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Comment by learning_still | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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