Comment by Karunamon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Karunamon | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not so sure that is a thing that happens with any great regularity - and I say that because the previously bright line between "this person offended me" and "this person is harassing me" has become a lot more blurry.

Sure, any of us can point at high profile cases, but there's that old saying about anecdotes and data.

The problem with your entire last sentence is that it's full of value judgements, value judgements shaped by your experience as a human and your own knowledge and biases. One person's "hate speech" is another person's "spirited argument", one person's "disagreement" is another person's "harassment".

You might have a very clear definition of "hate speech" in your mind as you write those words, but I'd be willing to bet if you defined it here in the most clear and unambiguous language you possibly could, you'd find perfectly reasonable people disagreeing with it.

And therein is the problem - I'm on the side of that line that leaves people the hell alone in all but the most egregious of cases, because at the end of the day, it's all words on a screen.

Perhaps the rise of microaggression complaints is exaggerated, but one has to wonder where we're headed as a society when the smallest insignificant things are labeled as (micro)-aggressive[1].

I'm loath to live in a culture where people have to walk on eggshells so as to not offer the semblance of offense. I think it's childish and also hypocritical --as if we can expect no one to think or say anything that would ever offend anyone. They never try to be mean to an ex-lover, they would never think bad of someone who ignored them unwittingly, etc.

[1]http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/the-rise...

This is a huge problem and has actually destroyed something very near to me, video games. The oversensitive attitude you mentioned has poisoned online gaming. Personally, I love to talk shit. A well spoken insult is a thing of beauty to me. It is an art, a craft, a science. Talking shit in video games used to be half the fun of playing, now it's unacceptable. What was once a staple of the culture is now it's greatest crime. Gamers today have this word "toxic". We used to have an antonym for that word, it was called "being a pussy". It's like one day everyone just decided to start taking the internet way too seriously. I can't talk shit in my favorite video game, some college student is facing charges because of a joke he made on twitter, and the presidential candidates are getting asked questions from facebook. What the fuck is going on.

The internet is growing up.

I think it just became popular. I don't think it grew up at all. This all seemed to start happening after the facebook boom and all of my friends suddenly knew what a meme was.

The question is, is the locker room, the powder room, the boardroom, etc. growing up?

There is a place for civil discourse and there is a place for people to be as ugly as they want to be or are. Else you're just pretending it does not exist or that you can wish it away.

This is like religious people thinking that if you only think pure thoughts all will be well in the world.

The same people who want to see crime-ridden neighborhoods bulldozed over to bring about the new society where everything is resplendescent, bright and tame and only the good people live and there is no Other. There are no drug abusers, misogynistic men, cruel women, or human traffickers.

I don't really think that the action of sanitizing reddit could be characterized as "pretending it does not exist or that you can wish it away". Its pretty likely that the people that are trying to do that are acutely aware of the presence of the Other.

I also find it curious that you're using the capital o Other. Is that a deliberately existentialist term?

The capital-O Other is our capital-E Enemy. They stand for everything we don't stand for.

Jokes aside, it seems that has been a growing awareness for the concept of "othering," as in emphasizing the difference between your ingroup (AKA Us, AKA people like you) and an outgroup (AKA Them). Unfortunately it has little to do with the relatively benign idea you might be thinking about.

Play dota instead of league, yes you can get communication banned for being abusive but I think largely they just seem to lump all the unpleasant people on teams together.

dota was the first game to mute ban me. I came home after a night of drinking and roleplayed troll warlord at 3 in the morning. I woke up to find myself mutebanned (something I'd never heard of). I had won 2/3 games and had the best stats in all three games. Very quickly I realized that this mute system was automated. A game could start with me unmuted, a teammate could report me because he didn't like the hero I picked or the lane I was going to, even if I hadn't said anything to said teammate, and I would become muted before creeps even spawned. The whole system was supper shoddy and lazily put together. Valve actually responded by posting an essay on why they were right and how the system wasn't automated, but perfect in every way. As a long time fanboy of Valve, I had never seen them do anything like this and I had never seen them post an essay like this. That was the nail in the coffin for me.

Sure. It's complicated. Heck, even just a passive laugh at a funny picture which is totally innocent and non-harmful in person, can become a crushing attack on a person when it goes viral and it's millions upon millions of people doing it.

But just because these issues are messy doesn't give us a license paper over their complexity with reductive founding-father-esque ideology. It's pretty clear to me that in aggregate freedom of speech on the internet is not suffering—people have unprecedented access to spread whatever thoughts they happen to have. Meanwhile an increasing number of people being hurt by internet bullying, harassment, and other anti-social behavior is growing by leaps and bounds in a way that society is not yet equipped to deal with.

In aggregate is not what we're talking about in this instance. "In aggregate", crime is down worldwide, people are living longer than ever. That does not mean focus gets shifted away from individual criminals and diseases.

People being cut off from any medium based on, not because someone was hurt in any tangible way, but because they were offended, is a crying shame, and that goes double when the medium plays at being precisely against that sort of thing.

Source on "anti-social behavior growing by leaps and bounds", and a definition would be nice, too. It seems to me words like "harassment" and "bulling" are being used as stand-ins for things as innocuous as simple incivility.

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