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What it's like to be cancelled

noahbradley.com

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Re: What it's like to be cancelled

#11

Post by prepend »

I think the biggest problem with Twitter is that we can’t determine a denominator. Twitter knows, but we don’t know.

100 people tweeting about how this guy is bad might be indicative of a general consensus or might just be 100 people out of a billion Twitter users. People then interpret it as general consensus and pile on.

We know the numerator but since we don’t know the denominator of people who didn’t comment, or disagree, or never saw, or don’t care. So we can’t figure out a ratio and many people assume the denominator is the numerator and the ratio is 1.

“The world won’t do business with this guy, I better fire him” doesn’t make sense if it’s just a very small ratio as who cares if 100 people are upset and 1,000,000 customers don’t care.

I wish Twitter had some ratio of who viewed vs who acted. Or had downvotes or something. Currently, people assuming that a few commenters is everyone is doing bad things.

This coupled with there’s always someone or a small group who holds an opinion so putting too much weight into a few commenters is not smart. Yet frequently done.

Re: What it's like to be cancelled

#12

Post by xwdv »

If you find yourself the target of a cancellation attempt, never give in. Never apologize. If you do, the problem isn’t going to go away, it will get worse. No apology is ever enough. No punishment is ever enough. There is no way to redeem yourself in the eyes of the public. Apologizing is making yourself humbled and vulnerable to a mob that does not deserve it. You will roll over to expose your belly in submission asking for mercy and instead get your guts torn out and burned.

Instead you must harden. Deny everything. Gaslight. You will know you have won when the mob grows tired and cynical from their inability to destroy you.

When the dust has settled, all that will matter is that no one came forward with hard evidence, only he-said-she-said bullshit.

You can downvote me all you want, it does not change the truth.

Re: What it's like to be cancelled

#13

Post by pdonis »

shadeslayer_ wrote: post #6

I'm a bit sceptical about this because it talks very little about what happened that caused OP to get "cancelled", and an awful lot about how they came back from it. I do understand, first-hand, the trauma that comes from being cancelled (although I have like 1500 followers on Twitter so you could argue the stakes are less) and there's no doubt that it is a bitch. But there is something to take away from it - or at l…

> I really wish there was a bit more introspection into how you see your past behaviour in the light of being cancelled.

I don't get this comment. The author says explicitly that he was an asshole in the past, that he changed who he was, and that he apologized privately to the people he had hurt. What more do you want?

Re: What it's like to be cancelled

#14

Post by kstrauser »

mrkurt wrote: post #8
shadeslayer_ wrote: post #6

I'm a bit sceptical about this because it talks very little about what happened that caused OP to get "cancelled", and an awful lot about how they came back from it. I do understand, first-hand, the trauma that comes from being cancelled (although I have like 1500 followers on Twitter so you could argue the stakes are less) and there's no doubt that it is a bitch. But there is something to take away from it - or at l…

There's a little more context here: https://www.hipstersofthecoast.com/2020/06/noah-bradley-admi...

> “I was terrible to women,” Bradley wrote. “I preyed on them. I ceaselessly hit on them. I pressured them into sex. I got too drunk and did all manner of dumb things. Yes, I was one of those shitty, creepy sexual predators you hear about.”

This is literally the first I've heard of Bradley, and I have no knowledge of him outside of this HN post. That's a pretty self-damning quote, though.

Re: What it's like to be cancelled

#16

Post by thebooktocome »

theossuary wrote: post #4

Twitter is vile. I thought that the day the company started, and never created an account; nothing good can come from a platform like Twitter. It's a failure of our laws that there's no recourse to this kind of libel, either against Twitter for basing their business model on it, or the individuals responsible for spreading it. Lives are consistently destroyed and everyone just shrugs their shoulders and goes "aw-shuc…

I didn't see any libel mentioned in the article. The author seems not to dispute the claims made against him.

Re: What it's like to be cancelled

#17

Post by threeboy »

prepend wrote: post #11

I think the biggest problem with Twitter is that we can’t determine a denominator. Twitter knows, but we don’t know. 100 people tweeting about how this guy is bad might be indicative of a general consensus or might just be 100 people out of a billion Twitter users. People then interpret it as general consensus and pile on. We know the numerator but since we don’t know the denominator of people who didn’t comment, or…

"Three men make a tiger"

Re: What it's like to be cancelled

#18

Post by nvahalik »

shadeslayer_ wrote: post #6

I'm a bit sceptical about this because it talks very little about what happened that caused OP to get "cancelled", and an awful lot about how they came back from it. I do understand, first-hand, the trauma that comes from being cancelled (although I have like 1500 followers on Twitter so you could argue the stakes are less) and there's no doubt that it is a bitch. But there is something to take away from it - or at l…

Sometimes people don't want to talk about it. I know society likes to paint people in terms of victims and culprits but people _can_ change. When this happens, sometimes you cut off those parts of your life and then you don't go back. It's hard enough to forgive yourself at times and it takes strength to realize what kind of person you were back then and try to reconcile that with now.

Here's an example of that learning: he obviously has turned from some sort of jerk into someone whose wife didn't want to leave him after all of this happened.

Seems like a big change to me.

Re: What it's like to be cancelled

#19

Post by kleiba »

I don't know the guy, and I don't know what happened. That's why I certainly don't want to side with anyone in this specific case.

But boy, cancel culture and this whole social justice warrior crap makes me so glad that I moved away from the U.S. many years ago to saner parts of the world.

Obviously that is going to get me downvoted to oblivion here on HN. But hey.

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