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Everyone’s offended these days

eev.ee

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Re: Everyone’s offended these days

#41

Post by bradleyjg »

jerf wrote: post #26
jimrandomh wrote: post #9

I think this is a property of the way voting/distribution work on some sites, but not others. On Twitter or Tumblr, if you want to reply to something, you have to increase its visibility in the process. So if something is really wrong and everyone wants to correct it, it creates these horrible positive-feedback spirals where mass-outrage explodes out of nothing. This doesn't happen on Hacker News, partly because the…

I've made a minor hobby of studying how communities are formed by the technical structure of the community, and what interactions they enable. The control of visibility is actually a subtle art, and a lot of things like Twitter or Facebook start with an initial design that is quite unsubtle that works at first, but scales poorly. I'm not convinced Twitter is fixable as-is. The most obvious technical solution is to do…

I can't say I've made a study of it, but I've certainly thought about it.

I'd be interested in your thoughts on reddit style voting with visible points and reordering. In my observation each of those things are detrimental, at least with respect to community building and maintenance.

Re: Everyone’s offended these days

#43

Post by [deleted] »

cconroy wrote: post #40
krig wrote: post #33

This is a complete misunderstanding of what that quote from Stephen Fry is saying. Of course people get offended. Everyone get offended all the time! So what? He's doing exactly the right thing: He isn't having fun using Twitter, so he stops using it. He's not claiming that getting offended is somehow beneath him, he's saying that getting offended is no big deal. It's everyone else who is making a big deal out of him…

I dont know Fry but he isn't handling things as well as Dawkins does it seems. Dawkins has a hilarious video of him reading the most hateful tweets. You have to be careful. Some of the people who complain about others being offended all the time are the biggest babies. [Edit] If he is leaving bc it is no fun anymore that is an excellent reason.

[deleted]

Re: Everyone’s offended these days

#44

Post by tomp »

krig wrote: post #33

This is a complete misunderstanding of what that quote from Stephen Fry is saying. Of course people get offended. Everyone get offended all the time! So what? He's doing exactly the right thing: He isn't having fun using Twitter, so he stops using it. He's not claiming that getting offended is somehow beneath him, he's saying that getting offended is no big deal. It's everyone else who is making a big deal out of him…

Came here to post this. The author of this post just made the biggest possible strawman:

> “Now the pool is stagnant, …frothy with scum.” Fry’s feelings aren’t feelings — they are a universal and objective standard of behavior, which everyone else is violating.

When he says "stagnant, frothy with scum" I don't interpret that as him complaining about his feelings, but rather that the discussion/communication (which, I guess, is the ultimate purpose of any communication medium) has become impossible, precisely because people keep being offended and complaining about their feelings.

Re: Everyone’s offended these days

#45

Post by KirinDave »

> who cares? It’s just some noise. No one is going to have an existential crisis over it; we’re all surrounded by each other, a network of people whose very presence demonstrates that of course Python doesn’t suck. That person has negligible influence here.

> Now, you’re the only Python developer at a Haskell conference. You go to a talk, and one slide makes a joke at Python’s expense. The entire room laughs. Suddenly you feel much smaller, maybe embarrassed, maybe annoyed. It was still only one person making one joke, but that person clearly had more influence here

I'm not sure what the author is trying to accomplish here. Maybe they thought they were "pandering to the audience." But I found this metaphor to be inappropriate, poorly formed, and implicitly draws a comparison between 1st world technical choices and actual harassment.

While we can respect other people's feelings, at some point we have to draw a line and say, "This is something where you may be able to brush it off, since it's basically an arbitrary choice you made that you could unmake at any time." As opposed to the deeply-rooted and often immutable nature of subjects that are axis of discrimination elsewhere, such as someone's race or personal gender identity.

Either this author has so little respect for their audience that they think this metaphor will actually speak to the average and intended reader (in which case, wow... you genuinely think I'm stupid), or they genuinely believe that these sorts of things are in a similar category.

Either way, I get a really bad feeling from it.

Re: Everyone’s offended these days

#47

Post by glenda »

It's pretty interesting that the people complaining about people being offended too often are so easily "triggered" by other people being offended.

I've been noticing this a lot lately, even on HN. Someone will mention equality or fairness and there will be a whole slew of people complaining about how people are too sensitive now-a-days. In reality, those complainers are being overly sensitive themselves.

Re: Everyone’s offended these days

#48

Post by Shivetya »

well there is no shortage of those who want to see the world burn and there is still a lot of anonymity in many of these tools. so the sycophants that join in the attacks are pretty insulated from responsibility for their actions while the higher profile instigators can pass off responsibility as well.

a common method that works in politics as well. leaders don't need to ask for those who support them to cross the line because they know there will be those who will and they derive benefit from their actions all the while decrying them.

social media is just the back room games of mover and shakers out in the open. the same rules but just more visible

Re: Everyone’s offended these days

#49

Post by SerLava »

krig wrote: post #38
krig wrote: post #33

This is a complete misunderstanding of what that quote from Stephen Fry is saying. Of course people get offended. Everyone get offended all the time! So what? He's doing exactly the right thing: He isn't having fun using Twitter, so he stops using it. He's not claiming that getting offended is somehow beneath him, he's saying that getting offended is no big deal. It's everyone else who is making a big deal out of him…

As an aside, I was stunned to see that "Stephen Fry leaves Twitter" qualifies as national news in Sweden [1]. I don't know how this could get any more ridiculous. Can't wait to get the non-stop 24-hour coverage of Stephen Frys Twitter account: Is he going to start using it again? Will he start posting on Google+? Twitter CEO refuses to comment! [1]: http://www.svt.se/kultur/film/stephen-fry-lamnar-twitter

It's not in the news because of the event... Like they don't track Twitter posts and see some celebrity stops posting and go put it in the news.

It's the commentary about the platform and the people using it. Sure it's not exactly 9/11 but it's not THAT bizarre that someone picked it up.

Re: Everyone’s offended these days

#50

Post by wavefunction »

cconroy wrote: post #40
krig wrote: post #33

This is a complete misunderstanding of what that quote from Stephen Fry is saying. Of course people get offended. Everyone get offended all the time! So what? He's doing exactly the right thing: He isn't having fun using Twitter, so he stops using it. He's not claiming that getting offended is somehow beneath him, he's saying that getting offended is no big deal. It's everyone else who is making a big deal out of him…

I dont know Fry but he isn't handling things as well as Dawkins does it seems. Dawkins has a hilarious video of him reading the most hateful tweets. You have to be careful. Some of the people who complain about others being offended all the time are the biggest babies. [Edit] If he is leaving bc it is no fun anymore that is an excellent reason.

Dawkins and everyone else in the world are certainly entitled to express themselves, but there are also repercussions for that expression. He's said some rather dim-witted stuff about religions in general and some religions in particular and while I will defend to the death his right to say those things, it doesn't reflect all that well on his person imo.
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