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Comment by Confusion | Hacker News Reader

There's no need to lay the blame at 'culture' and 'society'. The problem is that you only need a thousand assholes in the million that read your story to cause major problems. Even in the most amazing culture and society you may expect 1 in a 1000 to be an asshole.

I think most humans are reasonable people. Many are even great people, no matter how much you may disagree with them about many small things. The problem is just the 1 asshole in a 1000 that has an outsized influence.

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Blame isn’t a good word for this (not what I intended either) because it suggests superiority, knowing better.

If we are not engaged in leading by example then it does come back to culture and society.

So, I agree but not entirely. Twitter and modern social media is practically a democratized manifestation of the paparazzi and the gossip mag. Gossip in this form is toxic as fuck - we’re not small villages where everybody knows each other any more.

The effect of these things is often significant due to how poorly managed some channels are, though. And it's not always due to large size, it happens in schools all the time and we call it bullying.

For instance, this kind of thing could affect your job and lose you your job, which shouldn't actually be a thing, and we should ask why is this a thing or why is this a problem?

Consider SWATting, it only works because there's a framework in place to make it work.

Why are threats effective?

A lot of this is preexisting problems that manifest in bullying and stalking and frankly they're not handled very well, the victim often has little to no recourse. So it more seems like we do not have good solutions to these issues, socially OR legally.

>For instance, this kind of thing could affect your job and lose you your job, which shouldn't actually be a thing, and we should ask why is this a thing or why is this a problem?

The issue is that, in times past, if you said something stupid and unfunny in a bar with some friends on a Saturday night, probably no one would even remember it in the morning. Today, if you're unlucky, there's at least some finite possibility that for certain types of things, it will end up on YouTube, your company is being DDOSd, your company hashtag is being flooded with demands for your firing, there are news stories about you, and the path of least resistance is for your company to announce that you are no longer with them. I'm not sure what law prevents that from happening.

I'm saying the issue here is how affected you are by something like losing your job, and how likely it is to happen.

> the path of least resistance is for your company to announce that you are no longer with them.

This is kind of the issue. There's no room for reasonable discourse, or taking a risk.

Realistically, someone saying something about you on social media should be uninteresting, and a company shouldn't have to worry about that as much, but things got crooked and somehow it makes sense for a company to be very jumpy about these things. That doesn't actually make sense, and we should examine how we got here. This is not the only place this shows up, a similar problem is it being very difficult for someone to get a job if they had a criminal offense.

I get an overwhelming sense that Internet mediated connectivity between people has produced a societal phenomenon that is an analogue of psychosis within a single brain. It's like there is just not enough dampening to prevent wild feedback loops. I imagine that a normally functioning brain has some way of dealing with the problem and maybe society will eventually evolve something. In the mean time, there's nothing to do but keep your head down. It's terrifying to me that being polite and nodding and being tolerant of others is not enough to keep one out of trouble though.

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