaviors. Trolls would be the people trying to provoke the above.
  • hogFeast 5y ago
    Would you call Sacha Baron Cohen a troll?
    • loudtieblahblah 5y ago
      Absolutely
    • ben_w 5y ago
      Speaking for myself and not @droopyEyelids, absolutely.
  • frumper 5y ago
    I'd agree with that. I view a troll as having no ideals they cling to. They have a goal to provoke and incite with the least amount of effort and that usually involves taking a controversial stance for that given audience. It's what makes arguing with trolls, or feeding trolls, so pointless.
  • jandrese 5y ago
    I've seen news articles about "internet trolls" who followed a neighbor around and sat outside of her window but also looked at her Facebook page. The term has already lost its meaning.
  • kingsuper20 5y ago
    A troll is it doing it for fun and as an art form, I'd say that the horrid people on twitter are another thing. As mentioned in an earlier thread, I see a close relationship between the Twitter People and That Guy who goes to all the city council meetings to yell. They don't make up a majority of the population, but they sure can burn up some bandwidth.
• deleted 5y ago
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• lmilcin 5y ago
  I don't buy it. I think there is simple statistical/neurological explanation. Part 1: We are exposed to much more information and interaction that we have evolved for. Our brains have very biased/impractical approach to understanding the world: if you hear about something happening many times in large number then it automatically gives large weight to it and treats it as normal/prevalent/dangerous etc. This is also what somebody might mean when they say "a lie repeated frequently enough becomes truth". That's how our brains are built. Part 2: We tend to notice things that are out of ordinary more than normal. Nobody spends time revisiting "normal" comments, but people will notice and spend their focus disproportionately more on mean behavior. Part 3: Internet amplifies things, but mostly things we focus on. This means an extremely mean comment will tend to be amplified more and get more visibility than a perfectly normal comment. Part 4: Even if 1 percent of 1 percent of people write an extremely mean comment just once that is still deluge of meanness that your biased brain will understand as "mean" being frequent behavior on the internet, something that is done by many people and probably frequently.
  • distributedsean 5y ago
    This is an interesting idea, feel free to ignore this comment :)
  • mysterydip 5y ago
    I never made the connection to part 2 in the abstract before, that makes total sense. If you're walking down the street and see someone with two noses, you're going to notice, not the 20 other "normal" people you passed at the same time. Why wouldn't the same carry over to reading text or watching videos?
  • rossdavidh 5y ago
    I think your four points are all absolutely true. However, I cannot plausibly think of a reason why we _wouldn't_ have a disproportionate amount of online bad behavior from the mentally ill. There's really almost nothing in the online environment to prevent it, and quite a lot of mental conditions result in manic phases of some sort that would cause them to spew a lot of it online.
• slibhb 5y ago
  To me, the interesting question here is whether symptoms of BPD (or mental illness more generally) might confer an advantage when it comes to building a following on social media. For example, catastrophizing seems to be a staple on the many popular social media accounts.
  • Daishiman 5y ago
    Having dated people with BPD, it certainly created an emotional roller coaster that makes the highs really high; normal relations can even seem boringly stable after that.
  • paulpauper 5y ago
    No it does not. The most successful people on social media, i have found to be pretty cool and collected. The mental illness symptoms i think are more likely to come from having no following and feeling ignored. That will drive some ppl mad.
  • kayodelycaon 5y ago
    I don’t think BPD would be an advantage due to instability. There is nothing quite like a neurotypical person being dramatic. They can keep it up and keep going. It’s a stable “crazy” that doesn’t have other problems getting in the way of being dramatic.
• jmcgough 5y ago
  I think there's some truth to this, but the trans community is a really awkward group to try to fit into your argument. As a trans person, I think there's a lot of toxicity to the online trans community, and there's certainly more prevalent mental illness (not surprising when you deal with frequent harassment, discrimination, being disowned by family). But trans people act like that because they feel like they're constantly under attack, and they have good reason to feel that way, given the flood of anti-trans legislation. That constant vigilance is exhausting, and as awful as it is, many of them (especially younger people) have limited power to protect themselves so they lash out at any perceived threat against trans people. It's toxic, and probably creates more enemies than allies, but I understand it. A more interesting example would be toxic league of legends players. There's a few very popular, very toxic streamers (e.g. Tarzaned) who seem like they're struggling with depression or other issues.
  • loopz 5y ago
    Many online forums are incredibly toxic, or infested with a few regulars that get off always being negative and bullying other people. The only thing that works with bullies, is ignoring them. Trying to find reasons, psychological reasons, childhood traumas or gender identity issues, seems to be a way to focus on the behaviour and drama, instead of moving on.
  • Tainnor 5y ago
    Thank you for sharing your experiences. I think it's important to emphasise that having to live with the continuous fear of not being accepted as an equal part of society or worse can create a significant amount of stress. The same is true (albeit to a much lesser extent nowadays) for gay and lesbian individuals, and let's not forget that if you grew up, say, in the 90s, the world was still a significantly different place back then. As far as I know there have been studies showing increased stress levels in LGBT individuals even long after coming out. In a sense, I often feel that trans people are now facing what gays and lesbians were facing a couple of decades ago. Let's hope that your road to acceptance will be as swift as it was for us.
• wpietri 5y ago
  I"m glad to see this point made: > I’m not saying that all online bad behaviour is because of mental health issues or personality disorders: lots of people are just dickheads, and there’s no need to pathologise them. One of the important lessons I took away from a milestone book on abuse, "Why Does He Do That?" is that people really want to excuse harmful behaviors as illness. When often, repeated bad behavior happens because it works for the person in question.
  • HarryHirsch 5y ago
    Yes, there's a feedback loop, same as with alcoholism. It's nice and good to consider alcoholism a disease, but there's a point where the not yet completely dependent person should say "It's not even 4 o'clock yet and there's no social reason, what am I doing with this can of beer?"
    • giantrobot 5y ago
      > but there's a point where the not yet completely dependent person should say "It's not even 4 o'clock yet and there's no social reason, what am I doing with this can of beer?" Alcoholism is a mental illness and can have comorbidity with other mental issues. For many the answer to your "why am I holding this beer" is "I don't want to feel". But the alcoholic (not in any sort of recovery) never gets to the self reflection where they ask themselves why they have the beer. Like many mental illnesses, the inability to have agency over certain thoughts or thought process is what make it an illness. Alcoholism and other addictions are not typically something people reason themselves into with compelling arguments and a cost-benefit analysis.
      • HarryHirsch 5y ago
        Sure, many people self-medicate with alcohol, it's a GABA agonist and works for anxiety. But people don't live in a vacuum, there'll be reactions from family members and friends to their excessive consumption. It's not that people reason themselves into alcoholism, but a good number do recognize that they have a problem by the time the wife has had enough. It's the same thing with intrusive thoughts - medication plus cognitive-behavioural therapy works best, that condition is something that you can reason yourself out of when you recognize the signs quickly enough.
• deleted 5y ago
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• nickysielicki 5y ago
  This sort of wishy washy argument (seemingly accepted by generally educated/reasonable people on HN) is the reason that society is so scientifically illiterate. It has nice sounding arguments that embed themselves into your thought patterns but zero real substance. Articles like this are how you get hordes of people to believe something without cause. The next time you see someone act "bad" online, you'll be able to excuse yourself for thinking, "that person has 'psychological issues'" instead of thinking any deeper. You saw an article about that, after all. The plural of anecdote is not evidence.
  • okareaman 5y ago
    You don't say what is wishy washy or give any supporting evidence to your assertion that HN users seemingly fall for such arguments or how "nice sounding" arguments embed themselves into our thought patterns to control us or how these wishy washy nice sounding arguments lead us to dismiss people. You sound like you may have psychological issues and I say this as a non-neurotypical (bipolar)
    • nickthemagicman 5y ago
      That's a little ad hominem to diagnose them from one paragraph. There's actually a well known term for what they're describing. It's called pop science and is a very real thing.
      • nickysielicki 5y ago
        I'm pretty sure they're joking.
        • okareaman 5y ago
          Yes, I made myself laugh. As a bipolar, I often find things funny that other people don't.
  • falldmg 5y ago
    Unfortunately, your critique has even less substantiation than the article, and therefore it would be even sillier to draw conclusions from it...
• slackfan 5y ago
  I for one, will be looking forward to the mandatory psychoactive chemicals in the water due to these studies.
• Y_Y 5y ago
  They are missing the wood for the trees. Online behaviour in general is rooted in psychological issues. Well-adjusted mentally healthy people just participate in society normally, they don't sit in front of a terminal for a year inventing some amazing new way of communicating over computer networks, or expounding the modern equivalent of Athenian philosophy on message boards, or obsessing over entries in distributed databases.
  • sva_ 5y ago
    So what are the psychological issues that led you to write this comment?
    • Y_Y 5y ago
      DSM-IV or real? I have a number of (diagnosed and otherwise) mental illnesses. I also write Haskell for enjoyment, and help people with Linux on the internet even though it benefits me in no way. I care about mathematics and computation more than climate change and the feelings of people close to me. Is that ok?
      • jchw 5y ago
        Out of curiosity, have you read any of DSM? I've read some portions of DSM-V and found it to be, on the whole, more reasonable than it is typically given credit. Perhaps some of that is owing to improvements made over the years, but nonetheless.
      • strbean 5y ago
        > I also write Haskell for enjoyment Pretty sure there is an entry in DSM-IV for that :)
• 5cott0 5y ago
  What if the people acting out are actually the healthy ones?
  • kingsuper20 5y ago
    Maybe it's just that they're normal (is 'healthy' an ableist term?). You can make the argument that 'normal' people have been held down by jus' reg'lar dudes for millennia. This is their chance to shine. Have an upvote ya 'rebel.
    • 5cott0 5y ago
      My meaning was along the lines of family dynamics. Teenager starts acting out at school not because they're a bad kid but because their is some unhealthy dynamic in the school or home environment. The kid's behavior is just a symptom of something unacknowledged and in that case the kid is the healthy one bringing attention to the problem. Pain is your body telling you something needs attention. Mild trolling and shitposting is mostly harmless and perhaps an appropriate response to being very online and maybe a measure of the health of an online community. One of the big problems though is that trolling and shitposting can easily be weaponized into coordinated harassment on ideological grounds (gamergate, cancelling, etc) which can be construed as a symptom of the current culture war and perhaps social media companies should pay more attention to the problem.
• verytrivial 5y ago
  Trolls create anger and conflict and conflict drives engagement. But that is as nothing compared to the engagement you get from public spectacles of righteous indignation. Social media breeds a special sort narcissistic positive feedback loop and it turns out a very small amount of validation is all that is required to set people off. But trolls usually know they're trolls. On the other hand take for example Twitter user Oli London [1]. I can no longer tell parody from sincere in this "influencers" persona, but wow, does it drive engagement. Is this guy ok? There are thousands of accounts cheering him/them and many others on. [1] https://twitter.com/OliLondonTV https://twitter.com/OliLondonTV
  • bellyfullofbac 5y ago
    Hah, if he's willing to get botox in his lips he's probably being sincere. Or, maybe it's just some sort of video editing magic? A lot of online interaction is based on "If I can prove how this person is terrible, then I can be happy because I've proven to myself that I'm a better person.". Well, a glance at this Twitter account makes me feel better, because I'm certain he's a very unhappy troll, because people looking for offense wherever they turn surely will find them, and he's probably a very unhappy person because he feels he's been offended every day. Ah, that sweet persecution complex!
  • shoto_io 5y ago
    This is… I don’t know. I lack words to describe it.
    • deleted 5y ago
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  • techrat 5y ago
    To say it succinctly... Psychopaths like psychopaths. https://www.psypost.org/2018/10/study-psychopaths-are-attracted-to-other-psychopaths-52414 https://www.psypost.org/2018/10/study-psychopaths-are-attrac...
  • deleted 5y ago
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• mioasndo 5y ago
  Psychology is pseudo-science, and the term 'psychological issues' has about as much meaning as 'brain ghosts'.
  • derefr 5y ago
    Just because you can't identify what's going wrong to make someone's car have unresponsive steering (the etiology), doesn't mean you can't precisely identify the car as having unresponsive steering (the symptoms.) Psychology is just fine at recognizing symptoms (and complexes of symptoms that go together, a.k.a. "syndromes") — and also very good at treating symptoms/syndromes, such that they go away. Often, an understanding of the etiology isn't involved, but also isn't needed, because it's the symptoms/syndrome that are the problem, and the underlying pathology is otherwise benign. There're very few psychological diseases that have an organic origin, where treating the symptoms but not the disease will lead to the disease progressing and killing you. And those diseases get treated carefully and separately, with workflows that get you referred on any sign of such diseases to a neurologist.
    • mioasndo 5y ago
      > Just because you can't identify what's going wrong to make someone's car have unresponsive steering (the etiology), doesn't mean you can't precisely identify the car as having unresponsive steering (the symptoms.) Except in this case there is a (vague) diagnosis - something is wrong with the car's computer (psychological issues). > Psychology is just fine at recognizing symptoms (and complexes of symptoms that go together, a.k.a. "syndromes") You don't need psychology to recognise symptoms. Unless you're saying psychology has it's own set of symptoms and it's own terminology - which is just a truism. > and also very good at treating symptoms/syndromes, such that they go away. Very debatable, and very provably false for most of psychology's existence. > Often, an understanding of the etiology isn't involved, How often? > but also isn't needed, because it's the symptoms/syndrome that are the problem, and the underlying pathology is otherwise benign. So,the symptoms are a problem, but the causes of the symptoms are not? How could you claim that the 'underlying pathology is benign' without even knowing what it is? Imagine if this level of rigour was applied to cancer - 'here take these sedatives and painkillers to get rid of your symptoms... don't worry the causes are totally benign'. It's absurd. > There're very few psychological diseases that have an organic origin, where treating the symptoms but not the disease will lead to the disease progressing and killing you. Except you really have no idea how many 'psychological diseases' could be progressing and/or affecting you while you mask the symptoms. How do you know such a disease isn't present and progressing, if, as you said, you aren't even able to identify the disease if it existed.
• brudgers 5y ago
  An even larger number proportion is people being assholes because they can…just like offline bad behavior. Mental illness reduces culpability. Attributing most bad behavior to mental illness excuses it. It treats Twitter trolls as if they have no agenda. But Twitter is what we celebrated in the Arab Spring. An effective propaganda platform. That’s how trolls use it…to promote ideologies. That’s why the article leads with LGBT hotness; to define the victim perpetrator roles.
• callesgg 5y ago
  Anyone that says anything that is meant to hurt people has psychological problems. But reading intent is impossible.
  • deleted 5y ago
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• bjornsing 5y ago
  Interesting discussion, but on second thought I’m not sure what to make of it. Personality is a continuum and personality disorders are not clearly defined illnesses, like the flu or Parkinson’s. They are just areas of the continuum that are deemed troublesome for the person or their surroundings. One of the diagnostic criteria for BPD is “Inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger”. So saying that people with BPD are overrepresented among people who display anger online is a bit like saying red cars are overrepresented among red objects. Yes they are, by definition.
• ylee 5y ago
  Nothing has changed since Jerry Pournelle wrote 35 years ago when discussing online forums: >I noticed something: most of the irritation came from a handful of people, sometimes only one or two. If I could only ignore them, the computer conferences were still valuable. Alas, it's not always easy to do. This is what killed Usenet,[1] which 40 years ago offered much of the virtues of Reddit in decentralized form. The network's design has several flaws, most importantly no way for any central authority to completely delete posts (admins in moderated groups can only approve posts), since back in the late 1970s Usenet's designers expected that everyone with the werewithal to participate online would meet a minimum standard of behavior. Usenet has always had a spam problem, but as usage of the network declined as the rest of the Internet grew, spam's relative proportion of the overall traffic grew. That said, there are server- and client-side anti-spam tools of varying effectiveness. A related but bigger problem for Usenet is people of the type this post discusses, those with actual mental illness; think "50 year olds with undiagnosed autism". Usenet is such a niche network nowadays that there has to be meaningful motivation to participate, and if the motivation is not a sincere interest in the subject it's, in my experience, going to be people with very troubled personal lives which their online behavior reflects. Again, as overall traffic declined, their relative contribution and visibility grew. This, not spam, is what has mostly killed Usenet. [1] I am talking about traditional non-binary Usenet here
  • zozbot234 5y ago
    > completely delete posts This could be done by sending special "cancel" messages; it was then up to individual Usenet servers to figure out whether to honor these cancel requests, through unspecified criteria. The feature was somewhat hidden away in some Usenet clients to discourage pointless abuse, but it was there. > A related but bigger problem for Usenet is people of the type this post discusses, those with actual mental illness; think "50 year olds with undiagnosed autism". IME, these people were mostly entertaining as opposed to genuinely problematic. With killfiles being in common use and 'plonking' being discussed routinely as the standard way of dealing with annoyances, users were meaningfully incented to always be on their best behavior as judged by other forum denizens.
    • 5y ago
• stevenicr 5y ago
  How fast can an algorithm be put together to find evidence of mental health issues via social media posts and then trigger a waterfall of rights removals? It could be easy to argue that society may be better off without those folks having rights. Flagged as mental - - loose free speech - blocked from posting on networks, email capabilities removed via isps, library and cell phone companies. - Flagged so can not purchase firearms - soldiers may now be sent to watch over you in your place or residence/work - things you have said in the past and things you know can be studied - search history, alexa/assistant stuff - you can not hide what you know. - You could wait for a jury trial but never be able to see your accuser, it's a bot written by a very good professor/doctor - a jury of your 'peers' would be people who have never been red-flagged as problematic social media posters. - civil trials would be auto-lost because the bot would know you are bad. - would it be cruel punishment to be cut off from all things digital? no dating, friends, family, food orders, rides.. It seems you can slay the bill of rights pretty quickly simply using a digital footprint. I read a submarine article today pushing for the expansion of background checks for rights that did not include a bunch of 'other side info' that should be discussed.. it can be easy for something to be right and be used for the wrong reasons or in the wrong way. I've also seen news where 'they' are asking social media companies to hand over info to try to prevent offline violence as one solution to things - at what scale does this become weaponized mass destruction? a thousand people? ten thousand? Of course people will lose their right to vote, maybe parenting rights and all sorts of others. All from a twitter rant. This is actually where we are right now I guess. The goldwater rule mentioned in the article may need to be codified into national law to prevent these kinds of things from running amok.
  • korethr 5y ago
    Just reading that, my skin crawls and I can feel the nucleation of an icy fear in the back of my mind. Not just no, but Hell Fucking No. I argue that those genuinely arguing for such a system fail to realize just how quickly it can and will be weaponized against themselves.
  • 99_00 5y ago
    It wouldn't happen because it would not serve any establishment, elite, or entrenched group's interests. Unless the mental health algorithm was cover for flagging political opponents. But there wouldn't be any support for such a system. Mental health has a problem with having too low a profile, not too high. So there isn't motivation to do this. Labeling opposing political groups as scary extremists is easy, gets public support, time tested.
• tomp 5y ago
  Are "telling the truth" and "finding trolling humorous" also redefined to be psychological issues? Well, then the conclusion easily follows...
• theknocker 5y ago
  Cool now we can all talk about how anything we personally find abrasive must be a mental illness.
• blueyes 5y ago
  One twist on this: exposure to online platforms exacerbates psychological issues for some portion of the population. That's the flywheel of rage.
• taneq 5y ago
  2) Bad behaviour stems from psychological issues. 1) Psychological issues are things that cause bad behaviour.
• paperwasp42 5y ago
  Having worked in the publishing industry, my experiences support the conclusions of this article. About ~40% of authors I worked with had diagnosed mental health issues, and were quite open about their struggles. Most were a delight to work with--I strongly admire people who can be open and honest about their struggles. But about ~15% were... not so delightful. Working with them was hell, because they'd flip-flop constantly between treating me as sworn enemy or best friend. Their twitter feeds reflected this attitude. They were quick to pick fights with bewildered victims, to scream to the skies how evil X person was, how they were the victim of X's behavior. Having worked with them, I knew they were unstable and to ignore their online shrieking. But to an outsider.... All outsiders see is an award-winning author, touted as a genius, with that little blue check mark declaring that they're a respected member of their field. So of course they're going to listen when that author screams that they've been victimized. Of course, pointing out that this person is mentally ill isn't an option--for one, it's confidential information. For two, you'll be fired for being "disability-phobic". So there's no choice but to sit back and watch the unstable troll rip apart other people. It's horrible. And it's one of the reasons I left the publishing industry. It's slowly and steadily being overrun by mentally unstable trolls, and it's starting to have a serious impact on which books get published and which don't. (Hint: anything that might possibly trigger the trolls will NOT get a publishing contract.)
  • Dracophoenix 5y ago
    If you wouldn't mind my asking how does someone get in contact with a publisher to write a book? Not to sound condescending, but if someone with mental health issues can get a good deal, what makes this industry difficult for most others to break into?
    • paperwasp42 5y ago
      The difficulty is in writing a publishable manuscript. Most authors spend about a decade and several practice manuscripts honing their craft before they are published. Publishing doesn't require working 9-5, or daily check ins, or other things that generally handicap people with mental health issues. So you'll see a lot more authors with serious mental health issue than, say, software programmers (and personally, I think this is an amazing and positive thing, in many ways. Like I said, most of these mentally ill authors are just fantastic human beings who I loved working with). Of course, their mental illness doesn't make them any less talented or brilliant. Actually, I observed the opposite--the authors I worked with who were truly genius generally struggled with some variety of mental illness. To get in contact with a publisher, generally you need to first be represented by a literary agent. This is another faucet of publishing that enables more people with mental illness to thrive in the industry. Agents can act as the professional, polished barrier between the publisher and author, which makes a publisher less likely to even realize the author has mental health issues until the contract is done and signed. Again, this has pros and cons. The pros is that a lot of amazing people with mental health struggles manage to get contracts, without publishers having the chance to discriminate. The con is that some trolls get contracts as well, without the publisher realizing what kind of person they're signing on.
• joe_the_user 5y ago
  Article: "diagnosing people from afar is a bad idea" (diagnoses people from afar) Reason that diagnosis from afar is illegitimate isn't just that you don't have enough information (but there's that). Just as important is that "real", official, mental health diagnoses generally don't make sense without the context that a given person isn't functioning in society, has violated some institutional norm, etc. The role of mental health basically is to look at someone who's considered non-functional and classify how they're non-functional. If someone, mental health professional or otherwise, looks at someone in society and doesn't like how they're functioning but society is OK with this, that person can say society or some part of it is insane but collective insanity is a manifestly different phenomena than an individual diagnosis. Edit: Behavior some consider bad, that some people get away with and that is actually prized by some other section of society (whether it be hitting on women or taking ultra-moralist stances or trolling generally or whatever) can't be official, institutionally defined insanity, even I don't might informally various actions "crazy" (which indeed occasionally offends people in the present context). Edit2: Another I'd put is that the specific tools of the mental health professional aren't tools for understanding people in general and aren't tools for understanding bad behavior outside a context where it's debilitating bad behavior. In those contexts, sociologists, maybe, something specific to say but to a large extent, specialized knowledge by itself may given an advantage and someone tossing around psychiatric terms in this is kind of engaging in pseudo-science.
  • 99_00 5y ago
    >But one of them had publicly declared a few months earlier that they have “dissociative identity disorder”, DID. The specific person they are talking about declared the diagnosis they received.
• armchairhacker 5y ago
  Personally, the main reason I dislike Twitter / Reddit / sometimes even HN, isn't the trolling or toxic posts. It's just that most of the posts are - not interesting. Like dumb memes, popular "unpopular" opinions, or "hot takes" that are the same stuff over and over. Even on HN, post after post is: crypto sucks, advertisements suck, cancel culture sucks, Amazon making $300 billion sucks, "bring back the old internet!" And I agree with all of that (heck sometimes I repeat it myself), but I don't need to hear it over and over.
• aaron695 5y ago
  This is a old pre internet argument - Are serial killers mentally ill? Are people who are temporarily changed like black out drunk of a fit of rage responsible for their actions, like drink driving and murder? Should homosexuality in the 50's been classed as mentally ill considering it could ruin you life and even get you killed. But now it's gone fro Macro to Micro. I know at an IQ level believing Pizzagate is as dumb as thinking unarmed people in a Capitol is an insurrection. But I also think QAnon has more mental illness than BlueAnon but I have no idea why I say that. I think Scientology or flat earthing is a dumb as Catholicism but in practice I think Scientology has more mental illness. I do know Karen's is a name for mentally ill women and watching their videos will one day be a shameful stage of the internet. That's a predictable future. But it's all hard to quantify and the Goldwater Rule needs to die.
  • chillwaves 5y ago
    > believing Pizzagate is as dumb as thinking unarmed people in a Capitol is an insurrection. There was zero evidence and zero existence of ANYTHING to substantiate "Pizzagate" while there was certainly some percentage of those "unarmed people" at the Capitol there to overthrow the election results. I hope you realize how your efforts to "both sides" really distort both your message and reality.
• nullc 5y ago
  The comments immediately go in to decrying anonymity. This seems precisely backwards to me: Yes, even some mentally ill persons will be less hesitant to behave abusively under their legal name. But many will not, the examples given are people who are behaving abusively in part because they've adopted the abusive conduct as an identity. They aren't ashamed of it. Worse, a lot of the damage these people can do depends on knowing their target's identity. If some internet nutbar gets overheated in an argument and starts slandering you with random accusations but you're only known as a pseudonym then at worst you can abandon the pseudonym. But you probably don't even have to go that far: without knowing more about you its hard to make accusations that are even credible enough for an internet hate mob.
• faeriechangling 5y ago
  I see a dearth of evidence for the authors actual hypothesis as stated.
• 99_00 5y ago
  Over 50% Of Liberal, White Women Under 30 Have A Mental Health Issue. Are We Worried Yet? https://www.eviemagazine.com/post/over-50-percent-white-liberal-women-under-30-mental-health-condition https://www.eviemagazine.com/post/over-50-percent-white-libe...
• xkcd-sucks 5y ago
  This claim is tautological; by definition """bad behavior""" is """mental illness""" and vice versa