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It used to be that if you were queer - in any sense of the word - and lived in one of the countless small, conservative, traditional communities in this country

It used to be that if you were queer - in any sense of the word - and lived in one of the countless small, conservative, traditional communities in this country, you were shit out of luck. Now, thanks to the internet, there exists inclusive and positive communities for people of every type of background and experience. This simply did not exist for most people just a few decades ago, but now it's accessible to almost every young person in the country. I don't mind bashing the bad about social media and the internet, but I am kind of sick of people overlooking the good.

tester756 5y ago
How about numbers / net outcome? If we trade 10 good things for 10 000 terrible, then is it worth?
- stickfigure 5y ago
  According to another commenter here, the research that spawned the WSJ article said Instagram made 41% feel better, 31% worse, and no impact for the other 28%. I haven't found the original material to verify, but if this is accurate, seems like the net outcome argument works in Instagram's favor.
  - ethanwillis 5y ago
    It doesn't necessarily work in Instagram's favor. If the 41% and 31% had a baseline of both feeling "ok" then you took 72% who had a baseline that is acceptable and polarized them into groups who felt better or worse. Is it more favorable to have more people who have a stable baseline or to have one group have a good baseline and another similar sized group with a bad baseline?
    - stickfigure 5y ago
      I don't know, but at the very least the article title is grossly misleading.
- lxgr 5y ago
  Not an ethicist, but I don't think this is how ethical evaluations work in most frameworks.
  - tester756 5y ago
    Definitely, but still saying that "some people benefit from it" is difficult to agree/challenge. Numbers at least give some information.
  - feoren 5y ago
    It could be one input into a "utilitarian" model, which in my opinion describes all of the even remotely viable ethical frameworks.
dontblink 5y ago
Could minorities who need connection still find that connection via forum-based communities (i.e. pre social media)? Social media was helpful for me to connect with lost acquaintances (which was novel at first, but now I barely continue to converse with them if at all).
berkes 5y ago
Is that really so? Has this been researched over longer periods? I'm honestly curious, because I'm probably biased when I think about medieval inquisitions or 1930 Race theories. Was, say, a black person in Rome treated bad because of racism? Were Jews hated in ancient early Muslim cities? Were there no same sex couples in, say, a 1500 village at the swedish coast? I can imagine many 'queer' were just accepted as such in many communities throughout the world, throughout the ages. But I can just as well imagine it being literally deadly to be even a little out of line, just as well.
- dillondoyle 5y ago
  there are definitely cultures that were more accepting that the US in the previous say 100 years. I know an example is 3rd gender in India as an example. It does seem like the US took a step backwards. But from like a tiny percent. If queerness was say at 5%, it goes to 1%. and now we're at like 70% type of analogy.
- lthornberry 5y ago
  You are correct that racism as we know it is a product of, roughly speaking, the post-1550 world. The response to homoerotic acts has varied extremely widely across time and space. "Same sex couples" were pretty uncommon in most times and places (largely because almost no one thought of marriage/cohabitation as something constituted primarily by romantic love or even sexual desire). But plenty of examples of people having same-sex sex and even long-lasting relationships.
uniqueid 5y ago
It used to be that if you were queer - in any sense of the word - and lived in one of the countless small, conservative, traditional communities in this country, you were shit out of luck. As bad as that was, in the past you could move to another of the 380,000 towns on this planet. Today, if your social media trail renders you unemployable (or the target of persecution) there's no longer any corner of the planet to which you can escape. Edit: People seem to be misinterpreting my meaning entirely. By 'unemployable' I was thinking of, for example, racy photos. By 'persecution' I mean actual IRL stalking/assault etc. The kind of example I had in mind was, say, a racy photo from Pride Parade following someone around for the rest of their living days, preventing them from working at certain lawfirms, or attracting the attention of some violent psycho.
- danuker 5y ago
  You probably wouldn't want to get hired by someone who wouldn't tolerate (if not share) your views.
  - jlkuester7 5y ago
    Wait, what? Why should intellectual homogeneity be a requirement (or expectation) for coworkers? That seems like the opposite of encouraging diversity.
    - makeworld 5y ago
      The key word is "tolerate". If you're gay, you're going to want to be hired by someone who will tolerate you being gay, otherwise you'll have to hide part of yourself and/or be fearful at work.
      - tommymachine 5y ago
        They used to call keeping your personal life separate from work "being professional". Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong here... don't most companies hire people to do a job, not to flaunt who they are in their private lives in a distracting manner?
heywherelogingo 5y ago
"Now, thanks to the internet, there exists ... communities for people of every type of background and experience." -- this is good for the individuals, but what if there is a biological/societal/ecosystem negative eg organised crime, gene mutations? ie harmless singletons scaling into destructive masses. Is isolation nature's fire-break, broken by bridging technology? The negative connotations are hypothetical questions about unknowns, not a claim or suggestion.
detcader 5y ago
It's free to submit another story to HN about the topic you prefer, this one is about teen girls though!
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
xgulfie 5y ago
As a queer in several senses of the word, Instagram is not a place to find a supportive queer community. Instagram is the most one-way of all social networks — i.e. it's almost all plebs following celebrities.
- dillondoyle 5y ago
  True for you but not for everyone. I think though that this 1:many culture e.g. the mainstreaming and appropriating of queer culture has had a positive affect of allowing kids to have way more freedom of expression to be themselves. Like looking back growing up only 15 years ago in a liberal area the progress is insane. Gay marriage was illegal & Obama was against it! that's crazy to think about. Time has flown by (not fast enough especially for gender) and my point is I don't think we can ignore the role of social media & traditional media in those positive changes. Which is a 1:many broadcast like you mention. It's an interesting balance though I think OP makes a good point in looking both the bad and the good.
- rapnie 5y ago
  Indeed. I find there's a lot of inclusive and positive communities on the Fediverse with Mastodon as twitter alternative and Pixelfed as instagram alternative (and increasing integration between the two).
- standardUser 5y ago
  That is not how I experience it. Obviously, it is 100% about who you follow, and two people can have two entirely different experiences depending on those choices.
  - xgulfie 5y ago
    Yeah that's totally fair
rayiner 5y ago
We’re bad as a society at talking about the mixed effects of social change. Undoubtedly, social changes, including the Internet, have made things better for some minorities. But progress in the treatment of minorities shouldn’t overshadow discussion of the majority of people. Are the majority of teen girls better or worse off as a result of social media? That’s a really important discussion to be having. In the worse case, companies like Facebook and Instagram can point to improvements in the treatment of a small number of people to provide cover for activities that hurt the majority. After being excoriated in the 2000s for destroying people’s livelihoods, Wall Street refocused the narrative by publicly backing various social justice issues. Without detracting from the value of those issues themselves—the finesse with which these companies changed the conversation should give everyone pause.
908B64B197 5y ago
> It used to be that if you were queer - in any sense of the word - and lived in one of the countless small, conservative, traditional communities in this country, you were shit out of luck. Doesn't stop at the country's border: Social Media has been a gift to the whole world. And it's not just queers either: just look at the 2011 Arab Spring. Suddenly, people could just get news from their peers, see live videos of what was really happening and not just the curated content allowed by the local warlord. They could see how westerners lived and wonder: "Why do I have to bribe everyone around me?" "Why can they just go to school and not me?" "Why are woman able to have jobs and walk down the streets without a man?" and "Why are they allowed multiple sources of information?" There's a wonder some countries are trying hard to restrict internet access, and western social media. The great Firewall, Cuban Intranet, Egypt cutting out the countries network during protests...
- rayiner 5y ago
  And then what happened with the Arab Spring?
- barfingclouds 5y ago
  Facebook is also specifically used in countries to rally violence against ethnic minorities. As in literally assisting genocide. Looking at it with rose colored glasses is missing a lot of the point. In addition, Arab spring isn’t even a positive example. What have the aftermaths of that been?
  - 908B64B197 5y ago
    > Facebook is also specifically used in countries to rally violence against ethnic minorities. If you banned all accounts from these countries you know what they would do? Switch to something else and keep doing the same thing. It's a cultural problem. > In addition, Arab spring isn’t even a positive example. What have the aftermaths of that been? Before the people had dictatorships and a rotten culture. Now they only have a rotten culture. Social networking can't fix every issues...
    - 5y ago
ipaddr 5y ago
Those communities existed before social media on bbses, then forums, websites. Social media has drawn in more people but connected your real life identity and that will still cause you problems at a local level. If you are a young teen not out two profiles are required. But these services want your real name...
neilk 5y ago
The focus of the article is how Instagram knows that their product is harmful. It's not saying that all products, or even all similar products, are harmful for everyone. I think this thread is at the very least offtopic; at the most, it's intentional whataboutism. This could well be your honest reaction, but maybe consider carefully before shifting focus like this. Large tech companies would like the conversation to shift in exactly this way. They want us to choose between "the internet" and no internet, but the real choice is between their internet and other possible internets.
ryanisnan 5y ago
Is Facebook/Instagram this medium? I find this really hard to believe, especially in 2021.
laumars 5y ago
I think the fact that we are discussing this on a social platform served over the internet, the good parts haven’t been overlooked.
lhorie 5y ago
> there exists inclusive and positive communities for people of every type of background and experience I mean, sure, but this also goes for flat earthers, incels, fatphobia activists, dreamsexuals, etc. In other words, it normalized selfish individualism over collective conformism. Looking at it in aggregate, I'm not sure I can agree on whether that was a good thing or not. Personally, it strikes me as the pendulum shifting too far to the other side.
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
"Now, thanks to the internet, ..." This seems to be a common misdirection seen with defending Facebook. (Not to mention other Big Tech companies.) Facebook == "the internet" Facebook proponents, including public statements from the company, attribute the benefits we enjoy from the internet to Facebook. Criticism of Facebook == criticism of "the internet" It follows that any threat to Facebook is a threat to the internet. Threat to Facebook == threat to "the internet" Its quite sneaky. EDIT: One insidious implication is to create or reinforce a false belief that we cant derive any benefits from the internet unless we support Big Tech and their mass-scale, popularity-driven, advertising-based "business model". This helps Big Tech to stifle competition and new and/or different ideas not under their control. The internet isnt the web, nor is the web a small collection of popular websites, or a small collection of popular web browsers.
- Jonanin 5y ago
  I think you are reading too much into the exact wording of the OP's comment. You can replace "the internet" with "social media" or even "Facebook" and it still makes sense. Internet platforms for communicating with others (the use case that is being described in the OP) is literally the definition of social media.
- elorant 5y ago
  For many people though, Facebook IS the Internet. Especially for those who don't own a computer and most of their online usage is done through the mobile version of FB.
  - erikig 5y ago
    In many cases this was exactly Facebook's aim and they subsidized internet access to enable this. e.g Burma https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-55929654 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-55929654
freewilly1040 5y ago
It's discouraging that the top comment is in effect sticking up for the billionaire caught red handed in a lie (think of the good things FB has done for us!). I'm sure people smoking cigarettes throughout the years have had very nice conversations and maybe even made friends. That doesn't absolve the manufacturers from responsibility for knowingly selling poison. The same is true here.
MisterBastahrd 5y ago
"The internet" is not facebook. "The internet" is not Instagram. There were a fuckton of websites and forums devoted to gay issues and emotional support before Zuck ever got horny in his dorm room.

It used to be that if you were queer - in any sense of the word - and lived in one of the countless small, conservative, traditional communities in this country, you were shit out of luck. Now, thanks to the internet, there exists inclusive and positive communities for people of every type of background and experience. This simply did not exist for most people just a few decades ago, but now it's accessible to almost every young person in the country. I don't mind bashing the bad about social media and the internet, but I am kind of sick of people overlooking the good.

tester756 5y ago

How about numbers / net outcome? If we trade 10 good things for 10 000 terrible, then is it worth?

stickfigure 5y ago
According to another commenter here, the research that spawned the WSJ article said Instagram made 41% feel better, 31% worse, and no impact for the other 28%. I haven't found the original material to verify, but if this is accurate, seems like the net outcome argument works in Instagram's favor.
- ethanwillis 5y ago
  It doesn't necessarily work in Instagram's favor. If the 41% and 31% had a baseline of both feeling "ok" then you took 72% who had a baseline that is acceptable and polarized them into groups who felt better or worse. Is it more favorable to have more people who have a stable baseline or to have one group have a good baseline and another similar sized group with a bad baseline?
  - stickfigure 5y ago
    I don't know, but at the very least the article title is grossly misleading.
lxgr 5y ago
Not an ethicist, but I don't think this is how ethical evaluations work in most frameworks.
- tester756 5y ago
  Definitely, but still saying that "some people benefit from it" is difficult to agree/challenge. Numbers at least give some information.
- feoren 5y ago
  It could be one input into a "utilitarian" model, which in my opinion describes all of the even remotely viable ethical frameworks.

dontblink 5y ago

Could minorities who need connection still find that connection via forum-based communities (i.e. pre social media)? Social media was helpful for me to connect with lost acquaintances (which was novel at first, but now I barely continue to converse with them if at all).

berkes 5y ago

Is that really so? Has this been researched over longer periods? I'm honestly curious, because I'm probably biased when I think about medieval inquisitions or 1930 Race theories. Was, say, a black person in Rome treated bad because of racism? Were Jews hated in ancient early Muslim cities? Were there no same sex couples in, say, a 1500 village at the swedish coast? I can imagine many 'queer' were just accepted as such in many communities throughout the world, throughout the ages. But I can just as well imagine it being literally deadly to be even a little out of line, just as well.

dillondoyle 5y ago
there are definitely cultures that were more accepting that the US in the previous say 100 years. I know an example is 3rd gender in India as an example. It does seem like the US took a step backwards. But from like a tiny percent. If queerness was say at 5%, it goes to 1%. and now we're at like 70% type of analogy.
lthornberry 5y ago
You are correct that racism as we know it is a product of, roughly speaking, the post-1550 world. The response to homoerotic acts has varied extremely widely across time and space. "Same sex couples" were pretty uncommon in most times and places (largely because almost no one thought of marriage/cohabitation as something constituted primarily by romantic love or even sexual desire). But plenty of examples of people having same-sex sex and even long-lasting relationships.

uniqueid 5y ago

It used to be that if you were queer - in any sense of the word - and lived in one of the countless small, conservative, traditional communities in this country, you were shit out of luck. As bad as that was, in the past you could move to another of the 380,000 towns on this planet. Today, if your social media trail renders you unemployable (or the target of persecution) there's no longer any corner of the planet to which you can escape. Edit: People seem to be misinterpreting my meaning entirely. By 'unemployable' I was thinking of, for example, racy photos. By 'persecution' I mean actual IRL stalking/assault etc. The kind of example I had in mind was, say, a racy photo from Pride Parade following someone around for the rest of their living days, preventing them from working at certain lawfirms, or attracting the attention of some violent psycho.

danuker 5y ago
You probably wouldn't want to get hired by someone who wouldn't tolerate (if not share) your views.
- jlkuester7 5y ago
  Wait, what? Why should intellectual homogeneity be a requirement (or expectation) for coworkers? That seems like the opposite of encouraging diversity.
  - makeworld 5y ago
    The key word is "tolerate". If you're gay, you're going to want to be hired by someone who will tolerate you being gay, otherwise you'll have to hide part of yourself and/or be fearful at work.
    - tommymachine 5y ago
      They used to call keeping your personal life separate from work "being professional". Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong here... don't most companies hire people to do a job, not to flaunt who they are in their private lives in a distracting manner?

heywherelogingo 5y ago

"Now, thanks to the internet, there exists ... communities for people of every type of background and experience." -- this is good for the individuals, but what if there is a biological/societal/ecosystem negative eg organised crime, gene mutations? ie harmless singletons scaling into destructive masses. Is isolation nature's fire-break, broken by bridging technology? The negative connotations are hypothetical questions about unknowns, not a claim or suggestion.

detcader 5y ago

It's free to submit another story to HN about the topic you prefer, this one is about teen girls though!

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

xgulfie 5y ago

As a queer in several senses of the word, Instagram is not a place to find a supportive queer community. Instagram is the most one-way of all social networks — i.e. it's almost all plebs following celebrities.

dillondoyle 5y ago
True for you but not for everyone. I think though that this 1:many culture e.g. the mainstreaming and appropriating of queer culture has had a positive affect of allowing kids to have way more freedom of expression to be themselves. Like looking back growing up only 15 years ago in a liberal area the progress is insane. Gay marriage was illegal & Obama was against it! that's crazy to think about. Time has flown by (not fast enough especially for gender) and my point is I don't think we can ignore the role of social media & traditional media in those positive changes. Which is a 1:many broadcast like you mention. It's an interesting balance though I think OP makes a good point in looking both the bad and the good.
rapnie 5y ago
Indeed. I find there's a lot of inclusive and positive communities on the Fediverse with Mastodon as twitter alternative and Pixelfed as instagram alternative (and increasing integration between the two).
standardUser 5y ago
That is not how I experience it. Obviously, it is 100% about who you follow, and two people can have two entirely different experiences depending on those choices.
- xgulfie 5y ago
  Yeah that's totally fair

rayiner 5y ago

We’re bad as a society at talking about the mixed effects of social change. Undoubtedly, social changes, including the Internet, have made things better for some minorities. But progress in the treatment of minorities shouldn’t overshadow discussion of the majority of people. Are the majority of teen girls better or worse off as a result of social media? That’s a really important discussion to be having. In the worse case, companies like Facebook and Instagram can point to improvements in the treatment of a small number of people to provide cover for activities that hurt the majority. After being excoriated in the 2000s for destroying people’s livelihoods, Wall Street refocused the narrative by publicly backing various social justice issues. Without detracting from the value of those issues themselves—the finesse with which these companies changed the conversation should give everyone pause.

908B64B197 5y ago

> It used to be that if you were queer - in any sense of the word - and lived in one of the countless small, conservative, traditional communities in this country, you were shit out of luck. Doesn't stop at the country's border: Social Media has been a gift to the whole world. And it's not just queers either: just look at the 2011 Arab Spring. Suddenly, people could just get news from their peers, see live videos of what was really happening and not just the curated content allowed by the local warlord. They could see how westerners lived and wonder: "Why do I have to bribe everyone around me?" "Why can they just go to school and not me?" "Why are woman able to have jobs and walk down the streets without a man?" and "Why are they allowed multiple sources of information?" There's a wonder some countries are trying hard to restrict internet access, and western social media. The great Firewall, Cuban Intranet, Egypt cutting out the countries network during protests...

rayiner 5y ago
And then what happened with the Arab Spring?
barfingclouds 5y ago
Facebook is also specifically used in countries to rally violence against ethnic minorities. As in literally assisting genocide. Looking at it with rose colored glasses is missing a lot of the point. In addition, Arab spring isn’t even a positive example. What have the aftermaths of that been?
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  > Facebook is also specifically used in countries to rally violence against ethnic minorities. If you banned all accounts from these countries you know what they would do? Switch to something else and keep doing the same thing. It's a cultural problem. > In addition, Arab spring isn’t even a positive example. What have the aftermaths of that been? Before the people had dictatorships and a rotten culture. Now they only have a rotten culture. Social networking can't fix every issues...
  - 5y ago

ipaddr 5y ago

Those communities existed before social media on bbses, then forums, websites. Social media has drawn in more people but connected your real life identity and that will still cause you problems at a local level. If you are a young teen not out two profiles are required. But these services want your real name...

neilk 5y ago

The focus of the article is how Instagram knows that their product is harmful. It's not saying that all products, or even all similar products, are harmful for everyone. I think this thread is at the very least offtopic; at the most, it's intentional whataboutism. This could well be your honest reaction, but maybe consider carefully before shifting focus like this. Large tech companies would like the conversation to shift in exactly this way. They want us to choose between "the internet" and no internet, but the real choice is between their internet and other possible internets.

ryanisnan 5y ago

Is Facebook/Instagram this medium? I find this really hard to believe, especially in 2021.

laumars 5y ago

I think the fact that we are discussing this on a social platform served over the internet, the good parts haven’t been overlooked.

lhorie 5y ago

> there exists inclusive and positive communities for people of every type of background and experience I mean, sure, but this also goes for flat earthers, incels, fatphobia activists, dreamsexuals, etc. In other words, it normalized selfish individualism over collective conformism. Looking at it in aggregate, I'm not sure I can agree on whether that was a good thing or not. Personally, it strikes me as the pendulum shifting too far to the other side.

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

"Now, thanks to the internet, ..." This seems to be a common misdirection seen with defending Facebook. (Not to mention other Big Tech companies.) Facebook == "the internet" Facebook proponents, including public statements from the company, attribute the benefits we enjoy from the internet to Facebook. Criticism of Facebook == criticism of "the internet" It follows that any threat to Facebook is a threat to the internet. Threat to Facebook == threat to "the internet" Its quite sneaky. EDIT: One insidious implication is to create or reinforce a false belief that we cant derive any benefits from the internet unless we support Big Tech and their mass-scale, popularity-driven, advertising-based "business model". This helps Big Tech to stifle competition and new and/or different ideas not under their control. The internet isnt the web, nor is the web a small collection of popular websites, or a small collection of popular web browsers.

Jonanin 5y ago
I think you are reading too much into the exact wording of the OP's comment. You can replace "the internet" with "social media" or even "Facebook" and it still makes sense. Internet platforms for communicating with others (the use case that is being described in the OP) is literally the definition of social media.
elorant 5y ago
For many people though, Facebook IS the Internet. Especially for those who don't own a computer and most of their online usage is done through the mobile version of FB.
- erikig 5y ago
  In many cases this was exactly Facebook's aim and they subsidized internet access to enable this. e.g Burma https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-55929654 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-55929654

freewilly1040 5y ago

It's discouraging that the top comment is in effect sticking up for the billionaire caught red handed in a lie (think of the good things FB has done for us!). I'm sure people smoking cigarettes throughout the years have had very nice conversations and maybe even made friends. That doesn't absolve the manufacturers from responsibility for knowingly selling poison. The same is true here.

MisterBastahrd 5y ago

"The internet" is not facebook. "The internet" is not Instagram. There were a fuckton of websites and forums devoted to gay issues and emotional support before Zuck ever got horny in his dorm room.