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It shouldn't surprise you that online communities are a reflection of human nature. The behaviors we see are the effects of groupthink taken to its extreme. Eve
by imiric 3y ago
It shouldn't surprise you that online communities are a reflection of human nature. The behaviors we see are the effects of groupthink taken to its extreme. Even in "civilized" forums such as this one, you'll notice people conforming with the group mentality, and deleting their posts if they get downvoted. When there is little to no moderation, and viciousness is acceptable within the group, this behavior will spiral out of control, as individuals try to one-up each other, leading to vigilantism, manufactured outrage, cancel culture, racism, and all sort of abhorrent behavior an individual wouldn't do in isolation. We all seek validation in our ideas, after all.
All of this still exists offline, BTW. This is how riots happen. What the internet does is make it more possible by connecting more people than we traditionally could communicate with, and providing a safe space for any kind of discussion to happen. It's a tool our tribal monkey brains aren't ready for.
- dustincoates 3y agoI think you're largely right, but IMO the difference between what happens online and what happens offline is that you have to look people in the eye offline and you may encounter them randomly in person. There's a moderating function that generally (not always) keeps the heat down. Same for pile-ons. I'm not so naive to think that they never happen offline, but there's a higher cost to doing them than there is when all you have to do is write 140 characters to dunk on someone you won't even remember in two weeks.
- rightbyte 3y agoReddit is far worse than human nature, I believe. The upvote and downvote system favours people that are authoritarian (as a personality trait). There is this sect like wibe nowadays on Reddit.
- imiric 3y agoI don't think voting is related. There are some subreddits that do have quality content, but this requires a substantial moderation effort. The *chan sites are even worse than Reddit, and there's no user voting AFAIK. Slashdot had a voting system before Reddit, and the discussion there is mostly civilized. Usenet didn't have a voting system, and the discussions were civilized before Eternal September, when users generally followed a netiquette. HN itself has limited voting and civilized discussion, but the site could get overrun at any point if the userbase grows rapidly, and new users decide not to follow the rules. There have been Reddit-type comments here for a few years now, and it seems to be increasing. So it's a matter of community morals and values, and laborious moderation efforts to sustain it. Once the community grows large enough, moderating content becomes unmanageable. All large social media sites struggle with this, as they literally can't keep up with the amount of content. This is a scale problem that is unique to the internet.
- Forgotthepass8 3y agoReddit is arguably worse than 4chan on this front. I don't know about altchans. Imageboards push actually contrarianism to some degree as it gets more replies (the only metric equivalent to a voting system)
- rightbyte 3y agoNo I think the upvote and downvote system gives psychotic vibes. The normal disagreement does not exist (outside some niche subs maybe). I dunno but Slashdot but you can have a voting system if users are not using it to silence those they disagree with. Not showing the score goes a long way of keeping it sane, like HN.