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Comment by bilbo0s | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately these days we're forced to consider the possibility that even your post is part of a professional manipulation campaign. Or mine. Or every other post out here.

We just don't know.

That's the crux of the problem for me. Nowadays, I'm so jaded that I trust no one.

It's sad. I've lost trust, and I don't think I can get it back.

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Does trust mean automatically taking for granted the truth of anonymous statements you read online?

If so that trust never should have existed in the first place, and it should be gone forever.

Not taken as truth, but taken as in good faith by default. The amount of manipulative and dishonest content has gone up quite a bit.

Has it gone up, or have you only been made aware of it now?

That's exactly what was written on 4chan's /b/ for years. Despite having a ridiculous reputation, this place was always excellent at helping it's users develop the right attitude toward internet in general: don't trust anyone, don't let your emotions take control, and don't be so damn serious.

The last descriptor I would use for 4chan is "cold calm rational".

You clearly haven't spent enough time on it - that's exactly the qualities that it trains within you, although the method it uses is kinda harsh.

It is a place where people go to with their uncontrolled emotional outbursts. Which is their thing when those outbursts don't have impact on rest of the world and really not fine when it leaks outside.

Yes, swear words lost all their meaning for many on 4chan. That does not make people using them any more rational.

It's not about sharpening your wits thorough osmosis, it's about seeing nonsense laid bare at your feet. Leveraging that to see through the pretense of "smarter" conversation to understand it's the exact same stuff: shit-flinging, misleading but plausible half-lies, active propaganda, underinformed dummies thinking they're having a deep conversation, etc...

The zen that parent poster describes comes when you recognize that your favorite political commentator, or the thing your best friend just said over coffee are not inherently smarter or dumber than 4chan.

edit: w/r/t "leaking outside.": The problem isn't that Trump was meme-ed into the whitehouse. The problem is that paternalistic control of messaging will never equip the populace to evaluate something as nonsense when the parents aren't around to stop the message from propagating.

By leaking outside I meant a.) coordinated harassment b.) people being shocked that the rest of world does not share 4chan habits and culture - including channers being honestly shocked that people react negatively to unrelated Hitler meme used as argument and not taking author as some king of genius for that. Because channer using hitler and nazi symbolism did not even realized what those things means or were (except general understanding that it was something edgy).

I don't really think Trump got to white house bc 4chan, I believe his voters voted him because he represents them as he is.

Love your summary of the 4chan spirit. On point! It taught us that we shouldn't judge a message based on its communicator but only on the message itself.

Not even the message. Even the message is likely manipulative, or an outright falsehood, or, most likely, both.

This is the right way to view any single-source information you are reading on the internet.

I've found this is usually more the paper-thin justification /b/ users employ to avoid noticing that a culture based entirely around judging others for being too hysterical quickly drives them hysterical.

Personally, I can use Google to double check claims fairly easily. I actually have given up a lot of urban-myth beliefs that were wide-spread in even the 90s.

I regularly check and flag false or dubious claims friend's posts on Facebook (where I'd say Facebook gets a bum-rap in some ways because friends can point out fake stuff).

As far as not knowing where a given post comes from, that's OK if you are careful in your double checking.

But the opposite pole is people who don't care whether what they post is true. Usually I and those people go separate ways. So the ultimate thing is naturally the bifurcation of online communities, with some portion becoming highly partisan and willing to repeat fake info simply to serve a given pole of opinion (not necessarily "extreme").

Careful of fact checking with Google, it can easily validate something as truth that isn't. The best option is to usually include the keyword "study" and actively look for only that data.

Perhaps I made a mistake in supposing that someone would take "using Google" as "search until I found several studies or good discussions on a given topic, compare the data, the arguments, the point of view and so-forth of each study then come to a conclusion" rather than, say, using Google's auto-generated answers to a few topic.

>Unfortunately these days we're forced to consider the possibility that even your post is part of a professional manipulation campaign. Or mine. Or every other post out here.

The only way to beat this is to have an end goal that is objectively good regardless of who says it.

Bringing the first amendment into the 21st century and forcing corporations with open access discussion systems to be treated like government entities is a win for everyone.

After all the first amendment in it's original form only stopped the federal government from imprisoning you before you said something, not after, and had nothing at all to say about what states governments could or couldn't do.

The First Amendment doesn't beat professional manipulation campaigns, it facilitates them.

I've realized recently that the goood thing about the First Amendment is that it leads to an electorate that is as jaded as myself. One that views every Facebook, or HN, or internet post as potentially part of a state sponsored manipulation campaign.

So the 1st is bad because it makes you have to think?

It's probably a good thing, at least on the Internet.

You never should have relied on trust in the first place. Claims stand or fall on their rational consistency and correlation with reality. Nothing else.

Is there a way to combat this phenomenon (generally: bad faith posting) with technical means?

This is such a lazy/defeatist statement. I'm hoping you still know that, in the midst of all this noise, facts and truths continue to exist -- so do well-informed opinions that can be fact-checked. Also, accepting this holier than thou persona from televised/printed "professional" media is being ignorant to their adoption of sensationalism and immediacy.

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