The vanishing civility: The game of jerks, bozos and assholes | Hacker News Reader

The vanishing civility: The game of jerks, bozos and assholes

stactivist.com

173 pointsazuajef194 comments

When I was the editor of Dr. Dobb's, we were very concerned about how to create a lively discussion forum that was free from jerks and unpleasant people. Ultimately, we settled on two components: treat everyone respectfully even those who seemed to be trolling, and delete all insulting posts. This largely worked. Similar elements seem to work here on HN too. That the efficacy of this approach is repeatable suggests that the problem exists primarily b/c sites are willing to put up with bad behavior.

I'm glad to hear that an experienced editor sees HN that way, and also that you see evidence of a repeatable approach. Those are good signs.

As I'm sure you know, it's a more complex problem than just being willing or unwilling to put up with bad behavior. There are costs to addressing it—quite a few, it turns out, no matter what approach one takes.

Our plan is to move HN toward more community self-regulation. Each step we've taken that way—e.g. when we added vouching for dead comments—has worked well. I doubt the community can become completely autonomous (though a mod can dream), but we're pretty sure it can go further in that direction, especially if we do a good job of specifying what kind of site HN is, and isn't, supposed to be.

You guys do a great job with HN moderation and I've always been curious what ratio of mods:numComments is sustainable and still keep quality high and mods not burned out - do you think HN is a good datapoint or just special?

More mods doesn't necessarily mean more moderation, or the ability to moderate more content. From what I've seen it just means the moderation happens quicker and the mods pay less attention because "someone else will pick it up".

This does kind of make sense; excepting some special moderation view that allocates posts directly to each mod, they're all viewing the forum in the same way, posts bumped to the top or sinking to the bottom, so things will get the same amount of attention or outrage either way. Speaking again from experience, it's all dependent on how long that fire's burning before a mod sees it. A crappy comment deleted quickly causes little fuss, a crappy comment left to fester for a couple hours then deleted will still have the aftermath hanging over it. Even if the entire thread is purged, it still exists in the memories of users and effects the overall tone/behavioural standard of the forum.

Not sure I understand the question. Can you rephrase?

It sounded like there were two questions:

1) What is the right number of moderators per comment for HN

2) Do you think that number would generalize to other forums.

In that case the answers are I don't know. We don't have many moderators, and I mostly think it would be a mistake to try to solve HN's problems by adding more official moderation.

IMO the biggest challenge of self-moderating communities is avoiding the echo chamber effect: ideas surviving and spreading due to their popularity, rather than their merit.

I'm curious if you agree that this is a problem, and what your plans are to address it, if you do.

I think you're really overestimating the relevance of moderation on that, in lieu of, (for example,) the education level, ages, and number of people and their investments in the community.

Communities run in a tight feedback loop with their populations; when a community goes in any direction, some people who don't like it will leave (and some outsiders who observe it may refuse to join), which pushes a community further into that direction. People within the community like HN are all self-selected, so the education level, ages, etc. depends strongly on the direction the community is going.

Indeed, one need look no further than Slashdot to see this in action. 100% community moderation produced a comment section that is all confirmation and no information.

You need to moderate based only on civility. And emphatically NOT content (which slashdot does).

Say something completely wrong, but you are polite about it? No problem, it stays up.

Say something right, but insult those who disagree? Take it down, even if it's right and the others wrong.

That's a fundamental point and one we can do more to clarify. It's in everyone's interest not to discredit their own argument by going about it uncivilly.

I wonder how good or useful a civility algorithm might be in this case? Aren't sentiment analysis tools pretty good now? Finding examples of rude and uncivil comments on the Internet certainly won't be a problem.

I agree that it's a problem, one HN already has. I doubt we can solve it. We can maybe mitigate it, or at least not make it worse.

One tactic for not making it worse is to introduce changes slowly and with lots of time to assess the effect of each change. We're also willing to get procrustean, if we have to, about lopping off any changes that have bad effects. We've done that twice that I can think of.

Any new form of community moderation will come with a mechanism for overseeing it. For example, when we added vouching for users to rescue dead comments, we also added a review mechanism for moderators to catch vouching being abused—e.g. dead comments being rescued when they ought to stay dead because they violate the site guidelines. This combination, which was inspired by the flagging mechanism, turns out to work well. HN's userbase has vastly more capacity to sift through comments than moderators do, and makes good decisions most of the time. Meanwhile it's orders of magnitude less work for moderators to review vouches and flags than to read all the comments directly, and doing so lets us correct the community decisions that don't align with the site guidelines. Such an approach benefits from the strengths of both sides, users and moderators.

I joke that our goal is to turn HN into a pyramid scheme such that the community does all the work and we can just monitor things from time to time, but the real joke is that a 'pyramid scheme' in this case would amount to the holy grail of a self-regulating system. In my wildest dreams it would work à la the Tao Te Ching and simply run itself with the occasional tweak. But I don't expect to get off that easily.

The kind of community moderation we want has to do with protecting the values of the site—intellectual curiosity and civility—rather than particular content people post or views they hold. If you were to argue that those things can't completely be separated, I wouldn't disagree. But I do think we can influence it by how we design the software, and more importantly by how we clarify what the values of the site are. HN is getting to the point where we need a new round of specification about what the site is and what it is not. That's coming soon.

How on earth do you propose to separate merit from popularity?

Besides, there's also the question of "for whom is this a good idea?" especially in the context of things like Uber and SF property values discussions. It matters which side of the proposition you're on.

Are you really arguing that there are no objective standards by which we can judge rationality?

To the extent that there are, that would really limit the scope of discussion. There's no objective morality and no objective politics. Even if we try to limit discussion to "facts", things fall apart fairly rapidly once we start talking stochastic events and statistical morality.

Rationality can tell us about likely means to achieve goals and give a probability distribution of outcomes. It can't tell you what to want, what is right, or what to risk.

>There's no objective morality and no objective politics.

Really? The majority of academic philosophers disagree with you, and they have very good arguments for moral realism.

One thing to think about: it's not possible to affirm objective standards of rationality and deny objective standards of morality at the same time without being inconsistent, since both epistemology and ethics deal with normative statements (what one ought to do), not fact statements.

Really? I wasn't aware that morality was a solved problem! Now that we have the one true moral code, why aren't copies being distributed everywhere?

The truth of moral realism is a meta-ethical fact that doesn't preclude debate and experimentation regarding what the Good actually is. Just like how the existence of an objective material reality is a fact assumed by science without precluding scientific debate and experimentation regarding the nature of that reality.

Asserting the existence of moral realism without proving a specific moral reality is acceptable.

The closest thing I can think of in computing theory would be that the statement "A perfect player playing Go will never lose when going first" is obviously accepted as true, despite the fact that creating a perfect Go player is an open problem.

i'm curious: what are some of the major costs of addressing it that you referred to?

It's hard and not always very gratifying work, which means you either have to pay someone to do it (as YC does with HN) or rely on volunteers who will extract other compensation from the system.

Then there are many psychological costs. I'll list three. Often the people whose comments are being moderated do not feel that their comments are bad. They can become harsh, which can push your buttons. With the law of large numbers, any button you have will eventually get pushed sometimes, and when that happens it doesn't feel like a mere statistical process that's afflicting you. It feels more like an evil genius or demon that has perfect knowledge of how to drive you crazy. So you literally can feel driven crazy every day. (Edit: more on 'demons' here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....)

Second, an even harder problem is that people want explanations for why their comments are being moderated. It's hard to provide precise explanations in every case. When you get it right, it's helpful—at least to the general audience, and often to the commenter too—but it takes a ton of energy to get right because there is endless variation and nuance in these things, and the cost of being even a little wrong is high: it causes hurt feelings and a general sense of injustice. On the other hand, if you don't provide explanations, people feel that you're being arrogant and heavy-handed.

Third, every mistake you make will be jumped on by lots of people. Their intentions are largely benign, but it's hard to remember that when your mistake is being jumped on. I could continue!

There are different strategies you can take to this, but they all involve tradeoffs. When PG was moderating HN he relied on software to do as much as possible and did the human part with a minimum of (i.e. usually no) explanation. That led to complaints about lack of transparency and so on, but given that he was both building YC and raising small children at the time, there wasn't an alternative. By the time he handed HN over, the community had reached the point of needing a different approach. But no matter what approach one takes, there are these sorts of costs. I think the trick for keeping going is to design the system to have rewards as well as costs, but that's a different conversation.

(Edit from when I ran across this years later: from a 2020 perspective I would say that of the three psychological costs, #2 is the hardest because it consumes by far the most energy. #1 and #3 can be worked on internally, but #2 requires a lot of careful external communication, often under high-pressure conditions. I'm still thinking about what can alleviate that load. It's a bit of a double bind, because if you answer every objection and protest, it's draining—actually it's physically impossible—but if you don't answer, then people will imagine their own answer, invariably a hurtful one, and go away firmly believing it and feeling aggrieved, which is a bad outcome in its own right and often comes back to bite you later.)

Thank you for doing a great job dang. When you're doing your job right, it becomes invisible. I for one, tend to forget that the great community I enjoy here doesn't just happen all by itself.

I can often be an asshole on Reddit. But I never am here because HN is so clean and well kept. The signal to noise ratio is fantastic and I'll be damned if I'm going to be the one to lessen it.

Kind of amazing to me how it works that way: once there's graffiti on the wall, suddenly the perception is that it's okay to put graffiti on the wall.

Plays nicely into the Broken Window Theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory

Thank you for sharing. That's exactly what I was trying to convey, without knowing the term.

How are you measuring success? I feel that the quality of HN has declined a lot over the last year or two; we see a lot more one-liners and "couldn't resist" comments, and less technical content. (I think the caustic attitude of old HN helped; people who made jokes used to be shot down very quickly, whereas now people try to be nice about it). I now consciously avoid the site while America is awake.

> How are you measuring success?

Being a marketing platform, I would imagine something like the maximum number of people within their target audience engaging.

And two: not having facts/discussions which tarnish their company's image on the platform.

> I now consciously avoid the site while America is awake.

Is this one of those troll comments to which we should respond by saying something nice? Because if it were an American making a similar comment in reverse, then it would be buried as jingoistic/xenaphobic/racist/etc.

You look great today.

Serious answer: Cultural differences DO exist. I come from a place where, confusingly, passive-agressiveness is preferred over direct confrontation, AND sarcasm is used very seldomly and only very obviously.

Both of these things put me on edge with americans who, on average, despise passive aggressiveness and use sarcasm as if it were the salt of conversation. The result is that i have to think in a completely different mindset to talk to US people, to avoid misunderstanding them or having them be disgusted by the way i talk.

I don't see how an American wanting to avoid comments from another continent would make them afraid of a warrior princess.

On a more serious note, I too have noticed a shift in the comments on this site; I really enjoyed the fact that HN was a more "serious" place for sober discussion, where most comments were useful (larger signal-to-noise ratio). This culture made me reconcider my own comments on a few occasions.

EDIT: Not saying that this is a huge problem - just a development I don't enjoy.

I suspect, though I don't know, that the difference I perceive is more a factor of what kind of moderation happens in which timezones than a difference in regular users.

One liners can be informative.

That the efficacy of this approach is repeatable suggests that the problem exists primarily b/c sites are willing to put up with bad behavior.

Many people, even people running discussion forums with years of experience, simply do not know how to fix it and often believe it cannot be fixed. It is also common for them to "put out the fire with gasoline." On an email list, I used to say "fighting against the fighting is still fighting." Many people do not know how to address bad behavior that doesn't involve some form of fighting, punishment, etc and this tends to deepen the problem rather than resolve it.

You may have figured it out and HN may be doing pretty well with it, but that is not evidence that the problem continues elsewhere merely because people are willing to put up with it. It is far more complicated than that. One of the problems is that absence of a problem does not, by itself, point to effectiveness of a particular approach. In fact, what you will often see is that outsiders will assume you were merely lucky to not have had X thing occur rather than that you did something elegant to kill the problem without overt drama. The lack of overt drama gets read by most people as evidence of lack of a problem, not smoothness in handling it.

Aka have the patience of a saint?

No, not really. I am not a patient person and I am pretty good at certain aspects of this. If you know that doing X will actually make things worse and suck up more of your time and energy than foregoing X, it really does not take patience to sigh deeply at your computer screen and choose to pass on the option of shooting yourself in the foot.

Knowledge is power. Having it clear in your mind that certain things simply are not a path forward has nothing to do with patience and everything to do with having the right mental models, knowledge and education.

On the other hand, I am also medically handicapped, so sometimes I fall on my face anyway. But when I get it right, it has nothing at all to do with patience because I didn't get that gene.

Edit: Let me put that another way: Impatience is why I don't do certain things. If I know what a painful timesuck it is, impatience is my motivator for just not going there.

>> Many people do not know how to address bad behavior that doesn't involve some form of fighting, punishment, etc and this tends to deepen the problem rather than resolve it.

While I would agree with this, I would add that banning and punishing people only makes them try harder to continue to be the thorn in your side and make every else just that much more miserable.

Multiple accounts, using proxies, and other means to cloak your IP address then leads to spending untold hours trying to track this people down and block them instead of actually doing moderation and even site improvements.

It's a zero sum game in the end.

source: ran several BBS's in the late 90's early aughts.

Yes. Technical tools can be useful, but technical solutions do not solve social problems. Social problems require social solutions, something technically oriented people who run online communities sometimes seem to just not get.

Thank you for adding that info.

A few people will do this. Most people won't, in my experience, especially if you use hellbanning. I've seen HN accounts full of rude comments that have been hellbanned for years.

Is that a different term for "shadow banning"? I only recently came to know this while reading more about moderation techniques.

Apparently people will be allowed to say whatever they want but nobody will see it? I wasn't aware HN had this.

Check your profile settings. There should be one called "Showdead." Turn it to "yes."

If it is already at "yes," then you may have just not noticed because it looks similar to when someone's comment has been flagged to death or downvoted into the negatives.

I think it means the same thing as shadow banning. We have largely phased that out, except for spammers and serial trolls. For the most part we tell people that we banned them by posting a reply to one of their comments, and when they seem rehabilitable (I suppose that's not a word?) we invite them to email hn@ycombinator.com if they want to be unbanned.

Does the automatic shadow ban when you reach super negative karma not happen anymore?

It does still happen, because trolls.

However, vouching allows the community to rescue legit dead comments, and we review all the vouches. That means that if an account has negative karma (perhaps because of a faux pas early in its history), but has been posting good comments since then, we'll eventually see it. When we do, we use an internal feature code-named 'redemption' to put its karma back to 1 and restore any remaining dead comments.

I also think WRT to Dr. Dobb's is that the tone of the publication was thoughtful and did not invite controversy.

I think half of the reason why HN has succeeded to a degree has to do with the niche subject matter. This approach doesn't work on more general forums such as the large subreddits or twitter.

I don't think that's true. HN is not about some specific subjects.

We discussed everything from the Iraqi war to brexit to programming languages, etc.

While true, I think it has more to do with the way the relative niche-ness of HN shapes the community. The average person who comments on an Iraq war thread in HN is not selected from the same sample as the average person who comments on an Iraq war thread across all fora. HN consists of enough niche topics that the average person doesn't want to hang out here and make an account just to jump in on random Iraq war or Brexit threads (the current frontpage has about 25/30 tech-focused topics, many of which are beyond esoteric for most people). This shapes the community in a way that affects the make-up of the commenters on even such politically-charged threads.

Right. And if there is a thread on the Iraq War or Brexit, I'll pretty much guarantee that it's going to be heavily weighted with arguments and comments--mostly reflecting the talking points of a particular political perspective--that have been made a thousand times before. Plus a good smattering of "F so-and-so."

I agree with your conclusion, but the common thread I see is more the type of person than the subject matter. I don't mean that HN's audience is homogenous across some simple metric, but even among its vastly different members I see a shared respect of logical reasoning and evidence-based argument. That, and just generally smart people, are the hallmarks of the culture here for me (at least the positive part of it).

Right, and the subject matter (at least at the outset) has a large influence on the culture that develops. Challenging subject matter tends to attract people who share those traits.

Niche subject matter is a barrier of entry allowing only a specific subset/types of person in. To be precise a certain type of personality self-selects to find a site like HN.

That fact alone makes a significant impact on moderation.

> That the efficacy of this approach is repeatable suggests that the problem exists primarily b/c sites are willing to put up with bad behavior.

I think there's a little more at play, here. Look at the two subreddits /r/askhistorians and /r/askreddit, which vary about as much as possible in moderation patterns and resulting quality: /r/askhistorians is possibly the best moderated forum on the internet, allowing only high quality top-level comments from a historiographical perspective. OTOH /r/AskReddit is a cesspool of bigotry, puns, and reddit memes so tired they might as well be generated stochastically.

However, looking at what differentiates them, it's entirely culture. It's not that the moderators on /r/AskReddit are bad or aren't interested in moderation, they are simply trying to cultivate a much less formal discussion. Similarly, I think you'll see higher rates of success wrt moderation on focused, interest-driven discussion than on "free-for-all" forums where one can e.g. successfully start a blessed conversation with the intent to troll the forum itself.

For an example, people arguing for neo-nazi type politics on HN (or Dr. Dobbs) might not be tolerated for obvious reasons. But they're also not likely to comment in either place. On an article discussing controversy affecting the general public, you're going to have an extremely difficult time finding a line between civil and uncivil discussion—the normal for the context is probably not civil by most peoples' standards, but restricting the conversation would look a whole lot like trying to shape it.

Tl;dr every community has its own needs and expectations; I don't think there is a moderation panacea without creating isolated communities that self-select towards the conversation they want to have.

Thoughts?

I keep seeing deleted comments on /r/askhistorians though.

Community is so big that they probably get new users all the time that they don't know the rule.

Oh yea, the most popular posts are known as "comment graveyards" because they're cross posted to other reddits. But believe it or not, that's a sign that the moderation is working well. It's the less popular posts that slip past the front page before being replied to that slip in quality—those posts will often have sub-standard replies that never get the moderation they deserve.

> they don't know the rule.

I doubt it. I've seen reddit mods complain about being harassed across multiple social media sites, sent death threats and so on, not least by people professing to be affronted by their offenses against "free speech". I would be very surprised if a goodly number of deleted comments aren't people deliberately posting off-topic.

There are ways to look at a number of deleted comments in those threads, and very few if any seem to be deliberate attempts at community sabotage.

On the contrary, most end up being made by people feeling compelled to share their opinion, or some personal anecdote in reaction to a question, which would be completely fine in almost every other subreddit.

On that subreddit in particular, it's like 10% shitty answers referencing pop history (e.g. Jared Diamond, Howard Zinn), 80% shitty answers with no basis (e.g. "jefferson smoked weed"), 10% typical reddit shitposting (bigotry, holocaust denial, conspiracies, memes, moderator complaints).

I suspect the answer is something along the lines of:

The subject matter and associated demographics of some sites is such that, with appropriate moderation systems and commitment to consistently dealing with bad (or at least the worst) behavior, discussion forums can maintain a reasonable signal to noise ratio. The worst offenders usually get bored and go away after being banned enough times.

But a site that deals primarily with political topics? Even on HN, the level of discourse is far lower than with more fact-based technical topics. And even politically-oriented blogs and sites that I consider to have somewhat readable comments, are far more "raucous" than would be tolerated here.

And as for comments on controversial topics on truly mainstream sites like your local newspaper? That's pretty much a lost cause. There's so little signal to start with.

Yeah, the topic point is a good one here. Some stuff (like the aforementioned politics, religion, controversial issues, anything 'illegal') tend towards lower quality discourse partly due to the demographics that use said sites.

Meanwhile, something fairly benign or less popular will tend to draw a much more civil audience.

>When I was the editor of Dr. Dobb's, we were very concerned about how to create a lively discussion forum that was free from jerks and unpleasant people.

I think this seminal essay is required reading on such matters: http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enem...

Thanks; I just re-read that and it seems to me that HN is mostly pretty well aligned with what he's saying. But let me phrase that as a question: what's the most important insight in the essay that HN does not currently line up well with?

As a long time lurker, but a brand new user, I think my one criticism, as it relates to the article, would be that HN doesn't facilitate conversations as well as I would like. Or I'm using the site wrong.

So far as I can tell, there is no way for me to know when a person has responded to a comment of mine other than keeping my account page opening and refreshing to see if anyone has posted a response to me. Some means of being told, hey, someone posted a response to your comment 'X' would be nice.

That and there's a dearth of sex talk. Get us more of that you delicious beast.

> So far as I can tell, there is no way for me to know when a person has responded to a comment of mine other than keeping my account page opening and refreshing to see if anyone has posted a response to me. Some means of being told, hey, someone posted a response to your comment 'X' would be nice.

It used to be that you could put a token for an YC-backed messaging startup, but I think the startup died since you can no longer do so. In the meantime, bunch of HN notification services were created. I currently use HN Replies[0], which sends me an e-mail every time someone responds to my comment.

I agree this is a very important feature if you want to facilitate actual conversations; otherwhise, it's hard to track discussions that started more than a day ago. I've noticed a significant positive change in the way I interact with HN since I started using third-party e-mail notifications - I'm more likely to participate in a comment thread over several days, and I now consider it good manners to respond to replies that try to engage me in further conversations.

So, tl;dr - 'dang, I strongly second the "comment notifications" idea!

[0] - http://www.hnreplies.com/

Thanks for the tip off on that, it looks like a decent work around for what I'm looking for. Except that I hate getting a lot of email, but I'll have to live with it.

One of the things I get frustrated by with online conversations is how frequently they just sort of die without making much progress. I'm usually not interested in just scoring points with searing rebuttals followed by a mic-drop. I like hashing things out. That these conversations take place on HN so frequently is put in an entirely different context now that I see how poorly the site facilitates it.

As a side note / issue: culturally this site discourages low quality posts (like this one would be if I just said a quick 'thanks for the link' like I intended to), but sometimes manners dictates an acknowledgment even when you have nothing else to add. Some means of doing that beyond an anonymous upvote could be kind of cool.

> As a side note / issue: culturally this site discourages low quality posts (like this one would be if I just said a quick 'thanks for the link' like I intended to), but sometimes manners dictates an acknowledgment even when you have nothing else to add.

I see what you did there ;). I sometimes too spend a while figuring out something constructive to write when the only real thing I actually wanted to say is "thanks!". I agree it would be good to facilitate this use case better, but I have no idea how to approach it. For now, if I can't for life find anything else of value I could add to my reply, I'll just write "Thanks for the [link/explanation/whatever]!" and hope it won't be treated as comment spam.

(As an aside, I tend to upvote honest "thank you" comments whenever I see them. As a way of encouraging civility, I think one should not only reward the good comments, but also expressions of gratitude.)

Lots of people have asked for that and I think we'll probably break down and add it relatively soon. Also, welcome!

Probably can't help with that other thing.

I am working on a project that will eventually reward good users with credits they can sell for Bitcoin. It is not my idea but I got recruited into it. http://kr5ddit.com but the server might not handle too many requests. I am trying to help convert the software to an open source license.

Users earn credits for having comments and posts voted up by others who spend credits moderating content. Downvoting bad content earns credits, upvoting good content earns credits.

I exchaged 100 credits for 12 mBTC recently, a small amount maybe enough for a coffee.

FYI Chrome's telling me that your SSL cert expired a week ago.

I think your site could work if it remains small. As soon as it grows large enough to be worth gaming for fun and profit, I can't see any way of avoiding it - very sadly!

There's also the opportunity for all kinds of fun with users colluding with each other - and no doubt some fraud with others along the way.

If you manage to pull it off, more kr3ddit to you!

I wouldn't say that HN moderation is always effective. There is a local groupthink that will get you downvoted fast for rational commentary that runs contrary to the popular consensus. Much like Berkeley students shouting down any opposing viewpoint they've predetermined to be invalid.

I've heard this several times; I know there are viewpoints that HN tends to lean certain ways on (many of us are similar not only in profession, but that probably leads to similarities in views). Would you happen to have a link to a good comment thread that shows the alternate viewpoint not getting fair treatment or serially downvoted? (or, if not that, is there a particular topic area or debate, s.t. next time it comes up I might know to look?)

Perhaps the best I can come up with is the debate around good encryption, network communication, and the government's abuse of people's rights; but in this example, the counter-arguments I've heard have just not been convincing, which I find different from not getting fair treatment.

It's difficult to link to shadowbanned comments, so...

Basically anything to do with the cult of diversity. The double standards and refusal to acknowledge charlatans is impenetrable. It's no problem to demonize approved groups of people based on hearsay, but considered harassment to point out fraud or lies from protected demographics.

That's a holy cow that HN has slowly but surely adopted. The response is usually a kafkatrap: accuse the poster of being dishonest, and treat refusal as an admission of guilt.

If no explicit statement can be picked at, you get accused of "dog whistling".

Politics related threads have that issue. Downvoting should go: lots of people use it as a way to try and suppress political views they disagree with.

For instance, I pretty much accept that pro-Brexit posts will always get downvoted, even posts that state a matter of fact with citations. I don't care, I have great karma scores already and I've noticed that initial negative scores tend to end up slightly positive -> the problem eventually gets corrected, but it's incredibly obvious that lots of people simply downvote posts they disagree with regardless of content.

> delete all insulting posts

This would be ok on HN. I'd rather that than people downvoting because they disagree or because you made an honest mistake. It wounds me every time I get a downvote, and often I just logout and create a new user, so that I don't feel marred by being associated with a past comment that someone didn't like. I had a serious amount of karma about 9 years ago and probably should've just gotten over it, but I said a few things I believed at the time, got seriously embarrassed when others disagreed, and then just started quitting and creating new users, and have been doing it ever since. I'm not proud of it. Really- I'd much rather everything just be anonymous. That would be easier.

I also disagree with the rules saying that you can't frame something as "I know I'll get downvotes but..."- really, I don't understand why it matters. I think flagging offensive or spam comments really should be the only control necessary. I know that being a moderator is tough, but the community should be welcoming to all sorts of ideas and comments. I'm not a troll.

I agree with you. HN should get rid of the downvotes. They don't really serve a useful purpose. It just adds needless friction and anxiety, puts a certain amount of negativity at the center of the discussion, and reinforces a certain level of groupthink. If someone's factually wrong, a response pointing out the errors is far more effective than a downvote, and encourages further discussion. If something is offensive, flag the comment and move on. Downvotes also encourage some pointless noise in the conversation involving the downvotes themselves.

I could see keeping the upvotes as a way of helping to keep things positive (pun probably intended), but I'm not attached to them.

Although I agree with this point, I wonder if the removal of downvotes would alter the usage of 'flag' by a measurable amount, and flag be used by some as a proxy for when they would have used a downvote instead.

My guess is that the downvote system is an intentional encouragement of laziness in order to drown unpopular comments for whatever reason (sometimes valid such as noise, sometimes to intentionally suppress challenging viewpoints) while avoiding the heavy burden of moderation.

Just like Reddit's system, it is heavily flawed and easily gamed, as seen pretty much all the time here.

Having used things like Facebook, however, I don't think a single upvote is a better system; a bad post from somewhere or someone with enough momentum gets enough upvotes to perhaps go viral — even if completely factually incorrect. You need the -1 to balance it out, sometimes.

I don't tend to downvote if I disagree (and I'd argue, I think, that one shouldn't — if you disagree, comment); I typically only downvote if the post is extremely factually incorrect, not adding to the discussion (for example, repeating an earlier point or asking a question that is answered in an ancestor comment — i.e., not reading), or is rude. (I reserve flag for extremely bad posts — and often HN has beaten me to it.)

Not saying a +1/-1 system like Reddit or HN is perfect, nor is it the only alternative to a just-+1 system. One could imagine, for example, giving experts in various topic areas more sway in their vote, if you knew the topic of a given article (they should know what they're talking about); but that could just as easily backfire if a newcomer has a completely valid — if unconventional — idea.

> it is heavily flawed and easily gamed, as seen pretty much all the time here

I don't have that impression, and would be interested to see examples of HN's mechanisms being "easily gamed".

I think this is what dang means when he talks about building the technology to make the site YC wants. Users will use the features to get the results they want, often against the intentions of the site creators. reddit and the ongoing battle against 'downvote isn't for disagreement' in every sub is a good example of this. What mods want it used for is different from what users want to use it for, and obviously the users win.

Taking away the downvote button might seem like it would fix the problem, but as you point out, it would probably just shift the site behavior so that people use different features (flagging) to achieve the same result.

Is there a consensus on when to downvote? There are now quite a few people with enough karma to downvote, but from what I've seen there seems to be no clear guideline on when it's appropriate.

Should you downvote factual errors? Should you downvote hateful comments that don't contribute to the discussion? Should you downvote comments you don't agree with? Should you downvote for bad English? Should you downvote a comment like this one which is completely meta and not anymore relevant to the original post?

You need a certain level of karma to even give downvotes, so maybe the assumption is that people at “that level” should already know to how to use them.

I have the karma, but I'm not quite sure how downvotes should be used. For this reason, I almost never use them. A grand total of one of my own comments has received enough downvotes to get a total negative score, and I can understand why, but it's not enough for me to build a cohesive understanding on what the community means when it downvotes.

I don't know if there's a consensus, but I doubt it.

One way to think about downvotes is to keep them symmetric with upvotes. When I first came to HN, I expected downvotes to be asymmetrically reserved for people being wildly factually incorrect, or wildly negative. But, maybe if you upvote something on a whim because you lightly agree with it, it should be equally acceptable to downvote something because you lightly disagree with it. I don't do that, but I don't have any compelling reasons not to, aside from I don't like getting downvoted, it still feels more serious than upvotes.

When do you upvote things? I upvote for a number of different reasons including but not limited to when someone says something funny, contributes something valuable or different than others, posts data or relevant links worth bookmarking, says something that I agree with, shows a high level of nerdery and/or expertise in a weird subject matter, has a great attitude or meaningfully positive spin on something, etc. And as long as it's tastefully done, I'll even upvote the occasional correction or sarcastic comment.

I also tend to upvote people who engage with me, and respond to things I've said. Lately, it has been especially important for me personally to upvote people who are being critical or disagreeing with me, even if they're pushing my buttons. If my goal is for the conversation I start to bubble upward, then upvoting the thread is better than downvoting.

So, I'm only one person and I don't even have a consensus myself about when to upvote. ;) I don't personally expect consensus on when to downvote, other than a general wish that people use it judiciously - and I have to say that by and large, that is what I see going on. It's uncommon that I see or experience unfair or unreasonable downvoting.

> You need a certain level of karma to even give downvotes, so maybe the assumption is that people at "that level" should already know to how to use them.

I can only speak from my own experience and say that my ideas about how to vote changed between when I first started here and when I finally earned the ability to downvote. Not having the ability to downvote for a while did help me learn how to say more things that contributed rather than get stuck in the eddies of Internet arguments. If I'd had the ability to downvote from day 1, I would have used it a lot. Since I didn't have it, by the time I got there, I now don't see the need to use it, and so I don't.

> If someone's factually wrong, a response pointing out the errors is far more effective than a downvote, and encourages further discussion. If something is offensive, flag the comment and move on.

That depends on how wrong they are. There's plenty of fringe lunacy that's wrong but you could spend all your life uselessly rebutting. Everything from chemtrails to anarchocapitalism.

In this context, downvote is basically an eyeroll.

> Everything from chemtrails to anarchocapitalism.

Here we see one problem with downvoting lunacy: some people notice it where it doesn't exist, and others fail to see it where it does.

I'm not ancap myself, but I think the movement deserves respect; for example, I've not read The Machinery of Freedom, but I've heard good things about it, and I don't think you can dismiss it as fringe lunacy.

Chemtrails, though? Obviously dumb.

"Lunacy" more as a modality of discussion than a property of the ideas themselves. Usually involving taking the ideas as dogma and failing to think about practical application or relevance to the particular subject under discussion.

Another example: Marx wrote a lot of reasonable analysis of the mid-19th-century economic condition (and some bad analysis). Marxists tend to be tremendously irritating write-only dogmatists. It doesn't have to be that way. The right has a similar bunch of people who are Friedman dogmatists.

> If someone's factually wrong, a response pointing out the errors is far more effective than a downvote, and encourages further discussion. If something is offensive, flag the comment and move on.

I try to downvote poor conversation norms: a common one is replying to an argument that someone didn't make. (Especially when it begins "oh, so you think...") I'd be okay with flagging such things if we agreed that that was an acceptable thing to flag for. In the meantime, I think it's good to downvote such things.

Plus, it seems arrogant to say, but some people are simply clueless. Pointing out their errors is exhausting, and doesn't make them less clueless. They're not actually trolls, but they might as well be. I'm not sure about flagging such people, but I'm okay with downvoting them.

> I'm not sure about flagging such people, but I'm okay with downvoting them.

It may save your time, but a downvote doesn't explain why you think someone is clueless. Even link a link to something they could read to enlighten them to your point of thinking or a book title might be adequate in making your argument and would take maybe 30 seconds more, at most.

I've lurked on this site for maybe 4 years and only recently created an account. I find that I'm okay with downvotes on particular comments, but what kills me is having my score right there at the top of the page all the time. Just reminding me of how well I'm doing. It makes it harder to be sanguine about paying the price for an unpopular comment.

That said, getting past valuing fake internet points is a great exercise. I use reddit a fair amount and some of the subs I'm on are far more capricious than HN with the downvotes, often using it as an echo chamber reinforcement tool. I consider it good to acclimate yourself to paying the price for voicing unpopular opinions (without being a jerk obviously).

Sometimes one's comments have trollish effects even though one wasn't intentionally trolling. It took me years to notice this in my own case, and when I did see it, it fundamentally changed my approach. Effects matter more than intent.

Interesting. Can you provide an example?

I'd be embarrassed to provide one of mine and it would be unfair to pick on somebody else's.

I do not care to lose karma because of my strong opinion on a subject (like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12055486). I am more annoyed when I lose karma trying to give more matter of thought (for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11723170 or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11713948). This may be linked with my poor English level, but I do not really understand.

> It wounds me every time I get a downvote

I love that you said this out loud because it's candid and vulnerable. I feel the same way, and spend disproportionate amounts of time worrying and feeling insecure about down votes, when I hardly even think about up votes. Especially if I really truly try to contribute something and use a positive tone and get downvoted without any visible disagreement or explanation.

I have yet to cast a down vote because of this - I noticed how much it affected me inexplicably, and I don't want to pass that around, even if most people are impervious to it. I don't think I'm somehow being virtuous by not down voting -- some ugly comments I'm delighted to see being downvoted. But I'm not sure down votes are a necessary part of the system since things percolate to the top with up votes.

Maybe getting people to downvote less was the intent of the down vote karma threshold. Maybe it's working really well, I don't know. But that also makes receiving down votes sting just a tiny bit more.

What's funny about this to me is that it's meaningless. Why do I even care about karma? I have no idea. Once you have down vote power, what does it earn? Not much.

> I'd much rather everything just be anonymous. That would be easier.

I'd like to hear more about this. My working assumption has long been that anonymity makes bad behavior worse and more frequent overall, both comments and downvotes. Is it because you'd care less about your own profile & karma, or because you've seen anonymity produce more civility, or something else?

> jerks, bozos and assholes

Looks like incivility to me.

In my humble opinion, more often than not, when a techie refers to another commenter as an "asshole" they simply mean that they dislike the other commenter's politics or lack of left-leaning political correctness. You see, most techies espouse leftist views, which are rarely challenged in public because most media lean left. When they come across real-world opinions held by a large percentage of the population, they flip out and call the offender(s) "jerks, bozos and assholes."

I'm on the other side. I see the entire original post and most of the related comments on HN as examples of intolerance of truly diverse opinions. Those who would flag-kill differing opinions are the "assholes". Those incapable of seeing their own bias are likely "bozos" or "jerks". In short, several of the self-congratulatory commenters on HN fail to understand that the words "asshole", " jerk", "bozo" apply squarely to them.

I had a recent post which got 5 quick upvotes then was flag-killed for failing to hew to feminist orthodoxy and the feminine imperative. That's how intolerance is done.

> real-world opinions held by a large percentage of the population

Quite a lot of the population believe all sorts of intolerant things about women and nonwhite people. That doesn't make it right.

> most media lean left

Hahaha no.

Quite a lot of the population believe all sorts of things about all sorts of things, prejudiced beliefs about "others" being fairly high up on the list.

> Hahaha no.

I know "That which is asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof" and you're totally in the clear here, but it does make me wonder how you'd go about testing that claim (both yours and the GP's)? I mean, from my point of view many media outlets do lean somewhat left but partly because "reality has a left bias" or however the saying goes (although I lean somewhat left, so it may just be my filter bubble).

How do you determine it for even one media outlet? You could maybe do it by vocabulary choice. There are definitely some terms that are used primarily by one side or the other. Or the metric of what issues they try to get their readers outraged about? I've noticed sometimes there's bias not in how stories are covered, but in which stories are covered.

Perhaps it's not possible to do in isolation, but some sort of clustering technique (percentage of readers in common with another outlet as a similarity measure?) would reveal obvious groupings.

Regarding "most", would one weight different media outlets based on their viewership? Or does my local town paper count equally to Fox/whatever in adding "most"?

I guess really I'm just trying to have a more useful discussion than "media are biased left!"->"lol no", but it is actually an interesting question I think, and if anyone has resources about this (this question has definitely been asked before) I'd be interested in links.

It's a problem. There are various "anti-media-bias" organisations, most of which are themselves pushing some extreme view and denouncing opposition as bias. Even defining 'left' and 'right' is country-specific. Then you have the Overton Window problem that lobbying intends to actually move what is considered the 'centre' around.

Then you get back-formation of labels depending on party loyalty, which is a particularly bad problem in two-party systems. Something will get labelled as 'left' because it's supported by the Democrats or 'right' because it's supported by the Republicans, not the other way round. Widespread overuse of "socialist" and "liberal" as terms of abuse rather than descriptors makes this worse.

Then there's the question of whether newspapers should simply report what people say, or make their own efforts to determine whether it bears any relation to reality. Sometimes this is impossible: the greatest piece of anti-libel hedging I've ever seen was an article calling Leon Brittan a paedophile, which was comprised entirely of reported speech.

For clustering, see http://www.ex-parrot.com/~chris/wwwitter/20050415-my_country... : an attempt at reduced-preconception data-driven partitioning of viewpoints. It seems to have held up rather well over the past decade: people attempting to look for common factors driving the Brexit vote have found that the strongest correlate is being pro-capital-punishment. The old left/right axis seems to be subordinate to the modern pro-/anti-internationalist one.

That clustering link is really interesting, thanks!

"Vanishing" implies that there was some Golden Age of civility that has now gone by. This is not really true.

I would argue that this impression comes from the fact that media options were much more limited in the recent past, and therefore had to appeal to and not offend a wider range of audiences than current sources. Watching TV programs from the 50s/60s, for example, they do seem quite polite and civil. Now though, options abound. Why should I watch a whitewashed and generic news program when I can listen to vitriolic talk radio or scroll through my website of choice and see exactly what I want to see? Not to mention that every "jerk/bozo/asshole" can pour his heart out online.

The downfall of the previously-more-mainstream Mainstream Media has simply enabled more impolite and "uncivil" voices to stand out from the crowd (for better or worse).

As far as personal and professional interaction, the responsibility for maintaining civility in such environments falls on the individuals taking part. Don't tolerate bullshit from employees. Be respectful to your friends/family, and expect the same in return.

In other words, curation. For every readers letter that reached the opinion pages, 100s or perhaps even 1000s ended up in the bin at the hands of the editor.

What seems to have happened is a mentality change. Rather than seeing ads as a funding source for journalism, journalism (or a watered down variant) has become the means of pushing ads in peoples faces.

Yes! This is the inevitable outcome of the world of connectedness and giving a voice to the voiceless that we all wanted isn't it?

It comes off as overly cynical, but this seems to me to merely be the removal of a veil of ignorance about what people actually think and how they actually want to behave when they are either anonymous or not present physically (with the possibility of having their mirror neurons engaged, physical assault, in person shaming, etc).

If it wasn't obvious beforehand, then it must be obvious in retrospect that a culture war was the inevitable result right?

While I agree that the responsibility falls on the individuals taking part ... pragmatically isn't the outrage economy going to work for a long time? And the physiological tools for encouraging uncivil behaviour just going to keep getting better for a long time? I have my doubts that any significant percentage of people will be able to follow that path of individual responsibility when so many smart people are constantly trying to nudge them off of it using subtle methods the targets don't even understand.

Calls of "can't we all just get along", whether directed against physical violence or uncivil discourse, however correct, never seem to do much when the problem is occurring in a system that benefits from the opposite.

I don't know. Usually I recoil from nostalgic rememberings of the way things used to be but I believe that people tended to be more respectful to one another in the past, even if they were assholes.

More than enabled, media has encouraged the more outrageous voices. Shockjocks get a lot of attention and make a lot of money. The media doesn't have an interest in civility, it has an interest in maintaining divisive and largely 'solved' issues.

A little meta-civility goes a long way, too. If one is inclined to call people jerks, bozos and assholes, perhaps one is not understanding people very well.

It’s much more effective to work learn about people, their predilections, biases and experiences. No one is a “checkbox” asshole. Much better to focus on specific behaviors, instead of writing off a person as a type.

When I see a company describe its “no assholes” rule, I see a company inclined toward calling people assholes.

> When I see a company describe its “no asshole” rule, I see a company inclined toward calling people assholes.

http://basicinstructions.net/basic-instructions/2014/8/17/ho...

> When I see a company describe its “no assholes” rule, I see a company inclined toward calling people assholes.

I agree. I'd rather they have a "golden rule" policy which would effectively accomplish the same thing, but coming from a positive perspective. Starting from a negative point means expectations are low.

I had the good fortune of working at a place for 6 years where I never heard someone use a curse word or speak unprofessionally about another co-worker. People had opinions and there were heated debates, but ultimately with the goal of doing the right thing. There was stress and pressure, but it came from the work, not the interpersonal relationships. This place had no specific rule about culture. It just had leadership that led by example.

I attended npm Camp on Saturday, and the tl;dr version of their policy may fit the bill:

> be actively kind

>"When I see a company describe its “no assholes” rule, I see a company inclined toward calling people assholes."

I've seen variations of this pop-up more-and-more over the last few years and from my experience it usually hides the insecurities/bad behavior of the founder(s) and management team. Too often the "no asshole/jerk" rule is really code for "anyone who doesn't agree with us" and results in very vanilla organizations with little diversity.

IMHO, most people who misbehave online are decent people that get carried away in the emotion of the moment. If the community calls them upon it and force them to own up they comments, they will probably appologize. This requires explict rules and bounderies, as well as the community being able to disengage the minute the infractor does not show any signs of remorse.

On the other hand most online misbehavior comes from a minority of repeat infractors. I am willing to believe that the majority of those are not checkbox assholes, but inmature individuals that do not know any better. However, I do not think trying to understand them and accomodate them do any good to either the community of the asshole-to-be. The best online communities I have been part of do have a sort of virtual sign at the entrance saying: "Your manners have to be this tall in for you to ride this game."

If you fail to meet the requirements, your posts are erased (or never put thru in the first place). In an ideal world, a moderator may contact you and invite you to express your point with a minimum of decency. If this cannot be achived by personal message, a broadcast announcing an otherwise worthwhile post have been deleted due to open disregard for civility rules can be an acceptable compromise.

Finally, there is such thing as a "checkbox asshole", and nothing you do will make them change, because they trive on negative emotions they trigger. You just dont feed the trolls, keep hellbanning them over and over, and hope they get tired and go trolling elsewhere.

>A little meta-civility goes a long way, too.

Yes, but you can easily blow up the stack with all this recursion, since the real world doesn't have TCO.

>If one is inclined to call people jerks, bozos and assholes, perhaps one is not understanding people very well.

Well, some people legitimately and truly are "jerks, bozos and assholes" though, some even embrace the jerk ethos openly. If you're addressing them, it's fair game to call them that.

Except if your worry is that calling them that wont help them change but alienate them -- but maybe changing them is not the author's goal, but rather routing around them.

>When I see a company describe its “no assholes” rule, I see a company inclined toward calling people assholes.

That's not the bad thing though is it? The bad thing would be being an asshole, not calling out one. So, as long as the company doesn't do it to people undeserving the title...

but maybe changing them is not the author's goal, but rather routing around them.

Something about your phrasing made me think of this;

https://xkcd.com/810/

The point is more one of framing, not of tolerance to assholes. If you restate the 'no assholes' policy as a set of positive traits that are to be encouraged then the framing effect is to cause people to look for those desirable traits and emulate them. A 'no assholes' policy frames things in a way that makes people look for assholes, and causes them to think negatively about personality traits, in terms of not being something undesirable. Instead of 'calling out' people for being jerks, bozos and so on, the idea would be to talk instead about how they could become better at teamwork, interaction with others and so on. So rather than pigeonholing them as something undesirable, you show them they are on the start of a path that leads to improvement.

I think the impact of these subtle semantic changes can be surprisingly effective, especially because it is all happening at an almost unconscious level. I also think some of it can certainly come across as a little cringe-worthy and perhaps rather strained. Sort of like the trend of looking for something to praise about everyone, and awarding certificates for merely showing up when that is the only positive thing that can be found. But, everything can be taken too far I suppose...

> No one is a “checkbox” asshole.

With all due respect, this is spoken like someone who's never moderated a forum.

True, an actual human being, with meat and parents and bills is probably not a checkbox asshole - but online, we almost never deal with that person, aside from the people you know in meatspace on Facebook. I am not an actual human being to you, and vice versa, and can't be unless we take a very long time to actually get to know each other as such.

On the internet, we are more two dimensional, because we present as such, and some people get their kicks out of exposing their asshole nature to others. There is no fixing this, at least not on any sort of scale, which does not work when you're moderating. You'd have to fix them as an actual person, and taking a human being on as a project is unfair to everyone else who doesn't get their kicks by doing things "for the lulz".

FTR, the original post was not about internet.

This sentence jumped out at me:

>You also have those individuals who are “not rude” but keep telling people to “suck it up”, to get “their act together” or to believe that disrespect is just a question of interpretation.

Sounds like the author has a lot of conflicts. Sounds like he often receives unwanted advice to cool his jets. Talking about "assholes" is somewhat pointless because conflict is a fact of life, and in most conflicts both parties consider the counterparty an asshole.

This author doesn't show any philosophy, self-insight or humility; rather he is surrounded by "assholes" with "inappropriate" behavior. (He keeps using that word "inappropriate" - but if people agreed on what was appropriate, would we still have conflict?)

Here's something I've learned over decades of working with other people: fix yourself first. Become tactful, adroit and thick-skinned. Recognize that absorbing the bumps and jolts of social interaction is part of the job, whether your are a salesman or an engineer. Recognize that the "asshole" is right in his own mind and may in fact be be right, period.

if people agreed on what was appropriate, would we still have conflict?

Yes. It strikes me as a strange question. People act in ways they themselves would consider inappropriate all the time. We're emotional creatures.

I've heard this quote a couple times, it seems appropriate:

> If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you're the asshole.

> >You also have those individuals who are “not rude” but keep telling people to “suck it up”, to get “their act together”

> fix yourself first. Become tactful, adroit and thick-skinned

Aren't you just demonstrating exactly what the author was complaining about?

This is just a rephrasing of Postel's dictum. Be liberal in what you accept from others, but conservative in what you dish out.

Two answers:

1. Yes. It is not easy to take the advice of "suck it up." But if you are getting that advice regularly, there's a reason.

2. Paradoxically, telling people on the internet to fix themselves is the opposite of fixing myself. Advising tact is not tactful. If I knew this author in real life, I would probably commiserate with him, give him sympathy and understanding. Only if he's a close friend or shows signs of receptiveness would I offer the advice he really needs.

The biggest asshole I ever worked for had a "No Assholes Allowed" rule.

I came to learn that it meant if you ever say or do or criticize anything this guy did not like he would label you an asshole and then your career path was over there if he did not fire you.

It created a culture of the ass-kissers vs the assholes lol.

>The biggest asshole I ever worked for had a "No Assholes Allowed" rule.

Well, he probably meant "there's only room for one in this company".

Recommended reading: "Assholes, a Theory", by Aaron James. This is a serious analysis of asshole behavior and why society rewards it. The latter is the key point. There are benefits to being an asshole in some organizations.

Sooo... anecdote.

My phone (and Internet) company only allowed switching to a different plan (for phone and Internet at home) when at least two years had passed since the initial contract. So there still was about a month before I could do anything, their web interface would not let me switch the plan and instead told me the above.

So the day after the two years are over I go back to the web form to switch my plan - only this time they told me "it's too late, you should have told us before the two years period is over. We have extended your contract by another year and you cannot make a switch during that time - please come back in a year!"

I had tried to switch a month prior and it didn't work!

So I asked them. Nicely. Only got the standard response (copy and paste of a text block). I asked again. Still quite nicely. The same. Then no more reaction at all.

NOTE: The plan I switched to was better for THEM too! They wanted to switch as many people as possible to VoIP and that is what I wanted to get, and I still paid the same. More speed - but that doesn't really make a difference to them, and I don't even use it apart from very rare and very brief peaks. There were articles in the newspaper about the trouble they had getting people to switch to VoIP which they needed for cost-cutting, and how they tried to bait them. I volunteered!

I switched to full-out asshole behavior. I send them an email several times a day (and I know they can't just suppress it, it was a new ticket each time). I called them several times.

My thought process: If I'm nice they can just ignore me. No disadvantage for them at all. So instead I tried to raise their costs. Since they can't ignore the tickets and the calls - they don't know it's me - I calculated that they would react when it costs them money, when I occupy real people's time.

A week later I had the new contract.

I regret nothing.

PS: It was Deutsche Telekom.

-------------------------------------

By the way, bonus content, speaking about assholes here is what I found is the best way to be an asshole in Internet forums. I found out the hard way - by finding out what I myself found hardest to ignore when getting trolled.

- You must not be emotionally invested. The best trolling can be done when you yourself don't care at all, when whatever you write is more like "work", you just "have to get it done".

- Important: Act stupid! Nothing affects people as deeply as having a complete idiot troll them. It also makes the first rule easier, because you don't need to think. You can just write whatever. The best thing is to exude complete confidence but post something completely irrelevant, but not too much so: It must be believable that you seem to believe your irrelevant link as proof of your opinion is indeed relevant. Acting-stupid behavior also makes it much more believable that the responses don't get through to you, so you deprive the other person of the satisfaction of trolling you.

- Don't bother replying right away! Let the other person think it's over. A new message out of the blue 3 days later has significantly more impact because they don't expect it and think they are safe. This goes with the first rule, 3 days later you have no emotional connection to the original conversation and probably forgot all about it. So sending replies so much later indeed is just a chore without emotional involvement.

I think in order to fight trolling one has to first understand where its power lies.

The last rule has implications for criticizing anyone in real life: You get the worst reaction when it's not expected. So in order to make criticizing e.g. of co-workers safer for everybody we could introduce times, for example once per week, where we announce that the only allowed conversation is something critical. Just a thought. Something along those lines, obviously needs more thinking and needs to be adapted to the local situation.

That's the first rule of customer service/tech support: Be enough of a dickhead to get escalated up out of the minimum wage/skill script readers in the outsourcing farm and get in contact with somebody with some knowledge and authority to actually do something.

Most of these organizations are setup as a cost center, and their whole purpose is to deflect.

I am from India. The a part of transgender community often known as Hijras come to public places and demand money. Often they touch you while demanding money else they will simply lift their clothes to expose their genitals. Often to avoid that touch you end up giving them money.

The technique was further refined by beggar community who will deliberately be filthy and to avoid their touch you will end up paying the money.

I think assholes benefit from the fear of rest of the people to be civil.

>I think assholes benefit from the fear of rest of the people to be civil.

Just see the Europe.

Such comments are heavily downvoted here.

I would add one thing to the author's list of admirable behavior: always seek out the truth, no matter where it lies.

IMO a component of the growing toxic atmosphere in public discourse is the "win at all costs" mindset, that fosters the belief that a little white lie here and there is justified by the end goal.

Not all truths are the same size, though. If someone is ugly, telling them so in conversation is both completely truthful and completely unhelpful.

Just because something is true doesn't mean it's necessary to say it out loud, or constructive to building a civil, respectful space.

Useless but brutally honest truths aren't something we have abundance of in our society.

We are, however, drowning in possibly-actionable nuggets of data that range from the somewhat-truthy to the probably-bullshit area of the honesty spectrum.

That people fabricate -- and worse, repeat without fact-checking -- such information contributes to the problem I refer to.

The principle of "fact-checking" has a fatal flaw - it gives power to those who have time and resources to fact-check, and even more to those that can control the availability of facts.

Consider information regarding the Iraq war before wiki-leaks - only facts beneficial to the image of the US military were released.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Calling someone ugly says at least as much about you as it does them, possibly more.

Furthermore, the whole point of the piece about civility is that it protects individuals so we can more effectively hash out ideas that matter. Unless you are hiring a model, whether someone is "ugly" or not is likely not terribly relevant to the work you are trying to do.

Or in other words, the (rather ridiculous) idea of there being 'no bad behaviours, only bad targets'. Which often gets applied by zealots and trolls as 'destroy the opponent and their social life in any way possible'.

I see an exploit of human interactions favoring employers, let me extend, for example below comment:

  __derek__ 5
  I attended npm Camp on Saturday, and the tl;dr version
  of their policy may fit the bill:
  > be actively kind

now imagine you are paired with 5 other "junior" programmers on trying to get some project to x state that requires 5 senior programmers.

  -saying that you require 5 senior, not juniors can be seen
   as non polite.
  -not helping them is not polite
  -go above and beyond to help them while you go the extra
   mile to deliver on time is both polite and altruistic...
   and of course you do on free your extra mile time and
   help the company avoid paying the senior devs...

> saying that you require 5 senior, not juniors can be seen as non polite.

Depends on how you define politeness.

To me, not saying that you require 5 senior programmers, or more time, is a form of grinfucking your manager and producers. It is intentionally keeping them out of the loop, which is rude. It is disrespecting their ability to take well intentioned, reasonable, important, and professional feedback as fellow professionals and adults, and ultimately undermining their ability to perform their jobs. Worse, not properly trying to manage expectations may leave your coworkers on the hook for crunch and overtime to try and meet said expectations - which I certainly don't consider "polite"!

This is not to say there aren't rude ways to go about the task of informing your manager that you're understaffed, over-committed, and dealing with a unrealistic schedule. You can beat a dead horse, enumerate individual's faults (perceived or real) instead of focusing on what strengths the team needs (that it lacks), or whine about your boss's inability to estimate instead of trying to collaborate to figure out the discrepancy in your estimations, among a million other possible mistakes.

The trick is to thoroughly internalize and stick to this definition of politeness.

> not helping them is not polite

Junior programmers can help me get the project done. The trick is to manage your time wisely. "Let me swing by after I finish up X" - either they'll figure it out, or they could really use the extra help. "I forget, does it say on the wiki?". I am assuming they're trying and have some basic competency though.

> and of course you do on free your extra mile time and help the company avoid paying the senior devs...

Crunching - or otherwise overworking - and burning out would decrease my overall productivity. It would be both rude and irresponsible of me to allow myself to be so mismanaged.

Nice response but it's just a game of words just like mine.

>To me, not saying that you require 5 senior programmers, or more time, is a form of grinfucking your manager and producers. It is intentionally keeping them out of the loop

This means they in first place took the decision without asking you or without having metrics, not polite of them.

>The trick is to manage your time wisely

First law of thermo dynamics.. energy cannot be created or destroyed. Politely I ask you to please complete the work with the assigned resources.

>It would be both rude and irresponsible of me to allow myself to be so mismanaged.

People who care first about them are called egoistical... on the other hand they said the first person you should care about it's you.

It's up to you, always.

This is just a point of view, take informed decisions.

It's not actually "vanishing" civility. Life has always been that way among those who live above subsistence levels. Court life in the middle ages is rife with examples. It's important to realize that these "jerks", "bozos", and "assholes" are all engaged in political maneuvering. They're playing an entirely different game than you, and the only way to stop them is to remove possible political reward for such actions, or at least raise the risks so high as to not be worth the effort to begin with.

HN has largely been successful in this endeavor through a mix of technology and culture. You can't get rid of it entirely, but you can certainly subdue it.

Straight to the point. My colleague clearly and succinctly explained why an inappropriate behavior occurred and what motivated him to respond.

If this happens visibly to the team it is likely that the person behind the behavior will take this as an attack, especially if he/she is a true asshole. Not good for long-term working climate. Also, it has a flavor of "white-knighting" oneself if it's done in front of the team.

A more diplomatic and expedient approach would be

a) Approaching the person behind the behavior in private and letting him/her know that such behavior isn't tolerated. And

b) approaching the targeted person in private and assuring him/her of your support in case it happens again.

I would also like to add that in my experience, unfortunately, "asshole"-like behavior isn't going to change when the source is a person in authority or a person close to someone in authority.

I've been at two separate jobs where I encountered people like this. (Thankfully, I did not have to directly work with them - that would have been tough). Coincidentally, both had the title of "Senior Architect" or something like that, and both were extremely bellicose and condescending in their tone to a variety of people, both in person, on the phone and in emails.

In both cases, I knew of multiple people who had complained about the individual's behavior to management yet in both circumstances, nothing was done and the behavior continued. In one case, more than one person quit and specifically called out the offensive person in their "farewell" email. (This is not something I would recommend)

I eventually left both positions, for other reasons. In one case, during my exit interview, I was specifically asked by HR if I'd ever experienced any "difficult" behavior from the individual in question. I declined to give any details, as by that point it was clear to me that management not only ignored this behavior but condoned it as well. (You may not agree with my course of action) As far as I know, both of these people are still working at the same places, and I'm assuming nothing has changed.

This is unfortunately how many of these situations end up. My advice is to choose your battles wisely.

Note that as a general adage, this is "praise in public and criticize in private" (which doesn't just go for managers/higher ups).

But it's not bullet-proof. When the criticism is private, there is no signal to the rest of the group that the behavior in question is not appropriate. The person being criticized certainly isn't going to say anything. This can lead to the situation where the behavior by one person is stopped, but as a whole it continues due to the fact that there is no social signal to the rest of the group to stop.

So, as with many things, there is no clear cut approach that works all of the time. Knowing when to signal something publicly or privately is a skill like any other.

Once in a while, when I am in particularly good form and the stars align and so forth, I can deftly help the offending party out with explaining why their behavior is problematic, why it isn't getting the results they want, and some alternate approaches that would work better for them. I do so with witnesses. They do not feel attacked and everyone gets the memo that there are better ways to do things.

However, this can also go very badly. But I am mentioning it to note that there are alternatives to the two scenarios posited of either criticizing privately in order to protect the offending individual's ego or criticizing publicly so everyone gets the memo that the behavior is not a good idea. If you are careful and acting with good intent, sometimes you can protect the person's ego while publicly commenting on the fact that the behavior in question is not desirable.

There are other ways to give push back as well that actually moves the needle and doesn't just change who gets crapped on.

I think that makes sense if you're in a position of authority over the person (manager, etc.); but if you're peers and the other person was acting in a public venue, I view this as self-policing. Frankly, no manager can do it all on their own, the entire team has to set the culture.

I'm a true believer of monkey see and monkey do. Unfortunately much of our entertainment deals with the ugly side of human nature. The most popular comedies deal with insults and getting back at people. You can say the same for other forms of entertainment. This includes what goes by as news. Yes, NEWS. I understand that it's make believe and it happens to others but lines are crossed that where there for a reason.

You might say that all of this does not effect you but if you see it enough it becomes ok to do.

We need to think about what's civil and live by that. There's a reason why codes of conduct are created. Mostly, they don't appear because some person wants to impose rules. They happen because enough people feel that too many crossed the line and it's best to let people know what's acceptable.

I tend to agree. For example, I know some parents who could always tell when their son and daughter had watched The Disney Channel at a friend's house. For days afterward their kids would be sarcastic and obnoxious—imitating every tween show on that channel. They weren't allowed to watch the channel in their own house for that reason, because it had such a negative effect on their behavior.

I thought it was just me being a horrible father. I have noticed this in my own children too. They come back as different people from the neighbor's house where they watch TV they aren't allowed to watch at home. Using vocabulary, including in the past some swear words that I know they did not learn at home (bi-lingual household, I never swear in the local language). I just ask them, "why are talking that way? Where did you learn to say that?" and then tell them "Civilized people don't speak that way".

I really cannot stand the Cartoon Network and most TV aimed at children. The standards are very low. And quite a lot of seems to be adults testing to see how much adult humor they can slip into a "Kid's" show.

"People like bullies." -- Daniel Kahneman

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/06/05/british-voter...

I think this is great. People need to be aware of toxic behavior.

That said, though, I am often bugged at work because I am both an introvert and need to isolate my environment by wearing headphones. My team and others make assumptions that I'm unfriendly. It's frustrating and I've just started to go along with it and agree, "Yes, I'm wearing headphones because I am trying to shut you all out." The truth is, I am not mean, but I enjoy my alone time and need quiet to be productive.

Also, a lot of times, I've gotten frustrated with the leadership in the companies I've worked for over the years. Not every company- about half. And a lot of times in the past, I would vent to co-workers about this. I'd also be honest in reviews and surveys describing in detail what had been done incorrectly.

I don't think of myself as toxic, but because I've been so persistent at times talking about someone else failing to do their job correctly as a leader, people see me that way and as a pessimist.

I'm aware of this and have made attempts to be more optimistic. It has really helped out, but it's still tough. I often realize too late that I'm being down on something, even as I try to imagine a future where everything gets better.

I don't think I'm a jerk, bozo, or asshole, and I don't want to be any of those things. But, I also just want to be allowed to be who I am. I'm not always going to be sunshine.

The problem with calling out 'jerks, bozos and assholes' is contextual -- social norms/what works in NYC is quite different from small-town Indiana for example.

Two ways to handle someone you think is being a 'jerk/bozo/asshole': 1) what percentage of their behavior is 'bad behavior'? 2) what is my threshold percentage for what I personally consider bad behavior?

After I got married and witnessed PMS in action, the proportion good/proportion bad became essential.

The same is true at work.

And there is no OBJECTIVELY jerk/bozo/asshole behavior. What you think is jerk/bozo/asshole may not even CHART with what your boss, friend, family member think is jerk/bozo/asshole behavior.

If I hire a sales guy who blows away the next 10 sales guys but 25% of the time he is reported to be a jerk/bozo/asshole I'm NOT firing him/her.

This is life and people have different psychological makeups and histories.

If you're going to set your "tolerance level" for bad behavior to, say -- 5%? 10%? at home, or in the workplace -- you'll meet highly effective people who add value to relationships and businesses who will make you unhappy.

They're out there.

"For better or worse." "Take the good with the bad." "Lighten up Francis."

> you'll meet highly effective people who add value to relationships and businesses who will make you unhappy.

Sure.

> "For better or worse." "Take the good with the bad." "Lighten up Francis."

That depends on what you want out of life. Leaving money on the table for the sake of happiness is perfectly reasonable too.

I want to inline a linked reference and provide a summary as a form of protecting the reference against link-rot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_No_Asshole_Rule

Their unpleasant behaviours were catalogued by Sutton as The Dirty Dozen: (Robert Cipriano (2011), "No Jerks Allowed in This Department", Facilitating a Collegial Department in Higher Education, John Wiley and Sons, ISBN 978-1-118-10764-5)

Insults

Violation of personal space

Unsolicited touching

Threats

Sarcasm

Flames

Humiliation

Shaming

Interruption

Backbiting

Glaring

Snubbing

The problem with this list is that there are vastly more refined ways of being an asshole, which no list can catch.

So these coarse lists are often suggested by the refined assholes so that no one can call them out.

Civility is a very powerful weapon of keeping power structures in place.

Civility can also be a powerful weapon in dismantling corrupt power structures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi

I think all that is true, but that argument is also sometimes invoked to excuse garden-variety incivility that a person ought to just take care of.

But surely threats and sarcasm are not at the same level...?

What some of these miss are context. It matters who threw the first punch. If snub you because you keep insulting me...

Is there really less civility today, or have people redrawn the boundaries of civility such that other people's opinions are more likely to fall outside its bounds?

I think today we are much more casual. In the past it was more common to be much more professional and civil, at least in certain white collar occupations.

Now a lot more "personal expression", including assholery, is allowed and tolerated even.

Consider propellerhead programmers in the 60s with pocket protectors and all, and modern brogrammers.

I used to work with this guy that was a prick to almost epic levels. We'll call him "Richard", because he was a Dick. (Not his real name of course)

Most assholes are subtle, but somehow this guy kept his job despite being, basically, a monster.

A few of the things he did:

- Once, he kicked over a trashcan and stormed out for the rest of the day because I checked in a visual effect he didn't like (.. even though he approved the code review and it was trivial to disable).

- Another time, he very authoritatively started inventing policy around branching. (Keep in mind, he was nobodies boss). When one of the senior engineers politely asked him if that was from our boss, or just something he wanted us to do, he incoherently started shouting and, once again, stormed out.

- Every scrum, he would pounce on even the smallest misstatement to "correct" people (even if they weren't wrong). When it came to be his turn to give an update, he would condescendingly give the most terse eye-roll of an answer he possibly could, as if the entire thing was beneath him.

- At a certain point, he just stopped showing up regularly. He'd maybe appear two out of five days of the week. Which meant three-out-of-five workdays were great! Despite this, he would get upset about not being consulted on decisions by people that actually did work daily... even though he wasn't there.

- When he did show up, for the last six months or so he was employed there, instead of working on our product, he would take his laptop, co-opt the empty front-desk, and work on his own startup. (Luckily, he would still take the time to tell us the work the rest of us were doing was not to his liking).

- One time, when me and my boss were bouncing some light-hearted banter back in forth, he immediately jumped in and started attacking my boss, which turned into a shouting match between them and he ended up storming out early... again. (notice a pattern here?)

- Once, we had to pack our desks and move around some office furniture for some office construction. Being that Richard was a Dick, he decided not to show up for this, so his colleagues had to pack his desk for him. After three hours of heavy lifting, our boss decided to take us out for lunch. ... And suddenly, Dick shows up. Team player.

That's actually the tip of the iceberg with this guy. I never thought much of the no-assholes-rule before (though I was familiar with it), but now I'm pretty much adamant that I won't work with people who think being an asshole is ok, even if it just comes to tolerating misbehaviour.

Why was he kept on board for so long? With that much abuse I'd make it clear to my superiors that someone like him needs to have his future with the company reevaluated.

In a weird way, I think it was just a quirk of circumstances. We were a small team in a satellite office of a much larger company, which generally meant we were financially stable but otherwise disconnected from the rest of the company (no HR present or anything like that). So when someone misbehaved, it was sort of a "what happens in vegas stays in vegas" kind of thing, IE, as long as your shenanigans don't have ramifications outside of the group we'd keep things in the family.

I think because it was such a tight knit group, there was more tolerance than there would be in a more detached professional setting. I think this guy also got a lot more slack than he deserved because he was young and talented, so people chalked it up to immaturity.

That might be overcomplicating things though. I think when it came down to it, our boss was basically a nice person who didn't really want to fire anyone, and there was no pressure to, so he'd procrastinate it, and the rest of us didn't really want to see him fired, at least to the extent of outright advocating for it, and so it just sort of kept going until he finally left to do something else.

Wow hard to avoid negative people in the workplace and public. Jerks et all usually get what they want because agressive people are rewarded by management as getting stuff done through other people. Sometimes they become managers and supervisors.

Sort of like in high school the bullies and popular kids get what they want and the school does nothing about them being jerks to other students.

Moderators just need a 1 click button that bans the account and deletes all their posts. 1 moderator could get rid of hundreds of accounts an hour. I am a huge fan of the banhammer with no warnings. Rules should be posted and those not following get banned. No one has time for that nonsense IMO.

That exists in quite a few forum scripts. XenForo has a one click spam cleaner, which deletes all of a member's posts and topics, bans the account, checks their IP and mails them a message you type in about the ban (if you want to send one).

Quite a few others have similar solutions, sometimes as add ons.

Plenty of imageboards have that feature. It doesn't tend to lead to higher quality content or a better community, though, it just leads to sockpuppet accounts, shitposting (because no one has any reason to invest themselves beyond the most superficial level) and mods with Napoleon complexes.

Do you think part of the "mods with Nepolean complexes" often happen because they are not paid ?

I think mods need to get reviewed and logs looked at as to why they deleted accounts etc. To me a mod deleting things that shouldnt be is a rogue employee. Personally I am part of some very heavily moderated forums and I really enjoy them. I find people invest because they appreciate it being looked after and not a childish troll fest that muddles finding good posts.

I think it's less the lack of pay as a lack of maturity, although getting paid might help them take their jobs a bit more seriously (assuming there's enough money to make that worthwhile.) A lot of fault lies with the administrators or whomever selects the moderators, who themselves may not be willing or able to act impartially or reasonably.

A lack of transparency in the moderation process can protect moderators from the social consequences of. Having known moderator accounts (not necessarily linked to user accounts) and a public mod log might make it more difficult for moderators to feel their position puts them outside the community.

And I think reversibility is important as well - nothing a moderator does should be destructive, as far as the database is concerned. At best, they should be able to flag posts and users for review later. I would even go so far as to suggest that mod actions which aren't approved get automatically reversed after a certain amount of time.

And what do we do when the moderator uses that button to ban someone purely for his or her opinions being on the wrong side of the political spectrum, or unpalatable to the moderator?

Thats something that should be covered with the moderators beforehand as to what is to be banned etc. I personally would remove the moderator just like any other bad employee. Also why I think its a good policy to pay them and not just have people doing it for free.

Is the irony in the title intentional?

This is so badly written I'm having trouble finding a way to explain it without resorting to nitpicking. The essay starts with respect, decorum, and civility, but only discusses civility. Almost every special term is stuck between scare quotes instead of being explained. It's so bad.

Nitpicking Time

Respect, decorum and civility are not only disappearing from the political discourse.

Why mention respect and decorum if the essay is only about civility?

It is also about the public and private interactions among workers of the so-called “knowledge economies”, which include scientists and entrepreneurs (or their wannabes).

Interactions are between people, not among them. Saying interactions are among people makes them sound like the aliens from They Live. It isn't important to specify private and public. Nobody would have assumed this was only for public interactions or only for private interactions. The phrase "knowledge economies" shouldn't be quoted; it should be explained.

Robert Sutton’s The No Asshole Rule defines the...

There are more scare quotes instead of explanations for terms and there's another unnecessary distinction in parentheses. Nobody would have assumed only non-verbal or only verbal.

This type of behavior is not only inappropriate and unfortunate. It can have negative consequences on individuals, organizations and societies.

Saying it can have negative consequences is not the same as saying it does have negative consequences. The gap between the two is so big I could ship oil between it.

This “way of life” can be witnessed in physical and more virtual settings, including emails, discussion forums and social media.

More pointless scare quotes. The phrase "more virtual settings" is terrible. Just say online. Even better, don't say talk about physical and online settings. Here's an example, "These attitudes can be seen in person as well as in emails, discussion forums, and social media." That's much clearer.

I have encountered a good number of “polite” and smiling fools, who have mastered an astounding capacity for incivility.

There's another scare quote. This one is used correctly, but scare quotes are awful anyway. This is another clunky sentence that's hard to follow. This is my attempt, "I have met many polite people that are still very uncivil."

Civility means bringing discussion of problems to a ground where people emphasize arguments and the evidence to support or refute the arguments...

Civility also requires (and benefits from) conversations that are based on facts or reproducible observations...

These next two paragraphs start with a different version of the same sentence. This sentence defines civility and could replace both paragraphs, because neither paragraph helps clarify the sentence. The rest of these paragraphs is confusing. The other sentences give civility several different meanings instead of one specific meaning.

This is actually too important to let a few noxious people to hijack public or more circumscribed interactions for their selfish gains.

I didn't realize I had something to gain from being rude.

Hopefully, everyone here didn't need any of this pointed out.

>Why mention respect and decorum if the essay is only about civility?

Because respect and decorum are part of the total package of civility, even if we can nominally separate them.

>I didn't realize I had something to gain from being rude.

Ethically maybe not, but being rude etc can (and has traditionally been) used to one's advantage. E.g. it can fence off people from one's territory, it can intimidate people into giving one what he/she wants, it can make you accepted into a higher echelon that pisses on subordinates, etc.

Well, bless your heart!

Actually I see the present problem as exactly the opposite.

More and more we live in a culture where people think it's their right to feel offended and for anyone saying anything that makes them fell that way to just be shut up by someone (some faculty department for instance).

It is becoming basically a Politically Correct culture of censorship and we keep seeing opinion texts (just like this one) that appeal to that censorship like if it was a good thing.

I don't see it as more and more people becoming jerks, I see it as more and more people becoming thin skinned.

> I don't see it as more and more people becoming jerks, I see it as more and more people becoming thin skinned.

People claim to be "thin skinned" because it works as far as effecting an overall narrative. You can limit the conversation to what you want to talk about by declaring anything you don't want to talk about as 'triggering'. It's unreasonably effective, as is the jerk approach. People aren't overly harsh on online communities because they're all jerks. People respond more strongly to harsh or negative rhetoric than they do calmly stated facts or figures.

The phenomenon we're seeing are people identifying what tactics work and applying them. It's the weaponization of social media.

There are people who are genuinely toxic. If they get in your company, they'll destroy it. (The worst I've ever seen, I fortunately never had to work with. But if I did, I would make it clear to management that it was me or him within five minutes of his being hired.)

Then there are people who are genuinely too thin skinned. If you listen to their complaints, they'll lead you to destroy your company, because you'll persecute perfectly reasonable behavior and create a "witch hunt" atmosphere.

But some of the "thin skinned" stuff is realizing that people shouldn't have to put up with things that used to be considered "normal". Sometimes we grow up and realize that what we used to do was really pretty crummy. For those who haven't realized that yet, it looks like people becoming more thin skinned. (I'm not saying that this is your situation. But if you perceive others as becoming too thin skinned toward specific behavior, you maybe should at least consider whether that behavior is as benign as you think.)

Five minutes seems awfully short. What made you so sure so fast?

The fact that he accused us of hiding the truth from him in the first five minutes, and claimed to have exposed it. (And it was over something where we had told him the straight truth.)

I mean, it was an adversarial situation rather than a co-worker one (he was buying a line of business from us), but I saw enough to be fairly sure that he's toxic even when he's "on the same side" as you.

> ut some of the "thin skinned" stuff is realizing that people shouldn't have to put up with things that used to be considered "normal". Sometimes we grow up and realize that what we used to do was really pretty crummy. For those who haven't realized that yet, it looks like people becoming more thin skinned. (I'm not saying that this is your situation. But if you perceive others as becoming too thin skinned toward specific behavior, you maybe should at least consider whether that behavior is as benign as you think.)

I'm old enough to have watched this "political correctness" phenomenon rise up and take hold of the masses. I understand it as a reaction to overt racism and actual hatred, but it goes too far and stifles discussion where it's needed the most. A lot of people grow up racist, or sexist or otherwise dismissive of large portions of humanity based on their upbringing. Sometimes they can get past it, other times they can't or won't. Political correctness, for all of it's appeal as "the right thing to do", takes away options people have for getting past their own prejudices.

It's also possible that people can use racist or sexist terms and not really mean anything by it. Hell, growing up Pollack jokes were all the rage when I was maybe 8 or 9. I don't know if I've ever met someone from Poland. They were just a stand in for "someone stupid", for whatever reason.

I guess all I'm trying to say is that the intention of the communication should be taken into consideration, not just the exact words or phrases used. We should also not be afraid to confront topics that are otherwise taboo. If people are civil and friendly, such conversations can be more helpful than harmful sometimes.

>I don't see it as more and more people becoming jerks, I see it as more and more people becoming thin skinned.

When everybody else seems thin-skinned, is it everybody else that has the problem?

That is a Dick-from-the-Internet (http://dilbert.com/strip/2015-06-07) kind of reply.

He did not say "everybody". You are making stuff up, see the linked Dilbert cartoon (you are famous).

Except it's not everybody else that seems thin-skinned, it's "more and more people becoming thin skinned". If people around you are catching flu while you stay healthy, isn't it a problem with them, not with you?

All progress is necessarily a change, but not every change is progress.

> More and more we live in a culture where people think it's their right to feel offended for anyone saying anything that makes them fell that way to just be shut up by someone (some faculty department for instance).

Um, it is someone's right to feel offended, you can't control how anyone else feels. Now others can determine whether someone taking offense at something is reasonable in the situation, but people have the right to feel whatever they feel.

Now sometimes it becomes problematic when people who feel offended attempt to shut down discourse, that much is true.

> It is becoming basically a Politically Correct culture of censorship and we keep seeing opinion texts (just like this one) that appeal to that censorship like if it was a good thing. I don't see it as more and more people becoming jerks, I see it as more and more people becoming thin skinned.

Or maybe there are whole groups of people who had to accept unkind behavior in the past in silence, who now are demanding better treatment. Women in the workplace have had to (and still do) put up with all manner of misogynist nonsense and more women and men are saying this is no longer acceptable. To that, some will complain that things are becoming too 'PC' but the fact is that poor behavior that was tolerated in the past is no longer tolerated.

Same deal with race. A few decades ago it was ok to refer to a grown black man as, "boy" in any context. It was okay to disparage other races openly at home, at work, in public, now it largely isn't. Some will cry 'Censorship!' or whatever but the fact is that social norms of decency are relegating those attitudes to history. The people complaining are the ones who refuse to accept that those attitudes belong in the past.

    > Um, it is someone's right to feel offended

Well, doesn't that mean then other people have the right to say whatever they want even if others feel offended?

Which means we don't need to have this discussion and just accept both the offended and the assholes.

This argument seems to me to lead nowhere, unless you say being offended is okay, offending is not. Which I would find quite disturbing, not just because Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (Turkey) would vehemently agree but because it seems wrong to me.

No, it just means that you can't control how something will be received and that sometimes people are going to have an negative emotional response to something benign or well-intended.

Now, whether someone should change their behavior to suit the sensibilities of the offended is the question. The answer to that question is basically what social norms are. It's a moving target that evolves over time and across segments of society, so there's no foolproof way to always know where the line is.

But as long as someone cares to understand, learn from, and empathize with other people more often than not they'll have an idea of what is appropriate and inappropriate. The asshole is the person who either doesn't care, or chooses not to understand or take stock of the reactions of others, and as such is waaayyy over the line for decency.

> This argument seems to me to lead nowhere, unless you say being offended is okay, offending is not. Which I would find quite disturbing, not just because Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (Turkey) would vehemently agree but because it seems wrong to me.

In the case of Turkey and some other parts of the world, we're getting into the territory of the government punishing people with dissenting opinions or criticisms. My take would be that someone has the right to feel offended, but the government should not be in the business of punishing the offender when it comes to speech, political views, etc.

So someone can express utter disgust with the AKP and call Erdoğan a dictator in waiting, which would offend many of his supporters, but that shouldn't result in punishment/imprisonment.

Since you feel you had to reply with

    > Um, it is someone's right to feel offended,...

it certainly shows that you dispute the right of the person to say what he had to say - so my point stands. If you accepted his right as well you would not have felt it necessary to make that statement. As I said,

    > Which means we don't need to have this discussion and just accept both the
    > offended and the assholes.
    > This argument seems to me to lead nowhere...

I see you arguing for one side's right to speak their mind only.

Either you see their right as more important, or your post is completely unnecessary and you could just have let everybody say whatever they felt like.

> it certainly shows that you dispute the right of the person to say what he had to say - so my point stands.

You're reading stuff that simply is not there. Nowhere did I say that someone did not have the right to free speech, and I spoke to exactly that point RE: Erdogan/Turkey. Not arguing against free speech, just saying that whatever someone says, one cannot dictate how that speech will be received.

The parent post seemed to be arguing that the problem is that too many people are thin-skinned and they don't have the right to be offended by the statements/actions of others. I disagreed with that point.

    > You're reading stuff that simply is not there.

Well, so are you? Please read what I wrote. You are missing my point.

    > The parent post.... I disagreed with that point.

Exactly. How about the right of OP to say whatever he feels like? Your support for "free speech" (the one in quotes) is selective.

    >  Nowhere did I say that someone did not have the right to free speech

Except you don't want OP to say what he did.

Yeah, same thought while reading this. I come from a generation where bagging your friends was common and played a large role in building character. Now if you honk at somebody to prevent an accident, you're flipped the bird. Even mild constructive criticism comes across as a massive assault against one's pride.

In my experience, by far the worst thing about political correctness as a cultural force has been anti-PC backlash over the last 20 years. In my lifetime, that's been a far more destructive force than even the most cartoonish forms of PC overreach that people like to cite. Since the mid-'90s we have lived in a world where assholes have been given a blank check to be as dumb and toxic as they want- all they have to do is preface it with, "Now, it might not be politically correct to say this, but..." They also have a blank check after the fact because they can blow off any fallout from some dumb, toxic thing that they said with excuses like, "I'm too busy to be politically correct all the time".

I have literally never in my life been affected by political correctness, and I would guess that the reality is that hardly anyone else has been either (especially the people that complain the longest and loudest about it). But I would argue that the most toxic elements of American culture and American politics nowadays come from people who feel empowered to be assholes, because they can blow off any criticism by claiming that their assholishness is just a lack of political correctness rather than plain old asshole behavior.

Put another way, I remember several decades before political correctness existed as a concept that people were generally aware of. I think it has enabled a spike in asshole behavior that hasn't been good for anyone involved. Some of those assholes are stereotypical overly PC people doing stereotypically overly PC things, but in my opinion something like 99% of those assholes (that we wouldn't have, were it not for the PC movement) are the vocally anti-PC people who think they can and should embrace the most toxic versions of themselves because to do anything else would be to give in to the PC people that they imagine are lurking around every corner. It has enabled them to be the worst they can be, and to double down on it by lionizing the worst assholes they can find, all in the name of being anti-PC.

I don't think it's an opposite effect so much as a variation on the same theme. "Cry-bullies" are still bullies, they just opt for an appeal to some other authority in a passive-aggressive manner instead of directly being the aggressor to get what they want.

That's just street/slums/ghetto behavior. Such heavy selection pressure selects the most adaptive and the most lucky (on the contrary to the popular misconception that the strongest and the smartest are selected). One could find a whole countries with this kind of society - Russia and some African states are good example. Highest level of corruption and crime produce such street-gang social norms.

Such practices are plainly stupid and based on misconception and uneducated common sense and primitive memes. Every serious professional athlete will tell you that too much stress and pressure will dramatically diminish one's performance and health instead of making one "stronger". Relaxed self-control, proper habits and just enough of exercises will do.

Any highly such competitive and stressful societies of assholes and jerks characterized by high turnaround, very short lifespan for participants, high injury and mortality rates, and hence adaptations, such as earlier reproductive age, smaller body sized, quicker but lower quality development, etc. It is just biology.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com