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Disproportionate amount of bad online behaviour stems from psychological issues

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111–120 of 233 posts

Re: Disproportionate amount of bad online behaviour stems from psychological issues

#111

Trolls create anger and conflict and conflict drives engagement. But that is as nothing compared to the engagement you get from public spectacles of righteous indignation. Social media breeds a special sort narcissistic positive feedback loop and it turns out a very small amount of validation is all that is required to set people off. But trolls usually know they're trolls. On the other hand take for example Twitter…

that's a very positive and progressive profile imho

Re: Disproportionate amount of bad online behaviour stems from psychological issues

#113

Trolls create anger and conflict and conflict drives engagement. But that is as nothing compared to the engagement you get from public spectacles of righteous indignation. Social media breeds a special sort narcissistic positive feedback loop and it turns out a very small amount of validation is all that is required to set people off. But trolls usually know they're trolls. On the other hand take for example Twitter…

You don't even have to look at extremes like Oli London (thanks for the link, them/they/kor/ean are awesome!) for an example. In the past few years, whenever I hear about something new American wokes are suggesting or something Trump said, most of the time I can't guess whether I'm being trolled or not.

Re: Disproportionate amount of bad online behaviour stems from psychological issues

#114
post #66
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what are the psychological issues that led you to write this comment?

DSM-IV or real? I have a number of (diagnosed and otherwise) mental illnesses. I also write Haskell for enjoyment, and help people with Linux on the internet even though it benefits me in no way. I care about mathematics and computation more than climate change and the feelings of people close to me. Is that ok?

Out of curiosity, have you read any of DSM? I've read some portions of DSM-V and found it to be, on the whole, more reasonable than it is typically given credit. Perhaps some of that is owing to improvements made over the years, but nonetheless.

Re: Disproportionate amount of bad online behaviour stems from psychological issues

#116
post #94

Nothing has changed since Jerry Pournelle wrote 35 years ago when discussing online forums: >I noticed something: most of the irritation came from a handful of people, sometimes only one or two. If I could only ignore them, the computer conferences were still valuable. Alas, it's not always easy to do. This is what killed Usenet,[1] which 40 years ago offered much of the virtues of Reddit in decentralized form. The n…

> The network's design has several flaws, most importantly no way for any central authority to completely delete posts

Notice that HN mods can completely delete posts, but never do so (or at least, not without the target’s permission). Flag, yes, delete, no.

I think it’s a cool distinction, and hopefully future social networks will take a cue from it. Being able to see what’s going on (showdead) felt like an important diff from Reddit, and avoided much of the “un-edit Reddit” wars. (There are sites dedicated to tracking deletions by moderators.)

Re: Disproportionate amount of bad online behaviour stems from psychological issues

#117
post #96
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because you can't identify what's going wrong to make someone's car have unresponsive steering (the etiology ), doesn't mean you can't precisely identify the car as having unresponsive steering (the symptoms .) Psychology is just fine at recognizing symptoms (and complexes of symptoms that go together, a.k.a. "syndromes") — and also very good at treating symptoms/syndromes, such that they go away. Often, an unde…

>And those diseases get treated carefully and separately, with workflows that get you referred on any sign of such diseases to a neurologist. No they don't. Are they supposed to? Yes. But, at least in the US, things just don't go as smoothly as they should with regards to this because our healthcare system is incomprehensibly worthless.

Your complaint seems to be with the US healthcare system and not psychology.

Re: Disproportionate amount of bad online behaviour stems from psychological issues

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

amznthrwaway: If you read this, know you are shadowbanned - only certain people can see your content. I can only guess it has something to do with being a bigot and not just wishing for people to die, but directly wishing for the parents of fellow posters here to die. You claim to have been shadow-banned before (I know I was, many years ago) but somehow, you don't know you've been banned for the past two months. And…

You've broken the site guidelines, which say: "Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead." a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls. Obviously that should go double, at least, when the user is already banned and the comment is killed. Turning a dead comment by a banned user into an off-topic distraction and even starting a flamewar about it as you've basically done here, is an abuse in its own right. Please don't do anything like that on HN again.

It's also a bad bet to assume that a trollish account isn't aware that they're banned here; the majority are perfectly well aware, and most have created many accounts and been banned many times. They continue to post with banned accounts as a way of continuing to spew into the forum and troll the minority of users who have 'showdead' turned on.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Disproportionate amount of bad online behaviour stems from psychological issues

#119
post #15

I don't buy it. I think there is simple statistical/neurological explanation. Part 1: We are exposed to much more information and interaction that we have evolved for. Our brains have very biased/impractical approach to understanding the world: if you hear about something happening many times in large number then it automatically gives large weight to it and treats it as normal/prevalent/dangerous etc. This is also w…

I think your four points are all absolutely true. However, I cannot plausibly think of a reason why we _wouldn't_ have a disproportionate amount of online bad behavior from the mentally ill. There's really almost nothing in the online environment to prevent it, and quite a lot of mental conditions result in manic phases of some sort that would cause them to spew a lot of it online.
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