Now we have lame blogs owned by corporations like Techcrunch, or filled with vacation pics and food porn.
I thought it was a little silly when Hacker News began hiding points, but I think it has a lot to do with how Hacker News hasn't turned into a game about scoring points rather than people sincerely trying to express some analysis or opinion.
Getting to the end of a blog post, and wanting to see what other people have to say, then only seeing links to other people's blogs, or garbage comments like "really amazing post! come look at my blog" is disheartening. It even makes you feel unwelcome commenting on the actual content, as though a decadent interest in ideas interferes with a bunch of people trying to do their jobs and put food on the table.
People have seemingly figured out that confronting someone's employer, even about a topic unrelated to their work, is a good way to punish someone for a misdeed. That was never really a concern most people had to be concerned about until recently.
I like to thank that A. I'm a decent person and B. my employer would not drop me over an Internet argument, but I think really anyone who communicates online needs to be afraid of this risk.
Otherwise one day some group will have fun with them until they have no employees left.
My blog is about my city, and there are plenty of things we "can" talk about but probably should't. For example, I don't think the business that's in one of the cornerstone buildings downtown is the right business for the neighborhood. But I'd never say it. It'd be needlessly confrontational, my opinion isn't going to get that business to move, they're paying their rent so they have every right to stay there, and all it would do is piss people off who disagree with me.
On the other hand, we generate minor controversies all the time. People who live outside of the city always want more parking, we're pretty strongly against setting minimum numbers of parking spaces when putting in new buildings. We support new higher-density living in the city, many neighbors are strongly opposed to it. As such, we're the target of smear campaigns and any relevant social media post is often swamped with the people who disagree with us. We've also been factually wrong in the past, and some people do their best to remind us of it as often as possible.
The trick is to ignore it. Haters gonna hate. Don't be unnecessarily confrontational, and just roll on without acknowledging your public critics. They're just trying to piggyback off your success.
It's not really a "one wrong word" situation, it's "one word you really knew you shouldn't have said, but against all better judgement you did anyway" followed by "engaging your critics in arguments", then topped off with "caving and admitting defeat because you knew you were wrong all along".
I can't think of a single collapse of a public figure because of one wrong word that wasn't extremely egregious and then handled extremely poorly.
THAT dynamic is toxic and we need to somehow evolve a social rule against it. Something like Godwin's Rule, back when that worked.
Everybody has at some point said something factually incorrect and everybody has at some point said something that sounds wrong or mean when taken out of context today.
If forever bringing up "Remember, this is the person who said (worst thing ever)!" is a valid move, it's an attack on identity continuity. The existing defenses against that attack seem to be:
(a) completely abandoning identity continuity (eg: 4chan)
(b) trying to appear perfectly accurate and inoffensive at all times by retroactively deleting any posts that might make one look inconsistent or mean and hoping nobody notices or keeps an archive.
There really ought to be more options than those. For instance, one could adopt a statute-of-limitations approach: Anything said more than two years ago is off-limits as an attack on that person/blog/institution today.
Once the right rule is documented, those who break it are demonstrating they are too dumb or ill-informed to engage with what is being said now and thus have lost the argument.
One example is Bredan Eich. Because he chose to donate to a Prop 8 fund and it got out, his opinion on all subjects is automatically null and void for many people.
Another case is that of reddit user 'Unidan', who became an immediate pariah overnight because he was a dick to someone online, so he abandoned the entire identity. If any of his alternate identities were somehow linked back, it would likely become useless as well. I'd be willing to be his professional career suffered greatly because of that rant, too.
There's also Joy Reid, who has been in hot water lately because people found old tweets and blog posts that were offensive. In that case, people actively went back to look for things she said in the past.
None of these would have been possible pre-internet.
It is best to just ignore them.
This is why the web was better when everyone was operating under a pseudonym.
You only need to look at the kind of stuff the griefers on various other websites get up to to see the extent of the menu of real-world consequences. Those things are not jokes.
So I totally see your 'real consequences' argument, and it goes way beyond just your employment, in some cases it is your life that is in the balance.
But there will always be idiots. Just like there are people using drugs and then driving vehicles I have to share the road with them. But that won't change my attitude towards driving, and neither will the existence of assholes diminish my activities online. But I totally sympathize with those people for whom lines have been crossed that cause them to censor themselves or even to tune out completely. And I'm sure I too have such lines (in fact, I can easily think of several) and if those were crossed I too would bow out.
That, not consequently, is the same time as Facebook became the dominant way for many people to share and consume links on the web.
... And written by "influencers".
It loads slowly, but you're downloading the entire wiki. I'm as transparent as I can be with my thoughts. It's as personal as it gets. If you feel it's just a Timecube or TempleOS, then I'm sorry for wasting your time.