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You don't have to engage with people on the Internet
- brundolf 4y agoI sometimes notice my nervous system relax a bit when I log out of this website, because I know I won't get sucked into anything (he writes on this website)
- recuter 4y agoqueue hundreds of hn commentators
- WantonQuantum 4y agocue
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y agoNo, we're forming a line to take our turn like civilized internets.
- recuter 4y agoThey call me Cuban Pete.
- navjack27 4y agoIt's good advice.
- geenew 4y agoIf there are T's & C's I need to read before being permitted to talk to someone, I'll probably just skip the whole thing. Which I guess lines up with the title of the article.
- oddity 4y agoI was fortunate to learn this from pointless internet flamewars early in my life. Understand why you're in an argument and what you hope to accomplish by being in an argument. On the internet, it is usually very clear that you will accomplish nothing except maybe introduce receptive onlookers to a new idea, so the choice to minimize engagement is easy. I think applying this has generally made me more successful outside of the Internet, too, by being more conscious about how I approach conflict. Unfortunately, in the less pseudonymous world where preconceptions and reputation have more weight, the advice also holds, but the calculus is a big mess. Arguments can have only downside risk, but you don't have the option to disengage.
- Kamq 4y ago> On the internet, it is usually very clear that you will accomplish nothing except maybe introduce receptive onlookers to a new idea, so the choice to minimize engagement is easy. I'm going to disagree here. I've learned quite a lot from internet arguments. Admittedly, the majority of it was from attempting to argue positions I don't hold. You're taking it as a given that the only goal of an argument is to convince someone, and if you can't do that, then there is no point. But there can be value in making an argument specifically in bettering your own understanding of a point. With all that said, I will admit that some random news site's comments probably aren't the best place to do that.
- DiggyJohnson 4y agoGP seems to say this already. The thrust of their point is that the time spent engaging isn’t worth it for the person debating, not whether it does or doesn’t impact the perspectives on those that view the debate.
- Kamq 4y ago> The thrust of their point is that the time spent engaging isn’t worth it for the person debating Yes, and this is my main point of disagreement with them. My point is that there is plenty of value if you want there to be.
- musicale 4y agoSomeone is wrong on the internet!
- beebeepka 4y agoCome to bed, honey. No can do. Someone has to correct them. It's getting better as I age but there are times when the pressure has to be released
- quickthrower2 4y agohttps://xkcd.com/386/ https://xkcd.com/386/
- blondin 4y agonot knowing when to engage is as important as knowing when to do so. some people learn from their mistakes. some people don't, they look for reasons that make them feel vindicated.
- invalidator 4y agoObligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/386/ https://xkcd.com/386/ It's solid advice.
- TillE 4y ago> Even if you are a formal spokesperson for a company, you don't have to engage. This is key! At a lower level, if you're modding a Discord server or whatever, you can ignore people, and if they become a real problem you can just ban them. You don't need to engage with their drama, you don't owe them anything.
- duckmysick 4y agoIn my experience this leads to accusations about "power tripping mods" who "silence different opinions". Ditto on subreddits. Not engaging in those cases means stepping down as a moderator or even quitting the community. It will be worse off - moderating aside, it will lose some institutional knowledge. But in the long run you will feel better. You're right that you don't owe them anything. It's the same in the open source projects.
- worthless-trash 4y ago> You're right that you don't owe them anything. It's the same in the open source projects. In my limited experience, it seems that people think that developers owe them. It is so very strange how they have come to this conclusion.
- paulpauper 4y agoIt's worth replying if someone gets a key detail wrong or simple misunderstanding and you can set record strait
- dboreham 4y agoI see what you did there.
- bluedino 4y agoReddit is great because someone can says 1 + 1 = 3, get fifty upvotes, you can point out that it's actually 2, get downvoted into oblivion, and then some other idiot will come along and say it's 4
- deafpolygon 4y agoIt is 4 for infinitely large values of 1.
- bombcar 4y agoI mean hacker news has it too - I’ll come along and point out that 1+1 is 10 in binary or 11 if it’s ASCII.
- dogecoinbase 4y agoAs the old joke goes, there are 10 types of people in the world, those that understand binary... and nine others.
- rightbyte 4y agoI like that joke but I guess it only makes sense written? Or how do you say it? "Ten"? Thinking about it, "there are ten types of people" might be even funnier.
- Eisenstein 4y ago"one zero"
- InCityDreams 4y ago"One zero", by definition, is 'zero'.
- actually_a_dog 4y ago
- throwifasd 4y agoBut it's fun telling pretentious HNers that they they are wrong.
- xracy 4y agoYeah, I do. </s>
- julianeon 4y agoI really struggle with this; to this day I haven't found a good resolution. I'd say by analogy you could also say: "You don't have to pursue people romantically." It's really, really true: you don't. No one will blame you for keeping to yourself. In many settings it may even be better (example: a club, where the club organizers find the drama caused by romantic entanglements annoying). But there's a problem behind this problem, which is: while it's not necessary, if I act is if I don't 'need' to do it all (again: strictly true), that also causes problems. Basically I have an impulse towards sex, and towards being social, which exists in a hard to measure but much-more-than-zero state. The social impulse in particular needs attention daily. So - put that way - I kind of do have to engage. Because I work remotely I spend too long away from other people in my opinion to not engage socially whatsoever, during work hours. Like I said, I struggle with this. But my middle-of-the-road position is that, while any individual act of engagement (like a comment) is expendable, the general behavior of seeking community on the Internet is something which I can accurately treat like a need (especially in the sense that, if I haven't done it in hours, it's time to do it).
- toast0 4y agoOh, but this isn't even about that kind of engagement. It's just saying you don't need to comment in threads about your employer. I'll go one step further and say you shouldn't. Better not to find out you said the wrong thing as a company representative. And maybe it's good practice for seeing threads and not saying anything.
- theamk 4y agoBut you don't have to engage on every topic, for example about your employer (as Xe mentions). If something topic is not pleasant -- walk by, and satisfy your social impulse in some other way. Go to Hacker News and leave some comments under topics you find interesting. Go to your local Reddit and discuss how badly your town services work. Find a forum for your favorite series and start a --flamewar-- heated discussion about motivations of one of the main characters. In the age of internet, the possibilities for communications are endless. (In-person/private communications is harder, but that's not what the post was about)
- autoexec 4y ago
- hnbear 4y agoI have the "hide comments section" turned on my ad blocker. Makes the internet a much nicer place in general on a lot of general news/info type sites that aren't explicitly for discussion (eg. HN, Reddit). I was pretty excited a couple of years back when some bigger news sites explicitly turned off their comments saying they only generated distracting noise and added no value. Then, after that I can rigorously filter what I see - on Reddit I have multireddits that I care about, and set those to Home using Apollo to browse, and I keep only generally positive sub-reddits in there. I think there's huge value in going out of you way to block negative noise in bulk. Same reason I deleted Facebook - don't invite in the noise, and don't engage with trolls. It's the same old strategy - the only way to win is not to play.
- undersuit 4y ago>I think there's huge value in going out of you way to block negative noise in bulk. I'll go on a tweet made by a Twitter user with a large follower count and just start blocking people. AOC and Ilhan Omar are great because I can very easily pick out the crap comments being made just to try and troll them, I've started reading George Takei's tweets recently to block the trolling homophobes that respond to him.
- fullmoon 4y agoYou’re leaving lot of noise on the table if you only look with one eye.
- undersuit 4y agoIf I didn't close one eye I'd be blind when I went from light to dark.
- sph 4y agoHow many monthly active users does Twitter have? I mean, blocking trolls individually is certainly a way to keep busy, but ultimately useless as there are too many, and the craftier and more dangerous trolls (i.e. government sponsored) might have a blue checkmark next to their name and already in your follows list.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- cookie_monsta 4y agoNo comment.
- revskill 4y agoI learnt a lot from those comments though. You can be right or wrong, but it's the lesson from engagement that matters for participants. It's your choice and it's matter of taste. It's never a hard rule.
- deafpolygon 4y agoRelevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/386/ https://xkcd.com/386/
- charles_f 4y agoI like answering because it helps me clarify my thoughts. I also like the comments on HN at least as much as the articles, and I like to contribute.
- rjbwork 4y agoAbsolutely. It's like a journal I can get feedback on in a low stakes environment. It lets me practice my writing and formulate my thoughts on the outside of my head. I find that simply expressing some thoughts in writing and getting feedback on them helps with developing clarity and even changing my own mind. One does not necessarily have to believe every thought that they've ever written out on the internet. In fact, I'd argue it's a sign of a dull and stagnant intellect if it is the case.
- fortituded0002 4y agoGreat advice. I have tried this often, while it is really useful, sometimes it isn't enough. What I found more useful a good chunk of the time (on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit..) is to start blocking people. There are some people that are so far off the mark that what they say not only gets in the way, it actively erodes the quality of what's out there. I've found it far more beneficial than just shrugging and moving on.
- neonsunset 4y agoI may not have to but I will.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- troncon 4y ago[flagged]
- smilevideo 4y agoThere's also a chance that you're not even engaging with a person at all, but with a bot, so even less reason.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Zababa 4y ago> Sometimes people will engage in performative angst in comments about companies as a way to signal they are part of the "in-crowd" that totally hates everything corporations have "ruined". These views are not representative of the larger world. It is just them trying to get upvoted because they care about the internet point number. I feel like this is close to another point that has been hard to learn for me too: often, when talking about something, people care more about the talking than the something, or at least they care more about the talking and less about the something than me. This is not a value judgement, I don't think one way is "better" than the other, it's just one of those things that can cause a lot of trouble when you don't know about it. It also helps not engaging with people. What usually attracts me when I engage with people that I don't know very well is that they're talking about something that I know, and thus I feel in a way involved in the conversation, I can contribute something. But when I see it through the lens of a group of people that know each others and just happen to talk about something that I know, it's easier to let it go. As a more general comment, I really appreciate this blog. There's some variety in the subjects, the writing is engaging, sometimes there are cool technical tricks, sometimes interesting insights.
- bryan_w 4y agoEh, I tried to take that view but then I started hearing those wrong pithy responses reflected back at me via my real life friends, which showed that their campaign worked. Now I don't argue to try to change the person's mind, but rather to plant the seed of critical thinking that may help an onlooker find the truth.
- wutheringh 4y ago[flagged]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- csydas 4y agoI absolutely understand your strategy and that there is a huge frustration to have such awful pithy ideas continue to spread. One thing I'd like to offer though is a reminder of the quote "living well is the best revenge." I deal with a lot of prima donna managers, technical persons, you name it, and it became a lot easier for me to just let things go when I realized the best thing I can do to counter the pithy/ridiculous notions they espouse was just to do my thing and be comfortable in what I do, say, think, and feel (regardless of the feeling). It has an amazingly convincing effect on many without me having to write/say a single word, I am much less stressed as I don't feel a need to defend my thoughts and ideas, and I find my methods and ways far more simple and effective than those which are espoused by my colleagues. I don't insist that I'm right in every case or my strategies are right for everyone, I just focus on what is right for me. That it sends a strong message is simply a side-effect, albeit a positive one I think.
- iinnPP 4y agoThat only works if you are in a position that isn't negatively impacted (yet) by the permeation of specific ideas. The conversation has, unsurprisingly, shifted slightly as inflation puts more people from your position into a position where not caring could eventually be life altering. It's quite concerning to say the least.
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- wruza 4y agoIt's not worth the psychic damage There’s no damage if you don’t take it or don’t look at it (in case of a toxic auditory). My rule of thumb is: I’m not lazy to write a constructive-ish comment and there’s a good chance it could change, extend or represent some opinions and there’s still something left unsaid either itt or in general. E.g. if I’m lazy, or it’s unlikely someone could benefit from reading it, or everything was already said in that thread or is assumed to be well-known, then I don’t engage.
- ranger207 4y agoMy current theory about influencing people is that, for people already convinced of a position, small, indirect, and constant statements are more influential than large, direct, and infrequent (or frequent, for that matter) statements. eg, a bunch of people mentioning offhand over the course of a few years that they're recycling is more influential than a big recycling lecture directed at a single audience. In that regard, small inaccuracies are important to counter in order to preserve a particular narrative. The current meme war around Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine is a great case study
- quickthrower2 4y agoInteresting date format: M01 18 2023
- docdeek 4y agoThe Serenity Prayer could easily be adapted to serve as a guide here: Grant me the serenity to accept the minds I cannot change, the courage to change the minds I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
- shmde 4y agoCyberbullying?? Pffft just turn off your computer.
- zh3 4y ago>There is no good way to add oxygen to a tire fire. Combine it with hydrogen first and pour the resultant liquid on the fire (or silicon, and use the resultant solid).
- alxmng 4y agoMy father gave me sage advice: Choose your battles.
- theredlancer 4y agoCommenting because I can
- psnehanshu 4y ago[flagged]
- nicbou 4y agoI don't think about them at all. For all the noise people make about stating pronouns, I yet have to encounter it in real life. I'll wait until that happens.
- jsz0 4y agoI found this out recently after being perm banned from Reddit for making too many dirty jokes. It was merely a creative writing exercise for me that I didn't take seriously. Not being able to comment made me realize though I was subconsciously always looking for the worst most absurd filthy angle to setup the joke. So I probably enjoy using the site more now though I'm still annoyed at being targeted by moderators because most of my silly jokes were very well received and upvoted by actual users.
- avgcorrection 4y agoI hope I never feel intrinsic motivation to defend my employer.
- ShamelessC 4y agoYeah that part of this felt highly avoidant. It's one thing to engage in nonsense with random strangers - that is likely useless (irony ensues). But to feel attacked by coworkers who are upset about their jobs is probably just toxic. I assume the author's situation has more nuance than that, but they didn't provide that in their writing.
- sockmeistr 4y agoThe context is that they work for Tailscale. (I'm guessing you assumed they were FAANG?)
- avgcorrection 4y agoWhy do you guess/assume that assumption?
- ShamelessC 4y agoI made no such assumptions. Doing this in any workplace, tech or no, is toxic to people who are justifiably upset with their workplace. The vibe I was getting was that rather than admit there could be toxic elements at play, the author chooses to blame those complaining instead. It's a tale as old as the workplace.
- escapedmoose 4y agoReally? Don’t you think that motivation to defend one’s employer would correlate with taking pride in one’s work? If someone was spreading false shit about my employer, I would feel the need to set them straight, because I care about the impact my employer has on my community.
- avgcorrection 4y ago
- college_physics 4y agoThere is no option but to engage with people on the internet. Its a new domain in which a new form of social life unfolds. We are horrible at it because the rules of "real" life engagement, honed over millenia of civilization building don't apply, but unless we figure out the new rules we miss out on something important. The reason that after several decades of 'online' we dont converge on something agreeable has much to do with the ever changing technical platforms, outside of the control of users, which seldom have this aspect as one of their driving concern. From their perspective the cynical "any engagement is good engagement" reigns supreme
- josteink 4y ago[flagged]
- camdenlock 4y agoMany HN posters have been pointing this out, yes. It’s getting a bit tiring, but I will once again repeat my multi-decade observational summary: This aesthetic is the norm for the tiny (but rapidly growing) sliver of humanity who, like the author, favors their constructed Internet identities instead of the less-mutable shared reality that we all inhabit together. Such persons tend to be impressively talented with respect to the tiniest minutiae of information systems, somewhat emotionally volatile, obnoxiously socialist in political alignment, and somewhere on the autism spectrum. (Source: am a trans woman who is perfectly content with her identity and form here in our shared reality as a human male. There are more of us than you might think, because it really isn’t a difficult thing to reconcile.)
- skcusgnad 4y agoYou should write about this. Clearly you've thought about this a fair bit. > This aesthetic is the norm for the tiny (but rapidly growing) sliver of humanity who, like the author, favors their constructed Internet identities instead of the less-mutable shared reality that we all inhabit together. This isn't a jab at you; I don't know you at all and don't judge. But what you said would explain why it seems that the overused of furries and anime avatars is overrepresented in the LGBT community. Side note - yesterday I got my account banned for pointing out something along these lines. Dang sucks.
- trandan 4y agoLike most tech forum moderators, dang is actually a closeted trans women who is secretly obsessed with My Little Pony. So please don't be bigoted.
- Tade0 4y agoIt's less so for those who were exposed to this early in life. I had a great conversation about this the other day with a Swiss person in poverty who was upset about Ukrainian refugees driving expensive cars - sometimes people have features that may appear contradictory to you. In any case they do seem to address a certain subset of people - I for one stopped taking any stance on my employer years ago, because why would I?
- cm2187 4y agoWhen you are responding to a ridiculous take on something you are familiar with, you aren't necessarily engaging with the author. I think you are 1) providing readers with a more useful angle, and 2) not giving the wrong impression to a candid reader that this take is somehow a consensus. If it was in a 1:1 online conversation, I agree, it would be mostly pointless. But a forum is more like a public debate (provided the audience is an audience you vaguely care about).
- fullmoon 4y agoYou’re also most likely doing it because you’re getting something out of it: You’re exhibiting your own knowledge, you’re looking for validation, or want to demonstrate your own superior morals. I don’t mean you in particular, but sentences with “one most likely…” are rather hard to read IMO.
- johnisgood 4y agoDo you think most users here post comments for those reasons?
- guerrilla 4y agoImproving the world is getting something out of it. That's in one's own interest by itself.
- bityard 4y agoI would like to hear more about your thesis that arguing with people you don't know on the internet improves the world. :)
- guerrilla 4y agoI don't appreciate the sarcasm but I think it's obvious that you improve the world by, for example, correcting falsehoods and criticizing bad behavior, not because it effects the target (although I suppose there's a tiny chance it might), but for the rest of the audience, some of who may not know better or just may not have even considered it beforehand. Every little bit counts.
- galfarragem 4y agoNowadays I consciously try to do this even (or specially) on real life. People understimate how liberating is it.
- renewiltord 4y agoI do it primarily because I get a kick out of it. But it's true, LLMs have obsoleted the average HN commenter. Though, to be honest, I think we could have done it much earlier. Google => cancel products, spy, don't update OS, no human support Facebook => spy, Cambridge Analytica, ruined Oculus, Apple => expensive, closed ecosystem, high rake I think it would be cool, once we have speed to LLM inference high enough, for each person to receive a "your comment was generated x times in 100 seeds by LLMs that were prompted by this headline". This is the anti-Turing ratio: how botlike are you?
- dmje 4y agoNot expressing an opinion is the missing skill many people need to learn, particularly on social media where the medium is doing all it can to encourage people to get involved. Being able to say “I just don’t know” or “I don’t have the necessary facts” or “this isn't my area of expertise” or, better, to simply say nothing at all is something many “influencers” would do well to learn. Just because you have 50million followers on some platform doesn’t mean you have the expertise to talk about vaccines or whatever the hot topic of the day happens to be. Of course saying you don’t know requires a level of humility that many people simple don’t seem to have but hey, there you go.
- z_zetetic_z 4y agoWatch Rick and morty s6e8 and you will see a great meditation on the topic.
- faebi 4y agoI see it as some kind of mental training, puzzle or fun game. Find and engage in an opposing view, no matter the topic. Of course, do that without being negative, sarcastic but positive and solution oriented. Try to expand the space of options and opinions. And for extremist left/right politics, push it that far until nothing makes sense anymore, while confusing the author. And sometimes I learn something new from it. I think this does not work if you think you can't be wrong. I'm wrong all the time and I accept it without hurting my ego.
- sec400 4y agoFollows the saying "Never wrestle with a pig because you'll both get dirty and the pig likes it."
- lloydatkinson 4y agoNever argue with a hacker news user because they will strut around the chess board and then declare they have won, after some ad hominem attack of course.
- imhoguy 4y ago[flagged]
- gonzo41 4y agoI think some of this boils down to people who are lonely and want some form of connection. -And, there be a good percentage of people in tech, especially in 'visionary' companies that feel some for of identity fusion between they life they spend in their startups and the product the produced. It's unhealthy.
- Havoc 4y ago>"in-crowd" that totally hates everything corporations have "ruined". These views are not representative of the larger world. Is it though? Agree with overall sentiment expressed on not needing to engage but this part seems off.The mega corps ruined everything sentiment strikes me as quite pervasive throughout society.
- krapp 4y agoIt's usually less "the mega corps" and more "the government" and "kids these days."
- genezeta 4y agoFWIW: For people not reading tfa, note that while the title is wide and general, the actual concern expressed in the text is much more specific: It's about not needing to argue in favour of your employer in public.
- xyzelement 4y agoYou definitely don't have to engage with anyone on anything, but if you want to see a change in the world, you have an opportunity to influence the bystanders with your knowledge. I remember being at a party where two people got into an argument about abortion. It was exactly what you would imagine, a completely pointless exchange of rehashed ideas that the 10 people watching the conversation have heard a million times. Then someone chimed in - not to argue but just to drop a fact they possessed that nobody else in the room knew. It didn't change the arguers' minds but it took the other ten people aback like "how come we heard this debate a 1000 times but this very important fact never gets mentioned?" So that random quip influenced 10 people on a very polarizing issue. That's powerful.
- roym6 4y agoWhat was the fact?
- xyzelement 4y agoIt had to do with the number of abortions that take place in the US every year - over 600,000 per year. This number shocked us because everyone in the room thought we had heard everything about this issue, but tacitly assumed a much smaller scale. In my head Bill Clinton's quote about it being "safe, legal and rare" still ring out. It kind of smacked us in the face to realize we were talking about an issue for years without even realizing how often it happens. Maybe you had to be there but it really adjusted a lot of people's views. Maybe it was especially powerful because the fact was dropped on us by someone who wasn't part of the debate, they weren't a prolifer but someone who "could see both sides"
- rqtwteye 4y agoOne thing I have noticed is that a lot of people who engage a lot on the internet turn from reasonable to argumentative and often outright mean. Examples I can think of right now are Jordan Peterson and Elon musk. I also have some friends that seem to have lost their minds and become zealots that like to score quick points by putting other people down. It seems that engaging in social media, especially Twitter, is very unhealthy for people.
- anonair 4y agoSadly (?), in some cultures lying, libel and profanity is not something normally expected even from anonymous strangers, so they basically believe most things on Twitter and Facebook. And applying critical thinking to every piece of info online is too much effort and time-consuming, so that is not practical for the unsophisticated. May be there should be at least some effort to address "realistic looking" misinfo, so that the lack thereof could not be interpreted as avoiding to engage out of fear.
- jmyeet 4y ago> You can just sit back and let people be wrong. Especially when it's about your employer. Here's a better rule: don't argue about, comment on, criticize or even defend your employer in public at all. No good can come of it. You're almost never going to convince someone otherwise and the worst case is you find yourself quoted in the New York Times as "employee of X" (yes, I've seen this happen). Your employer isn't your family. You're not invested in how they're perceived. Your relationship is transactional if they're not paying you to represent them, don't. They will pick you rname on a spreadsheet and fire you tomorrow to slightly improve their bottom line. As for arguing with randoms you generally want to quickly identify which bucket someone falls into: 1. People who reasonably disagree; or 2. The "my feelings matter more than your facts" crowd. You cannot reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into. IME you can quickly separate the two and as soon as someone is clearly in the second camp, just block them (on platforms you can) or stop responding (where you can't). No good can come of it. Furhter engagement can actually turn someone into a "hater". They will follow you around, comment on everything you say and do and may go as far as mass reporting you. Don't let them get that invested.
- JanneVee 4y agoThis is the main excuse for companies when they get flak for their anti-consumer behaviour, that the comments on the internet don't matter. It is somehow rooted in emotions and/or irrational status seeking through imagined Internet points. If people show up in the comments they could have something to say! I know that this is a place of terminally online people and we have seen sooo much bullshit in comments but we can't turn a blind eye to some of the bullshit that big corporations pull and not tell people why we think it is wrong. One of the best examples is that I had to fight Intel fanbois defending software unlocks for CPU performance. It is anti-consumer behaviour where they are artificially segmenting the market to build fewer models. The car manufacturers are doing similar things now where they always put in heated seats in the car and tries to sell the ass heating as a software subscription... when I buy the car I'm paying for the heating coils in the seat and I should be able to turn them on at any time since I bought them.
- cactusplant7374 4y agoReddit is best known for terminally online people. The place where one person leaves a boilerplate comment for another person that they will never interact with again.
- JanneVee 4y agoYes, I feel so much better after quitting reddit. Erased all my users after I cleaned out my comments. I don't engage so often in comments anymore except for the occasional HN comment I drop! Best move for my mental wellbeing recently.
- RHSman2 4y agoYes you do!!!
- dredmorbius 4y agoA/K/A: "You don't have to attend every argument you're invited to." (Sometimes seen as "fight".) I'd run into this via Noah Friedman on the late, little-lamented Google+. Discussion, online or off, is ultimately serving some goal. Online mass discussion is often some mix of tactical and strategic. A late realisation of mine, having been engaged in online discussion since Usenet in the 1980s, is that there are two major divisions of online discussion: dialectical, which is aimed at understanding some greater truth, and rhetorical, which is typically engaged in partisan or ideological promotion. This is a tradition dating to at least the time of the Greeks, see Plato and his tirades against the Sophists, as well as Aristotle's "Sophistical Refutations", or as I prefer to describe it: "Bullshit Arguments Which Must Die". (There are of course numerous other modes of communication and their study is also of interest: narrative, phatic, persuasive, performative (where the speech act itself executes some function, as in swearing an oath or declaring "I do" in a marriage ceremony), descriptive, entertaining, distraction (as with much stage patter in legerdemain, or financial marketing), etc.) It's helpful to realise what type of discussion you're entering into, as well as what audiences exist (there are often multiple). The audience is often not merely your interlocutor. For a domain which has come to dominate media, I've found that people in the tech world are often highly dismissive of the field of communications study (and its antecedents in rhetoric and philosophy). "Communications" whilst a popular field of study when I was at uni was not seen as an especially robust or challenging one, a perception of my own I've somewhat come to regret. Harold Lasswell proposed a five-element model of communications in the 1940s: 1) who 2) says what 3) in what channel 4) to whom 5) with what effect. I'd add a sixth element: with what intent, though in practice intent is often subordinate to effect for numerous reasons, e.g., ascribing a single intent to a collective entity, unintended and unforeseen consequences, etc. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lasswell%27s_model_of_communication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lasswell%27s_model_of_communic...> There's also the matter of understanding mass vs. personal communications, which can be particularly challenging to keep in mind on platforms in which personal exchanges between two parties are also (or can rapidly become) mass or at least public exchanges. (Failure to recognise this seems a frequently recurring source of friction on the Fediverse in particular, with various people asserting the right to speak publicly without others joining in on the discussion.) Simple human psychology makes coping with responses from multiple people, even where that number is relatively low in comparison to a the larger community from which it emerges is challenging. See for example many cases of performers and creators who don't pay attention to general critics and criticism, which is to say, even amongst people whose milieu is the field of mass communications, this can be hard. No wonder it's a challenge to mere mortals.... In a world of hot takes, memetic warfare, and frequently-encountered low-effort, low-comprehension responses, one tactic I've seen (and occasionally used) with some effect is to have and refine over time countermeasures which can be deployed with little effort or cognitive drain, but which effectively communicate a rebutting or countering message. A good example close at hand would be HN's own moderation responses within threads, where many admonitions are frequently recycled, e.g., "Please don't post in the flamewar style". <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22Please%20don%27t%20post%20in%20the%20flamewar%20style%22&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...> While I'll often write dedicated responses to comments or posts (as here), I've also over time developed a few of my own specific rebuttals to commonly-encountered fallacies and myths, though I try not to post those so frequently that they become an annoyance. I'll also refine thoughts on a specific topic over time (universal content syndication comes to mind) which would be an example of why engaging in specific arguments can prove useful in those instances. I'm happy to do my part commit denial-of-attention attacks on tired takes as well though, and pay attention to what's living rent-free in my consciousness.
- Scubabear68 4y agoI really like to debate issues. This leads to many problems on the modern internet. I won’t go into all of them, but the biggest by far is when the real world and online world collide, and you encounter stakeholders not willing to work on a good-faith basis. I live in a small town of around 6,000 people in NJ. Very rural, you have to drive 30+ minutes to get most anywhere. Yet our bucolic town is a hot bed of intrigue because a small but very vocal group of people have come to dominate online conversations. The local Facebook pages have become toxic. A regular stream of lies, false accusations, made up “threats” to the community, false narratives on school referendums, etc are propagated online in an effort to change the actual fiber of our towns. Attempts to engage in good faith leads to the predictable results - name calling, doxxing, character assassination, fake posters. It escalates into stalking, obscene graffiti spray painted on driveways, etc. Facebook is far and away the biggest problem here. The end result is many of the saner people have exited all the local Facebook groups. For me it’s sad that I am now less connected with what’s going on. But it is worth it for getting rid of the drama and stress. Neighbors IRL can disagree (even radically) and still be neighbors. Neighbors on the Internet rapidly devolves into the unhinged and depraved and frankly immoral people (from a golden rule perspective) dominating every conversation. Moderation would seem to be the answer, but hasn’t worked.
- escapedmoose 4y agoThat’s insane! I’ve generally been of the opinion that one can escape the negative effects of social media by simply walking away, so I’m awed to hear that it’s had such a physical, real-world effect on your town. Can I ask if you have any theories as to why it’s spiraled so far out of control? What are the particularly divisive issues? Does your town have an interesting demographic makeup that would exacerbate flamewars? This is really intriguing.
- 2devnull 4y agoIf you hold things inside, in the long run it erodes your soul. Better to speak your mind and relieve the pressure. Often, by voicing opinions, our opinions change. We think, “oh gosh, cringe at what I said,” and then evolve. As Hemingway put it, “continence is the greatest foe to heresy.”
- mgarfias 4y ago1000000% this. Taken me years to learn to turn it off and walk away. Life is much better now. Also, it often works in real life too