31–40 of 613 posts
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.
Be anonymous. Be obscure. Stop talking to people on the internet.
Which isn't to say that your advice is poor advice!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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?
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.
> My womanizing at events predates ever meeting my wife. But people went so far as to call her a rapist, a sex trafficker, or at best a rape apologist.
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…
That's the mob mentality speaking. Just because a bunch of assholes on the internet took something they said out of context, and refused to acknowledge that people other than themselves are not objects and are capable of changing over time, that doesn't mean the person they targeted needs to "learn" anything except that people on the internet are assholes.
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 a…
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…
A lot of it is that journalists will amplify it as well if they are one of the 100 who sees it. Seen journalist job postings where checking Twitter for stories is part of it.
I think you can look at it this way:
* For normal people, Twitter is not real life.
* For journalists, Twitter is real life.
Journalists then become the vector by which BS Twitter drama becomes mainstreamed.
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"
It would be much harder to build a critical mass using more traditional methods of communication, even e-mail. As a result, people would spare their energy for serious incidents only.
But we have a variant of the tragedy of commons here: societal ostracism, an important but dangerous tool, is no longer used rationally, but milked to exhaustion. It has become too easy to get the ball of outrage rolling. Too many people are treated as if they commanded a genocidal death squad, when their transgression is often verbal only (not the case of this particular artist, I know).
As a result, we have a virtual Salem trial every day. I wonder when the inevitable reaction happens and people start ignoring the social networks altogether. This is not a stable, persistent state of things. Too unhinged.