Comment by aantix | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aantix | Hacker News Reader

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>Fiddling with the internet in a futile attempt to decrease social alienation is like buying a tank top to increase your physical fitness.

Disagree. For the innovators out there, please keep fiddling.

Funny how I can interact with strangers in the real-world and sometimes walk away refreshed but I am not sure there's a single time I have ever read a stream of tweets from strangers and felt anything but anger and nausea?

Reading unrefined emotive sentences has the damning effect of "this is a proclamation, this must be true!"

Where-as if you had the conversation with a stranger, you would realize there are dramatic pauses, "umms" where they aren't so certain of their statement, trailing inflections in their voice where they're actually asking a question instead of making a statement.

Most people are not sophisticated enough to write in a way that accurately conveys their emotions.

So the tweets all read as grand proclamations.

And it sucks. Participating in these "social" sites cause stress.

Keep iterating. How can we experience online, the emotion of in-person chats? Video chats are from perfect and come off stale and more akin to the experience of a CB Radio.

Async video group chat - all participants record video clips/responses? Along with fairly accurate transcriptions of the video, so that the content can be searched?

> Funny how I can interact with strangers in the real-world and sometimes walk away refreshed but I am not sure there's a single time I have ever read a stream of tweets from strangers and felt anything but anger and nausea?

This hasn't been my experience, I regularly see interesting and refreshing stuff linked from Twitter. The Outer Worlds bug thread was only a few days ago[0]. Here's another story about deaf astronauts if you want something recent that's more general than programming.[1]

I do think there are things we can do better, and I don't think everything is fine, and on average I even advise people to stay away from sites like Twitter -- I don't think they're super-healthy right now. But overall even the toxic parts of the Internet I frequent (like Twitter) are not nearly as toxic as people make them out to be.

There's been this kind of push in the media lately that maybe all of this was a mistake, and that's just laughable to me. Of course the Internet has been a net good for society. There are a lot of problems, and a lot of stuff I hate, but I am overall trending towards optimistic, not pessimistic -- especially when I look at efforts like Mastodon, PeerTube, and Matrix. I think the Internet is rough, but not fundamentally flawed. So please keep iterating, but also stop being so pessimistic. The Internet is honestly kind of good. We did a good job building it.

I was thinking the other day -- I need to start indexing some of the things I see online that make me happy, so when I see comments like this I can just more quickly list them out.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21779583

[1]: https://twitter.com/TheSpaceGal/status/1205258285412020225

It's not just the loss of data in communication, though that might be part of it, it's our lack of mechanisms to deal with the scaling of the number of interlocutors. If you messages are being read by 1000s of people it is a certainty some will be psychos of one shape or another. The medium will reward with attention precisely the unhinged who will say the most extreme nonsense with little fear of real world repercussions.

I wonder if there could be an online equivalent to the premise "say it to my face".

Meaning, if you wanted to tweet/response at me, you should be required to see my emotional response to it in real-time, and you must be open to me asking any follow up questions to your response.

And if you're not open to that, you don't get to respond to me.

You'd have people queuing up to insult you so they could watch the reaction.

The real world "say it to my face" really means "say it somewhere I can fight you if you're rude enough".

Yes. The underlying threat of violence, or at the very least social exclusion, if one goes too far is what keeps most in person conversations far more civilized than their online counterparts.

Social exclusion works online -- and did work on usenet, until platform owners disabled it in order to promote engagement/enragement for ad impressions.

A little bit. It was a lot easier to escape exclusion by changing your identity in Usenet compared with the real world so motivated trolls would often do that.

Not really - it certainly didn't work against spammers, and the whole thing was entirely unauthenticated.

Even assuming the correctness of your argument, the threat of violence only applies where it is credible. Strong bullies aren't intimidated by their victims, men generally aren't intimidated by women, and so on.

There is in fact an orthogonal effect where people will fear expression in the face of violence. Is "civilized" expression dominated by the strong better than the rudeness of online communication, where there are different power dynamics? I don't know, but I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it.

Perahps at least a portion of the "uncivilized" speech you see online is the outcry of those who are not allowed to express their opinions elsewhere.

You assume one-on-one conversations. In a group setting even a strong bully can be subdued by the group. In such a group, a man isn't going to be allowed to insult a woman without other men stepping in. But you bring a good point. Should insulting, disrupting voices be tolerated in a conversation in the name of freedom of speech? I would say no, because they make further speech impossible, but I see the problem in deciding what constitutes disruption/insults.

That's the real-world implications of an in-person conversation.

Obviously extending this to online, two people could be far from each other. But it still would require one person to see the emotional response from the other, which may or may not be pleasant.

Not exactly, the real world implications could go well beyond observing your targets emotional response.

And how would that work exactly? Strap the other person into a chair and force them to watch you "Clockwork Orange" style?

As an adult your emotional responses to communication are entirely your own affair.

> Funny how I can interact with strangers in the real-world and sometimes walk away refreshed but I am not sure there's a single time I have ever read a stream of tweets from strangers and felt anything but anger and nausea?

Really? I find the opposite. There are few people I can talk to for hours, most face to face communication even with people I like is exhausting after just a few minutes. But I can spend all day online and feel refreshed.

Granted I stay away from cesspools like Twitter. Really I go out of my way to not spend time online in places that don't add some sort of value to my life.

I think it's a difference in communication preferences that gets magnified by your environment growing up.

Short: 'Censoring Digital and Social Fake'?

REM: 'Tyrannys have concentrated views.'

I think the difference is the GP is thinking of cesspools like Twitter, and you're thinking of more uplifting communities.

Why do you allow yourself to feel anger and nausea over something as trivial as a tweet? Social media is just entertainment and a game, not something that sensible people actually take seriously.

Oh boy, I have to tell you about this old guy from New York...

I wonder how many millions of productivity hours have been lost in the past 3 years as people direct all of their emotional energy at the president

Few people are so perfectly stoic as you presume. Often times spreading anger is the game people are playing on Twitter, and it spreads like a virus. Emotions are contagious.

It doesn't take perfect stoicism not to react with anger and nausea to every expression one encounters on social media. Most people aren't that sensitive.

I suspect this is the social adaptation that the generation that grows us with Twitter will have. Unfortunately, it may be hard to adapt to for those that weren't. I'm somewhere in the middle and I've mostly just chosen to dial down my interaction with politics online because I noticed it made me less happy.

I agree that it shouldn’t be taken seriously (or even just not participated in), but not everyone is a master of stoic detachment. Some people cannot help but have strong emotional reactions to things like this.

And that is precisely why everyone should study stoic philosophy and seek to become a master of stoic detachment. The ability to control our reactions is what separates humans from lower animals.

I have to agree. The internet is a badly distorted view of reality. Who cares if some wacko posts some crazy stuff online?

When the Tweet expresses some abhorrent view (like "she deserves to be treated badly because she is $RACE", terrorism apologism, etc) and it garners hundreds of thousands of likes and retweets, it causes me quite a lot of stress, doubly so if it comes from or is endorsed by major publications or political officials.

Arguably, I shouldn't feel stress for things so far beyond my control, but at the same time I have a vested interest in my community and its future (and if so many people feel this way, it certainly _feels_ like a credible threat).

I think stress is natural reaction to learning that your community has abhorrent views, but you could train yourself to minimise that reaction in a stoic manner.

Training is in many ways a body thing as well as mind. E.g. learning to modulate fear and disgust reactions, heart rate, breathe so as to let the adrenalin spike pass (if you want), change muscle posture, etc.

And you should anyway on intellectual grounds, because words' intepretion is often different, at least in degree and shades and layers of meaning, than the intent of their author. For example "$X apologism" is often a misinterpretation of words someone was using to try to reduce the amount of $X in the world (due to the world and people being complicated). Many issues are "no matter what you say, or where you are coming from, someone will think you mean almost the opposite, and sometimes they have a vested interest in thinking that".

But reducing stress doesn't have to mean stop caring.

It can make you more effective at caring.

For anyone with an interest in their community and its future, I'd advocate for deciding which reactions to keep, maybe even develop (e.g. various ways to channel anger constructively, such as politics, community organising, creating new institutions), and training yourself to reduce stress and other intense reactions that you decide are not so helpful (e.g. anxiety from watching the news).

My main point is to encourage people to think of stress and anger as being a mix of constructive and destructive types.

My approach these days is to first try to overcome my anger and despair at knowing how many people seem to think what they do, and when I (eventually!) calm down, ask myself how can I affect the world to change this. I must admit, it is challenging these days because I've come to think of large numbers of my fellow humans as jerks who are happiest when damaging others!

But it isn't a game.

A made up example to illustrate:

Say 100,000 people from your locale +1 the tweet "she probably deserved to get raped [euphemism for gang-raped and murdered brutally while guys are laughing, recording it on their phones and sharing it with their mates], women need to be reminded of their place, those guys should be let off", and 1,000 people reply with about half of them approving, that's a serious, non-game signal about the real world in your locale.

A signal that tells you something life-threateningly important about the people around you, how they think when they see you, what you should be looking to protect yourself from, and how.

If it was just a game, you could safely ignore the words.

But it isn't just personal safety: Those balance of opinions end up determining how the local police think. Do they investigate, or do they brush it under the carpet? How the local government officials think. What they prioritise, what they even care about. Whether anyone even gets prosecuted, what the law ends up being. Even who ends up in government.

Now, although that's a strong example with details made up (but not unrealistic, sadly), there are countless examples on social media where it is clear that the tweets, likes, comments and other things have a large, profound, physical effect on many people's lives if you trace the effect of the influence of words.

Because behind a tweet is a person. A person with a mentality to think a certain way. A way that might be harmful to you. A way other people think. The tweet itself is nothing, but what it represents can be massive.

If someone tweets that all left handed users of hacker news who use custom CSS should be banned from the internet, no one gets mad because that tweet doesn't represent some widespread group of humans. It is so outside expectations people will assume it is sarcastic, but even if they were convinced it was real, unless it came from someone in power or showed traction, it would be ignored and none would be mad.

When someone tweets that you doing something you see as natural should result in you being imprisoned under threat of death, and there are entirely communities backing that view and perhaps even a history of people being imprisoned for the same, it gets far more personal.

Much of the time I'm pretty sure it's not a person behind a tweet (or reaction to a tweet). Lots of bots out there now. And even when there is a person tweeting, many of them are trolls or paid provocateurs. The whole platform is a total joke. If you take it personally then you're missing the point.

I think a big part of why there is so much antagonism in Twitter threads, Facebook politics and the like, is due to the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle.

Even if people weren't actually more angry online, and even if communications in text didn't come across as more antagonistic, the BAP tends to amplify the negative in any large group.

Closely related is the way that it only takes a Tiny Number Of Assholes to ruin things for a large group. That happens in verbal discourse, face to face social groups, and community organisations too.

The effects on targetted individuals can be devastatingly traumatic, and sometimes take years to recover from, especially when they interact with other difficult things happening in people's lives. It's hardly surprising, if some people's lives are turned upside down completely, that for a larger circle of people in the vicinity there's an instinct towards unhappiness and anger in general, just from proximity, without necessarily having a clear, fixed target.

If we can ever figure out how to create a Bullshit and Asshole Damage dampening field, that would be great.

> Async video group chat - all participants record video clips/responses

Isn't that Snapchat?

> I am not sure there's a single time I have ever read a stream of tweets from strangers and felt anything but anger and nausea?

Don't read those people then?

It is a bit of an art to find a Twitter community who are nice, but fandoms are generally a better place to start than politics.

>Isn't that Snapchat?

No. Video isn't required. Texting is allowed and used liberally with Snap.

Snap's consumption of video tends to be one way - from the followee to the follower. Or two friends, one sends video, the other sends a text response.

With my idea, the required video response clips would force participants to reveal themselves. Their mannerisms, their current emotional state.

Ahahaha, good luck finding non-toxic communities on fandom twitter, I've spent many years organizing community events and have given up on that platform for fandom fun considering the near daily dogpiles and harassment campaigns I see. And I wish that was an exaggeration.

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