What it's like to be cancelled • Hacker News Board

Re: What it's like to be cancelled

#141

Post by LeifCarrotson » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 6:57 PM UTC

firebaze wrote: post #96

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…

I got triggered by "Twitter knows". It doesn't. It's just a bunch of mostly toxic wannabe-in-group imbeciles. There are lots of exceptions, sure. But still. I lost count by orders of magnitude where the twitter mob-opinion was simply totally wrong (be it "masks are not useful" or whatever you name it). Thanks to the collective Alzheimer's, despite archive.org etc., this somehow doesn't hurt the mob mentality at all.

Twitter as in the company/software platform, not the group of people who respond to a particular tweet.

Twitter's database could show how many people were shown the tweet. It could guess at how many of their users would react in this way. And you could do some surveys to find out what fraction of our cultural spectrum/Overton window Twitter users occupy.

Re: What it's like to be cancelled

#142

Post by xupybd » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 6:57 PM UTC

radmuzom wrote: post #66

Earlier this year when Richard Stallman was re-instated to the Board of the FSF, there were a lot of tweets expressing dismay. To one of them, I replied that I personally don't think he has done anything wrong at all - and linked to a well-known article by a woman who defended him better than me. While I found some support among a few people, the amount of hate I received shook me a bit. People started adding me to l…

Yeah Twitter is very toxic. I got on a few lists as well.

I tried to talk to the NZ civil liberties association about freedom of speech. As it turns out they are against free speech and pro hate speech laws. I didn't know that going in. Then some people put me on a hate speech list. After that I was blocked by a large group of people I'd never encountered.

It's a weird place and I'm glad to be off the platform.

Re: What it's like to be cancelled

#143

Post by Animats » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 6:57 PM UTC

What he's supposed to have done: “I was terrible to women. 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.”

None of which is illegal. It's not even a matter for civil litigation. He was not accused of doing this as a boss in an organization. Or in a workplace context. There were apparently no criminal charges. No EEOC complaints filed.[1] No abusive workplace charges.[2]

So he acted like a jerk in social situations. It's grounds for being, say, thrown out of a nightclub. But not fired.

[1] https://www.eeoc.gov/sexual-harassment

[2] https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/california-sexual-ha...

Re: What it's like to be cancelled

#144

Post by gonehome » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 6:57 PM UTC

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 recognize the context of this response, but Twitter can be really great.

I follow a lot of interesting people - as a result my information on Covid was more accurate and months earlier than anything in the main stream press. Sometimes not just 'more accurate', but the main stream press was actively and entirely wrong and a handful of smart people on Twitter were right. [0]

You also can interact with other interesting people, make friends that you can meet in real life (many live in the bay area), learn new things, etc. You can get an accurate sense of where some trends are going.

It can be a great place, but requires a lot of manual curation. Don't engage in culture war, block people often and immediately if they comment in bad faith, curate your feed with friendly people. Don't get drawn into petty emotional arguments. Try to be nice.

[0]: For a recent high quality example: https://twitter.com/Bob_Wachter/status/1404151502864883713

Re: What it's like to be cancelled

#145

Post by LegitShady » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 6:57 PM UTC

fration wrote: post #122

LegitShady wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

define sexual predator

Those are his own words.

I asked you what that means to you, not what it means to him.

I don't think hitting on woman or convincing them to have sex is sexual predation. 'pressuring woman for sex' can mean many things. People under attack by a mob do many stupid things, including thinking that 'admitting and apologizing' will somehow stop that abuse.

You accused him of being a sexual predator. What does that mean to you? how do you know what happened meets any definition of that word to you? Don't take these pressured confessions of wrongdoing as credible - they're people desperate to save their life. They may say anything to do so.

Re: What it's like to be cancelled

#146

Post by nmz » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 6:58 PM UTC

radmuzom wrote: post #66

Earlier this year when Richard Stallman was re-instated to the Board of the FSF, there were a lot of tweets expressing dismay. To one of them, I replied that I personally don't think he has done anything wrong at all - and linked to a well-known article by a woman who defended him better than me. While I found some support among a few people, the amount of hate I received shook me a bit. People started adding me to l…

The deal with cancel culture is power, if you're canceling Joe Schmo, or if you keep canceling someone well after they've lost everything, well then that's just bullying.

Re: What it's like to be cancelled

#147

Post by CogitoCogito » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 6:58 PM UTC

radmuzom wrote: post #66

Earlier this year when Richard Stallman was re-instated to the Board of the FSF, there were a lot of tweets expressing dismay. To one of them, I replied that I personally don't think he has done anything wrong at all - and linked to a well-known article by a woman who defended him better than me. While I found some support among a few people, the amount of hate I received shook me a bit. People started adding me to l…

This is great example why pseudonymous commentary is often essential to honest discourse.

Re: What it's like to be cancelled

#148

Post by firebaze » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 6:58 PM UTC

commandlinefan wrote: post #113

firebaze wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got triggered by "Twitter knows". It doesn't. It's just a bunch of mostly toxic wannabe-in-group imbeciles. There are lots of exceptions, sure. But still. I lost count by orders of magnitude where the twitter mob-opinion was simply totally wrong (be it "masks are not useful" or whatever you name it). Thanks to the collective Alzheimer's, despite archive.org etc., this somehow doesn't hurt the mob mentality at all.

I think he means Twitter, the corporation, knows how many total users they have. Although having worked with analytics groups for a long time, I'm not sure that's necessarily true either.

I'm convinced we should simply stop lending folks using twitter to voice their opinion any credibility at all. It was cool, trendy and thoughtful to limit a response to a certain amount of characters, to compress your message.

But by now, this got hijacked. There is no reflection, no compression of intelligent thought, nothing but voicing your (mostly biased and unsourced) opinion left, to just create a toxic cesspit.

Re: What it's like to be cancelled

#149

Post by overgard » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 6:58 PM UTC

qbasic_forever wrote: post #69

yummybear wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would you suggest you do when you have been behaving incorrectly? You can’t change the past.

That's an odd strawman. I... wouldn't behave incorrectly in the first place. It's not a difficult concept to understand for most people I hope, especially with sexual harassment.

I'm glad we've found the first person in life who has never made a mistake! What a shining example you are.

Re: What it's like to be cancelled

#150

Post by bigbillheck » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 6:58 PM UTC

IAmGraydon wrote: post #120

bigbillheck wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually while you're responding here, can you verify that you had these '48 laws of power' as your desktop? https://twitter.com/arvalis/status/1274765367957573632/photo...

Why do you care? Also, are you really so dense that you can't recognize that anyone who would have this as a desktop really feels incredibly powerless and is trying to convince themselves that they aren't? If you know people who are really actually powerful, it's hilarious to think they would have something like this on their desktop.

> anyone who would have this as a desktop really feels incredibly powerless and is trying to convince themselves that they aren't?

Why would he feel powerless? He was (apparently) a name in the MTG art world and the Noah Bradley of the apology considered his previous self to have been on a 'self-centered hot-shot ego-trip'.