71–80 of 480 posts
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 care about them.
There are a lot of talks on HN about the toxicity of social media. And people are pretty angry against Google and Facebook. But to me the worse is by far Twitter. There are plenty of random people who have a disproportionate number of followers compared to the quality of their posts. And as a result can do these kind of mods. Which are amplified by retweets, something that barely exists in other social media. Random…
>Random people can have too much power. So the common persons voice should be rate limited? Only those 'qualified' should be able to have a larger impact? Who makes the rules in this situation?
On Faceobook, the only people who can flood my notifications are people have I as friends, or maybe friends of friends. On Twitter, it's everyone, including people who are just there to be abusive.
There are a lot of talks on HN about the toxicity of social media. And people are pretty angry against Google and Facebook. But to me the worse is by far Twitter. There are plenty of random people who have a disproportionate number of followers compared to the quality of their posts. And as a result can do these kind of mods. Which are amplified by retweets, something that barely exists in other social media. Random…
Oh good, so now I can silence a critical voice by unleashing a horde of bots and I don't even need to drown their voice?
I'm not sure humanity as a whole can get away from this. Just being different is enough to trigger people's feelings of "other", to become the target of a mob fueled by hatred and fear. And everyone is capable of being different.
But, while we're not going to get away from it as a people, we can get away from it as individuals. Don't join the mobs. Don't react to the initial outrage that we feel when reading something. Sleep on it, and prefer to let the law deal with it (or work to change the laws so it can deal with it) over taking it into our own hands.
There are a lot of talks on HN about the toxicity of social media. And people are pretty angry against Google and Facebook. But to me the worse is by far Twitter. There are plenty of random people who have a disproportionate number of followers compared to the quality of their posts. And as a result can do these kind of mods. Which are amplified by retweets, something that barely exists in other social media. Random…
Why? What benefit does this provide to everyone? How is this not just going to silence minority opinion?
The 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…
HN is one of the better places by far, and I think it takes active action by someone at the top to hold the line.
On here we also get extreme reactions still though - The only reason apple does X is because they are evil and want to spy on you etc.
One idea you see in nature and also developing countries is camouflage. You basically give your kids a very generic name so they blend in, harder to search etc. In developing countries people really operate with nicknames a lot more and sometimes have multiple "real" names.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We drastically need significant reform of our court system. We simply don't have the capacity to address the current demanda on the court system (which is why we need ao many plea deals.) We certainly don't have the slack we need in the system to be able to drastically expand the scope.
Nah, we just need some real mods on social media. We have them literally everywhere else.
I've touched on this in another comment, in another thread - if we are going to assume that people have the right to say whatever the hell they want, how do you reconcile that with the rights of a mob to pigpile someone for speaking their mind?
The short answer is: "You can't."
The long answer is: "You can't, because when two groups are in such a conflict, you either explicitly censor one, or implicitly censor the other."
If/when any of my friends get attacked by the mob, I hope I'll have the courage to stand by them publicly. A good recent test was the doxing of Scott Alexander. I signed the open letter against it with my real name and was happily surprised to see the names of many people I know. We should have more of these small but visible acts of resistance that let like-minded people find you.
The post, and your comment, IMO wrongly frames this as courage .vs. cowardice in standing up for friends. However, that fails to take into account any context of the particular “cancellation”. eg, A situation with damning screenshots of lewd DMs are pretty ‘smoking gun’, and the barometer of “good friends would publicly support me” feels like an insane expectation when (in this hypothetical instance) the person did a…
With the exception of some particularly abhorrent things, I'm not sure I'd consider myself a friend to someone if I'm not willing to support them even if they're in the wrong. That doesn't mean lying for them or trying to pretend it wasn't bad, but I would expect myself to push back on mischaracterizations of them (positive or negative!) and help them navigate the consequences.
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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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The post, and your comment, IMO wrongly frames this as courage .vs. cowardice in standing up for friends. However, that fails to take into account any context of the particular “cancellation”. eg, A situation with damning screenshots of lewd DMs are pretty ‘smoking gun’, and the barometer of “good friends would publicly support me” feels like an insane expectation when (in this hypothetical instance) the person did a…
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…
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, cancellation is very very over the top as a penalty).