When a cold case is solved, why can't internet sleuths move on?

This is really interesting:

It was then that the realization set in in the subreddit: after all these years, after hundreds of thousands of hours of theorizing and plotting and thinking and organizing, they might never find out the true identity of Lyle Stevik. His identity was known to the police, and to DNA Doe, but it was never revealed to the subreddit. And it might never be; as of press time, the family has declined to share the information.

It seems like there’s two ways to look at this. The first is... the subreddit didn’t materially contribute to solving the case, apart from putting up $1500 for DNA sequencing. The critical research was done by a specialist volunteer org, and law enforcement located and contacted the family.

It seems like being able to identify folks using genetic ancestry is a really valuable service; it also seems like a good thing that, to the average redditor, this service is a black box that produces a single bit of output. If the person (family, in this case) who has been identified doesn’t want their name to be public, that should be their choice.

So, that all is working as intended. But at the same time...

In 20 years, nobody ever put up the money for DNA testing. Why would they? There must be millions of cases like this, and for most of that time sequencing cost a lot more than $1500.

The price is still going down, so eventually someone would have done this. Maybe once the cost of sequencing hit $50, or $1. I don’t know, at what point do we start DNA testing every single cold case Doe, since forever? Probably not for a long, long time. Maybe long enough to be forgotten entirely.

The folks on the subreddit cared, is my point, when no one else did. They picked this person to care about, out of all the unsolved mysteries to choose from. I don’t think there’s any particular explanation; he just happened to catch their fancy, and then they spent a lot of time thinking about him. In a weird digital-era way, he was kind of their friend.

And it makes a lot of sense that there would be some shock and isolation at having their care rejected, having their “friendship” invalidated. I can get that. And I kind of think that if the family grokked how much these folks cared about their person, and how little anyone else did, their response might be a little different.

March of Dimes actually succeeded in its mission to eradicate polio, then was faced with either disbanding or coming up with a new mission. They went with the latter.

This is a rare success story. It is much more common for charities to essentially do counterproductive things that help keep the problem alive so they will continue to have a reason for being.

This is something I have learned to be incredibly leery of. Programs to "help the homeless" are often programs that help keep people stuck. If you really care, you should be aiming at policies that reduce the incidence of homelessness, preferably via prevention, rather than big feels squee-worthy approaches where you expect some pathetic soul to grovel and be effusively grateful while their life probably remains in the toilet.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_of_Dimes

> And, probably most, they want to know why he did what he did — hole up at a hotel in the middle of nowhere, and end his life. And that is almost certainly an impossible question, one that no amount of internet sleuthing will answer.

That's a strange statement. Outside of "can you ever really know another person, man?" there are plenty of suicides and attempts that are very straightforward to explain.

Don't know why this is downvoted. It's a bit glib, but it's not really false. You can't just take a random selection of humans, put them on the internet together, and reasonably expect something non-bad to happen. You have to select, curate a community, before focus will align toward anything that's not "we're bored let's anonymously fuck with people"

Is there such a thing as a "healthy" internet community? I'd argue not. So much of our society's ills these days is people not dealing face-to-face