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I worked at FB for almost 2 years. (I left as soon as I could, I knew it wasn't a good fit for me.) I had an Uber from the campus one day, and my driver, a twe
by nappy-doo 2y ago
I worked at FB for almost 2 years. (I left as soon as I could, I knew it wasn't a good fit for me.)
I had an Uber from the campus one day, and my driver, a twenty-something girl, was asking how to become a moderator. I told her, "no amount of money would be enough for me to do that job. Don't do it."
I don't know if she eventually got the job, but I hope she didn't.
- narrator 2y agoYes, these jobs are horrible. However, I do know from accidently encountering bad stuff on the internet that you want to be as far away from a modern battlefield as possible. It's just kind of ridiculous how people think war is like Call of Duty. One minute you're sitting in a trench, the next you're a pile of undifferentiated blood and guts. Same goes for car accidents and stuff. People really underestimate how fragile we are as human beings. Becoming aware of this is super damaging to our concept of normal life.
- int_19h 2y agoIt's not that we're particularly fragile, given the kind of physical trauma human beings can survive and recover from. It's that we have technologically engineered things that are destructive enough to get even past that threshold. Modern warfare in particular is insanely energetic in the most literal, physical way - when you measure the energy output of weapons in joules. Partly because we're just that good at making things explode, and partly because improvements in metallurgy and electronics made it possible over time to locate targets with extreme precision in real time and then concentrate a lot of firepower directly on them. This, in particular, is why the most intense battlefields in Ukraine often look worse than WW1 and WW2 battles of similar intensity (e.g. Mariupol had more buildings destroyed than Stalingrad). But even our small arms deliver much more energy to the target than their historical equivalents. Bows and arrows pack ~150 J at close range, rapidly diminishing with distance. Crossbows can increase this to ~400 J. For comparison, an AK-47 firing standard issue military ammo is ~2000 J.
- llm_trw 2y agoWatch how a group of wild dogs kill their prey, then realise that for milenia human like apes were part of their diet. Even the modern battlefield is more humane than the African savannah.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y agoThat reminds me of this[0]. It's a segment of BBC's Planet Earth, where a pack of Cape Hunting Dogs are filmed, hunting. It's almost military precision. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRS4XrKRFMA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRS4XrKRFMA
- keybored 2y ago> Even the modern battlefield is more humane than the African savannah. On behalf of dead WWI soldiers I find this offensive.
- BehindBlueEyes 2y agoYeah, I tracked a lost dog and found the place it was caught by wolves and eventually eaten. Terrible way to go. I get now why the owner was so desperate to find it, even without any hope of the dog surviving - I'd want to end it quicker for my dogs too if this happened to them.
- newsclues 2y agoHumans can render other humans unrecognizable with a rock. Brutal murder is low tech.
- noduerme 2y agoWatching someone you love die of cancer is also super damaging to one's concept of normal life. Getting a diagnosis, or being in a bad car accident, or the victim of a violent assault is, too. I think a personal sense of normality is nothing more than the state of mind where we can blissfully (and temporarily) forget about our own mortality. Obviously, marinating yourself in all the horrible stuff makes it really hard to maintain that state of mind. On the other hand, never seeing or reckoning with or preparing for how brutal reality actually is can lead to a pretty bad shock once something bad happens around you. And maybe worse, can lead you to under-appreciate how fantastic and beautiful the quotidian moments of your normal life actually are. I think it's important to develop a concept of normal life that doesn't completely ignore that really bad things happen all around us, all the time.
- karlgkk 2y agoFrankly there’s a difference between a one or two or even ten off exposure to the brutality of life, where various people in your life will support you and help you acclimate to it Versus straight up mainlining it for 8 hours a day
- stephenitis 2y agohey kid, hope you're having a good life. I'll look at the screen full of the worst the internet and humanity has produced on the internet for eight hours. I get your idea but in the context of this topic I think you're overreaching
- keybored 2y ago... okay. Emergency personnel might need to braze themselves for car accidents every day. That Kenyans need to be traumatized by Internet Content in order to make a living is just silly and unnecessary.
- ashoeafoot 2y agoISISomalia loves that recruitment pool though
- portaouflop 2y ago
- doublerabbit 2y agoOne does not fully-experience life until you encounter a death of something you care about. It being a pet, person; nothing gives you that real sense of reality until your true feelings are challenged. I used to live in the Disney headspace until my dog had to be put down. Now with my parents being in their seventies, and me in my thirties I fear losing them the most as the feeling of losing my dog was hard enough.
- batch12 2y agoThat's the tragic consequence of being human. Either the people you care about leave first or you do, but in the end, everyone goes. We are blessed and cursed with the knowledge to understand this. We should try to maximize the time we spend with those that are important to us.
- wholinator2 2y agoWell, i think it goes to a point. I'd imagine there's some goldilocks zone of time spent with the animal, care experienced from the animal, dependence on the animal, and manner/speed of death/ time spent watching the thing die. I say animal to explicitly include humans. Finding my hamster dead in fifth grade did change me. But watching my mother slowly die a horrible, haunting death didn't make me a better person. I'm just saying that there's a spectrum that goes something like: easy to forget about, I'm able to not worry, sometimes i think about it when i dont want, often i think about it, often it bothers me, and do on. You can probably imagine the cycle of obsession and stress. This really goes for all traumatic experiences. There's a point where they can make you a better person, but there's a cliff after which you have no guarantees that it won't just start obliterating you and your life. It's still a kind of perspective. But can you have too much perspective? Lots of times i feel like i do
- FireBeyond 2y agoSpeaking as a paramedic, two things come to mind: 1) I don't have squeamishness about trauma. In the end, we are all blood and tissue. The calls that get to me are the emotionally traumatic, the child abuse, domestic violence, elder abuse (which of course often have a physical component too, but it's the emotional for me), the tragic, often preventable accidents. 2) There are many people, and I get the curiosity, that will ask "what's the worst call you've been on?" - one, you don't really want to hear, and two, "Hey, person I may barely know, do you think you can revisit something traumatic for my benefit/curiosity?"
- BobaFloutist 2y agoIt's also super easy to come up with better questions: "What's the funniest call you've ever been on?" "What call do you feel like you made the biggest difference?" "What's the best story you have?"
- Modified3019 2y agoThat’s an excellent way to put it, resonates with my (non medical) experience. It’s the emotional stuff that will try to follow me around and be intrusive. I won’t watch most movies or TV because they are just some sort of tragedy porn.
- coliveira 2y ago> movies or TV because they are just some sort of tragedy porn 100% agree. Most TV series nowadays are basically violence porn, now that real porn is not allowed for all kinds of reasons.
- ocschwar 2y agoI'd be asking "how bad is the fentanyl situation in your are?"
- FireBeyond 2y agoRelatively speaking, not particularly. What's interesting now is how many patients will say "You're not going to give me fentanyl are you? That's really dangerous stuff", etc. Their perfect right, of course, but is sad that that's the public perception - it's extremely effective, and quite safe, used properly (for one, we're obviously only giving it from pharma sources, with actually properly dosed solutions for IV).
- nradov 2y agoI don't mean to trivialize traumatic experiences but I think many modern people, especially the pampered members of the professional-managerial class, have become too disconnected from reality. Anyone who has hunted or butchered animals is well aware of the fragility of life. This doesn't damage our concept of normal life.
- Eisenstein 2y agoWhat is it about partaking in or witnessing the killing of animals or humans that makes one more connected to reality?
- AnarchismIsCool 2y agoLots of people who spend time working with livestock on a farm describe a certain acceptance and understanding of death that most modern people have lost.
- Eisenstein 2y ago[flagged]
- sabbaticaldev 2y ago[flagged]
- Eisenstein 2y agoSocratic questioning is not cluelessness and your inability to answer does not bolster your position.
- zmgsabst 2y agoSocratic questioning requires the asker to have a deeper understanding whereby they guide with their questions. Do you think that’s what people see in yours?
- sandworm101 2y ago>> ridiculous how people think war is like Call of Duty. It is also ridiculous how people think every soldier's experience is like Band of Brothers or Full Metal Jacket. I remember an interview with a WWII vet who had been on omaha beach: "I don't remember anything happening in slow motion ... I do remember eating a lot of sand." The reality of war is often just not visually interesting enough to put on the screen.
- HPsquared 2y agoI'm no longer interested in getting a motorcycle, for similar reasons.
- zmgsabst 2y agoYou’re only about 20x as likely to die on a motorcycle as in a car. What can I say? People like to live dangerously.
- alamortsubite 2y agoYes, but you're also far less likely to kill other people on a motorcycle as in a car (and even less, as in an SUV or pick-up truck). So some people live much less dangerously with respect to the people around them.
- HPsquared 2y agoI suppose 20x a low number is still pretty low, especially given that number includes the squid factor.
- spacechild1 2y agoI spent my civil service as a paramedic assistent at the countryside, close to a mountainroad that was very popular with bikers. I was never interested in motorbikes in the first place, but the gruesome accidents I've witnessed turned me off for good.
- ocschwar 2y agoThe Venn diagram for EMTs, paramedics, and motorbikes is disjoint.
- andrepd 2y agoI'm pretty sure watching videos on /r/watchpeopledie or rekt threads on 4chan has been a net positive for me. I'm keenly aware of how dangerous cars are, that wars (including narcowars) are hell, that I should never stay close to a bus or truck as a pedestrian or bycicle, that I should never get into a bar fight... And that I'm very very lucky that I was not born in the 3rd world.
- gosub100 2y agoI get more upset watching people lightly smack and yell at each other on public freakout than I do watching people die. It's not that I don't care about the dead either, I watched wpd and similar sites for years. I didn't enjoy watching it, but I liked knowing the reality of what was going on in the world, and how each one of us has the capacity to commit these atrocities. I'm still doing a lousy job at describing why I like to watch it. But I do.
- mdanger007 2y agoStreet fight videos, where the guy recording is Hooting and egging people on are disgusting
- Shorel 2y ago> Becoming aware of this is super damaging to our concept of normal life. Not being aware of this is also a cause of traffic accidents. People should be more careful driving.
- BehindBlueEyes 2y agoYou can be aware without having to see the most gruesome parts of it to a point where it is traumatizing and damaging. I've seen the crumpled metal of a car, I don't need to see the people inside to know it is not good.
- DirkH 2y agoI disagree. Or at least I do for myself. It is the same reason studying physics theory alone is sometimes not enough to "get it". Often to really learn something you need the dirty real-life demo. You don't have to excessively see hours upon hours of such footage. But a single harsh and gruesome traffic death footage sure as hell made me more careful in traffic. No amount of crumpled car metal was going to properly internalize in me how sudden and unexpected death can be and how fragile life really is.
- portaouflop 2y agoNormal does not exist - it’s just the setting on your washing machine.
- h_tbob 2y agoI concluded that we really should have the speed limit at 45mph on highways. Then one body dying on the road would be so rare it would be newsworthy.
- LeftHandPath 2y agoEarlier this year, I was at ground zero of the Super Bowl parade shooting. I didn’t ever dream about it, but I spent the following 3-4 days constantly replaying it in my head in my waking hours. Later in the year I moved to Florida, just in time for Helene and Milton. I didn’t spend much time thinking about either of them (aside from during prep and cleanup and volunteering a few weeks after). But I had frequent dreams of catastrophic storms and floods. Different stressors affect people (even myself) differently. Thankfully I’ve never had a major/long-term problem, but I know my reactions to major life stressors never seemed to have any rhyme or reason. I can imagine many people might’ve been through a few things that made them confident they’d be alright with the job, only to find out dealing with that stuff 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week is a whole different ball game.
- sandworm101 2y agoA parade shooting is bad, very bad, but is still tame compared to the sorts of things to which website moderators are exposed on a daily/hourly basis. Footage of people being shot is actually allowed on many platforms. Just think of all the war footage that is so common these days. The dark stuff that moderators see is way way worse.
- wkat4242 2y ago> Footage of people being shot is actually allowed on many platforms. It's also part of almost every American cop and military show and movie. Of course it's not real but it looks the same.
- consumer451 2y agoI have often wondered what would happen if social product orgs required all dev and product team members to temporarily rotate through moderation a couple times a year.
- Teever 2y agoYeah I've wondered the same thing about jobs in general too. Society would be a very different place if everyone had to do customer service or janitorial work one weekend a month.
- ANewFormation 2y agoMany (all?) Japanese schools don't have janitors. Instead students clean on rotation. Never been much into Japanese stuff but I absolutely admire this about their culture, and imagine it's part of the reason that Japan is such a clean and at least superficially respectful society. Living in other Asian nations where there are often defacto invisible caste systems can be nauseating at times - you have parents that won't allow their children to participate in clean up efforts because their child is 'above handling trash.' That's gonna be one well adjusted adult...
- alex-korr 2y agoI can tell you that back when I worked as a dev for the department building order fulfillment software at a dotcom, my perspective on my own product has drastically changed after I had spent a month at a warehouse that was shipping orders coming out of the software we wrote. Eating my own dog food was not pretty.