I've always thought anonymous imageboards were excellent training grounds for how to deal with all of this. When there's no upvoting or ability to filter people by name, you have to learn how to deal with people who often truly are only posting to make you mad. There are two good responses, both of which are extremely difficult if you have no practice: ignoring it; engaging sincerely and with the assumption that the other person is doing the same. If you persist with the first they'll eventually go and bother someone else, but this is doubly hard because it requires everyone to ignore them, and that only really happens when the bait has grown stale. The second often results in them switching from the troll persona to actual sincerity, but it requires several back and forths of responding with goodwill to bile, and I think it's even harder to accomplish in forums where people have tied their name to their opinions.
The Internet of Beefs
61–70 of 342 posts
Re: The Internet of Beefs
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is spot on. I wonder if this exodus has resulted in people trying to make workplaces their "religious community"; but obviously people who happen to be at the same company don't have any reason to agree on important issues. So then the mission becomes trying to make everyone at work care about and agree on .
It's almost like our social bonds are being broken in the same way chemical bonds get broken when we digest food. Like our capitalist society is a higher-order organism that is extracting energy from our societal bonds.
I think this way of looking at it is interesting and I don’t see why your comment is currently being downvoted.
Sun Tzu wrote about humans acting as a bigger organism when an army work together as one.
And with that in mind, and with your comment on top of that, I wonder:
We generally agree that self-awareness is a sign of general intelligence, right? So if a group of people see them selves as one, in some sense, and act as one in some sense, then could we say that we are witnessing an organism that is built from people and that is elevated over the mind of just each of the individual people?
In the same way that we people are made of what I will very scientifically refer to as “a bunch of smaller stuff” but yet we are more than just the individual bits of stuff we are made of because as a whole each of us have our self-awareness and all that.
That is, something of higher general intelligence than its parts.
Re: The Internet of Beefs
#63HN is pretty good at moderating discussions. Which is the main reason I come here. Still, I've seen plenty of beef only thinking here and I too have been guilty at times. It can be quite frustrating when you make an observation about someone's comment only to have them automatically assume you were in disagreement. It's good to assume a generous interpretation. Since tone is so hard to gauge on the Internet, discussi…
HN is now my last un-deleted social media account... and even here I end up removing 50% of my posts, and regretting another 30-odd% after realizing they were low-value emotional negative "beef" post. Why is "if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all" so hard in practice? Why do I just NEED to throw in my 2 cents?!
> if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all
Because pleasantness isn't a virtue in every context? Some unpleasant things need to be done and said sometimes. In fact, saying no in certain contexts is good, though it can often be unpleasant.
That being said, some people find it pleasant to be unpleasant. Certainly self-censor if you sense that urge arising. Getting drunk on anger or righteousness isn't a good look.
Re: The Internet of Beefs
#64I hesitate to criticize this person, because they're presumably writing for an audience that already knows them, and probably are following for this style of writing, but I have to ask: What is it with think-pieces that state obvious and widespread conclusions while using jargon and jokes to obscure how basic of conclusions they really are? I can't fault people who do this because they're paid by the word and taking…
I suppose you could have shortened your comment here to "Why is this article so long?". Why all the extra words?
My personal gripe with articles like this one is that they invent their own terms to frame the discussion in a particular way, perhaps in the hope that some time in the future, people will really start talking about "Internet beefs" or "beefy conversations" or something equally silly. The issue isn't the length - after all, use as many words necessary - the issue is with the relative paucity of research into whether this topic has been addressed in the relevant fields (sociology, psychology, media studies).
Does the concept already exist in the literature? Are there any similar concepts?
Let me have a go at it. I call this "the hacker blogger mindset", in which relevant literature in the field is passed over or simply ignored (assuming due diligence has been taken to research the topic, which it often hasn't been) in favour of a kind of NIH-syndrome thinking in which every concept the author thinks of is novel, it has not been noticed before by lay people or the academic community, and of course it hasn't been written up into a snazzy article with nice jargon that makes us sound clever like "mook manorialism". We'll throw a reference to Francis Fukuyama or Weber in there to convince the more skeptical that this is more than an unsubstantiated blog post.
A famous guardian of the hacker blogger mindset is Scott Alexander[0] (and to a lesser extent Paul Graham and the LessWrong community), but it's nice to see new contestants who want to try their hand at sociological analysis without referencing any sociology. I hope I'm not being too crude when I say that essays like this are a kind of poor man's academy. You don't have to learn about standing objections to the theory (or the theory's assumptions) made by experts, because I called my theory "internet beef", and the remarkably similar academic theory that already exists isn't called "internet beef" - so none of your objections are valid against my internet beef!
The optimist inside me wants to think that this topic hasn't been covered before, and that the essay addresses a problem that hasn't been addressed before. If that were the case, however, I would have expected the author to at least state as such - that after reading tens of papers on discourse analysis and Internet sociology, nothing similar to "Internet beef" showed up. Maybe I'm wrong and being unfair to the author - in which case, fair enough. Unfortunately, it doesn't negate all the other times I've seen this.
[0] Scott wrote a whole post on his blog about a particular German philosopher. As it turns out, he hadn't read any of the philosopher's works, but only Peter Singer's much-criticized entry in the Short Introductions series. This was sufficient. Likewise, the author of this blog post doesn't seem to have read up on Internet discourse analysis, a topic which a search on Google Scholar throws up hundreds of papers.
Re: The Internet of Beefs
#65At some point people will realize that Twitter doesn't matter. The sooner that happens the better. For whatever reason, our elites and media are convinced Twitter is very important . Nothing is worse than getting criticized by the peanut gallery. Twitter can end careers, cancel television shows, bring down elected officials. That power quickly turned from, "complain about lost baggage on Twitter and get an airline ti…
This 100%. Twitter is utterly irrelevant to 99% of people and organisations on the planet, and the opinions of people on it don't reflect the mainstream in any way whatsoever. It's especially noticeable in election cycles, where the 'extremes' seem to do really well on Twitter but get curbstomped in the actual polls.
But it's also noticeable in many so called examples of cancel culture too, since the whole result of your usual internet backdraft is... nothing much in particular. Everyone I've seen get hammered by negative reactions after saying something controversial online has seen the popularity not change one jot. Logan Paul? Still doing decently. The Nostalgia Critic? Still going strong. The people making these complaints have virtually zero pull as far as actual influence goes, and the angry gnashing of a few hundred/thousand Twitter users is vastly outweighed by a hundred times more people subscribing/following/supporting stars as normal.
For the most part, almost every business is in the same boat. The people on Twitter don't matter. They're not your customers. Most of your real customers don't give a toss what some angry internet 'influencer' thinks or their complaints about your 'offensive' remarks.
When people finally realise that, everything will quiet down and sanity will return.
Re: The Internet of Beefs
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is spot on. I wonder if this exodus has resulted in people trying to make workplaces their "religious community"; but obviously people who happen to be at the same company don't have any reason to agree on important issues. So then the mission becomes trying to make everyone at work care about and agree on .
I have spoke to many people who have said that they feel that work has replaced their social life, myself included to a degree. It also means that people don't want to move on in their careers as they get too comfortable with their work family and pass on better opportunities. I have a coworker who passed on a great opportunity just because he really likes working with everyone. A close friend had to be prodded by hi…
> I have a coworker who passed on a great opportunity just because he really likes working with everyone.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but your tone makes me believe you think your coworker made the wrong decision.
I'm actually jealous of your coworker. Currently, if someone offered me a better career opportunity, I'd likely take it without hesitation; but I wish that weren't the case. I don't hate my current position, but I wish I loved it more to the point where leveling up, learning the newest framework, and making more money wasn't the priority.
On top of that, everyone around me seems to be more focused on the trajectory of their life rather than their current situation, so I feel like its hard for me to get out of this rat race mindset.
Re: The Internet of Beefs
#67This article resonates with me and my experiences online to a startling degree. Specifically: “We are not beefing endlessly because we do not desire peace or because we do not know how to engineer peace. We are beefing because we no longer know who we are, each of us individually, and collectively as a species.” I think we are seeing a genuine lack of strong family, social, and organizational ties among most people,…
I agree with you, and I too kept thinking "Hmm, that is a really good point." but I found the statement you called out somewhat at odds with the rest of the thesis.
What I understood him to say was that his thesis is that culture wars are not about identity and yet this endless conflict is about a lack of identity. So where does identity really fit in there?
The economic and political incentives of inciting "beefing" were spot on. And there is nothing like amping up the inequality of the distribution of wealth to put energy into the "beef battery" (if such a thing existed).
Re: The Internet of Beefs
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is spot on. I wonder if this exodus has resulted in people trying to make workplaces their "religious community"; but obviously people who happen to be at the same company don't have any reason to agree on important issues. So then the mission becomes trying to make everyone at work care about and agree on .
It's almost like our social bonds are being broken in the same way chemical bonds get broken when we digest food. Like our capitalist society is a higher-order organism that is extracting energy from our societal bonds.
Not saying capitalism is devoid of fault but it seems like consumerism is more directly to blame
Re: The Internet of Beefs
#69This article resonates with me and my experiences online to a startling degree. Specifically: “We are not beefing endlessly because we do not desire peace or because we do not know how to engineer peace. We are beefing because we no longer know who we are, each of us individually, and collectively as a species.” I think we are seeing a genuine lack of strong family, social, and organizational ties among most people,…
Thank you for crystallising this succinctly.
The loss of cultural meeting places, be they churches, or arcades, or malls, is something I consider a huge loss as well. The pendulum might swing the other way yet, however.
If we can reinvest in our community centers and hacker spaces and make them part of the zeitgeist, we might all be rehumanize a bit.
Re: The Internet of Beefs
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is spot on. I wonder if this exodus has resulted in people trying to make workplaces their "religious community"; but obviously people who happen to be at the same company don't have any reason to agree on important issues. So then the mission becomes trying to make everyone at work care about and agree on .
I have spoke to many people who have said that they feel that work has replaced their social life, myself included to a degree. It also means that people don't want to move on in their careers as they get too comfortable with their work family and pass on better opportunities. I have a coworker who passed on a great opportunity just because he really likes working with everyone. A close friend had to be prodded by hi…
Alternative proposition.
'Moving on in your career' may be horribly overrated, or at the very least not something everyone prioritises the same way.
Enjoying the work you do, and the people you do it with, and being satisfied by same, may be a sufficiently compelling reason to not engage in high-risk behaviour for the sake of 'advancing your salary'.