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Life after an internet mob attack
101–110 of 480 posts
Re: Life after an internet mob attack
#102Had me for a while, then unfortunately lost me at the quote of Scott Adams. Adams is EXACTLY who I think anyone should avoid quoting at all costs, when you’re rightfully criticizing the Internet Morality Hordes. If you wanna know why, just scroll his Twitter timeline.
Re: Life after an internet mob attack
#103The best solution here is to completely disconnect from social media or (at most) have an incredibly sanitized presence. Unless your job or livelihood revolves around needing to engage with a random internet audience (i.e. you're an influencer, entertainer, etc.) stay away from having a public persona on Twitter/Facebook/etc. The only community I interact with candidly tends to be this one. I don't post on Twitter, F…
Having a following on social media has great benefits for regular techies, not just influencers and entertainers, etc. It lets you magnify your resume to reach people with authority who you normally couldn't connect with. It helps you get spots at conferences, seats on cool new projects or positions that you can further leverage to increase your online fame and bump up your compensation. You can also use your followi…
You can certainly be both an "influencer" and a "techie" but what you describe is someone participating in the "influencer" side of things and no longer being just a "regular" techie.
There are a lot of benefits of being an influencer, but it has its downsides too.
(s/influencer/celebrity for a few decades ago...)
Re: Life after an internet mob attack
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oops, mea culpa . I mistook another screenshot in his post to be his own account. Yeah, 16k isn't that much; pretty sad.
Historically, even just a few decades ago, if you had reach of sixteen thousand (!!) people, you were incredibly publicly exposed. To think that we now file it as “not that much” is something I can’t wrap my mind around.
Not really. If you put a classified ad in a Chicago paper saying you were having a garage sale, you were exposed to a million people and had the direct attention of the many thousands who would actually read the ad. If you spent an hour putting up flyers at major intersections near the bar you were playing at on Thursday night, thousands of people per hour would see them.
It's important to remember that there are as many people following 10K people as are being followed by 10K people. They aren't really paying attention to 10K people's photos of their lunches or stray observations on Ohio sports.
Re: Life after an internet mob attack
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
That kind of scenario doesn’t seem relevant, given the kind of attacks this thread is about, but if shown a damning screenshot, I would hope that I would not not immediately disavow a friend before looking into it, and if the situation was indeed that bad, would still love my friend enough to help them rehabilitate and obtain forgiveness from the people they wronged. I believe it’s possible to temporarily withdraw go…
This is a good and much more balanced/nuanced outlook. However (in my hypothetical scenario which was meant to challenge the utility of blanket statements of support), a message of support does effectively act as a counterweight to an accusation, and unless one possesses all of the facts it may have the effect of laundering the reputation of somebody who deserves criticism (though I’d argue that in most instances, ca…
I think that a culture of lovingly challenging our friends is part of the solution to that problem of that counterweighting. I should be the first to uncover the sins, if you will, of my friend, and urge repentance and restitution, temporarily withholding approval to achieve that end, and involving more people in that knowledge to the degree necessary with public shaming being a last resort. (In this example, the problem is not one requiring legal intervention.)
Sadly, the idea that a friend can be a loyal one, while insisting on good behavior, seems alien today.
Re: Life after an internet mob attack
#106The best solution here is to completely disconnect from social media or (at most) have an incredibly sanitized presence. Unless your job or livelihood revolves around needing to engage with a random internet audience (i.e. you're an influencer, entertainer, etc.) stay away from having a public persona on Twitter/Facebook/etc. The only community I interact with candidly tends to be this one. I don't post on Twitter, F…
+1. I did exactly this a few years back when I saw a prominent member of the Nodejs community get savaged for linking to an article (exploring the idea that campus speech codes might adversely impact autistic people). I thought "if they can (nearly) take down this guy (a Nodejs technical steering committee member) for linking to a blog post, what are they going to do to me, Joe Nobody?" I was primarily a consultant at the time and relied on being invited to conferences to give talks & trainings in order to drum up new consulting work. Reputational damage would have been devastating to my income as a freelancer.
So participating "in the public sphere" was just not worth the risk. I had no idea what view I express today might in the future be deemed unacceptable. Even just being visible on there makes you more of a target–it's harder to have a pile-on on, say, someone's blog.
I miss twitter and facebook at times (quit facebook for different reasons), but overall it's a huge relief to not be contributing to those ecosystems.
Re: Life after an internet mob attack
#107What shocked me the most was his listing of "the quality of my relationships with people" and what looks like people pretending to be friends towards him while sacrificing him for publicity behind his back. I'd say the main point to be learned from this story is that you need to be very careful whom you consider a true friend, as opposed to just an acquaintance. Because they might not care as much about you as you ca…
This ^ your friends will have your back.
Re: Life after an internet mob attack
#108Had me for a while, then unfortunately lost me at the quote of Scott Adams. Adams is EXACTLY who I think anyone should avoid quoting at all costs, when you’re rightfully criticizing the Internet Morality Hordes. If you wanna know why, just scroll his Twitter timeline.
I've lost as much respect for Scott Adams as anyone, so I'd agree that quoting him is ill advised, but the underlying sentiment is not wrong. Mobs do cause harm, not least because they make redemption harder than it already is. In a way, treating a Scott Adams quote as an automatic disqualifier is only making the OP's point.
Re: Life after an internet mob attack
#109The problem is previously we didn't listen to victims, and allowed them to be silenced. Now the pendulum has swung the other way, and we are listening unconditionally, but (occasionally) bad actors are taking advantage of our good intentions. How do we find balance?
This is essentially why civilization has legal systems and courts. Unfortunately, legal systems and courts don't scale to internet (global) scale. You'll be "dead," metaphorically speaking, of an internet mob attack before your lawyer even calls you back.
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Re: Life after an internet mob attack
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a good and much more balanced/nuanced outlook. However (in my hypothetical scenario which was meant to challenge the utility of blanket statements of support), a message of support does effectively act as a counterweight to an accusation, and unless one possesses all of the facts it may have the effect of laundering the reputation of somebody who deserves criticism (though I’d argue that in most instances, ca…
I think that a culture of lovingly challenging our friends is part of the solution to that problem of that counterweighting. I should be the first to uncover the sins, if you will, of my friend, and urge repentance and restitution, temporarily withholding approval to achieve that end, and involving more people in that knowledge to the degree necessary with public shaming being a last resort. (In this example, the pro…
This is very good. I definitely endorse this approach (and largely agree with your final sentence).