Comment by muzani | Hacker News Reader

Comment by muzani | Hacker News Reader

I've been active online since 2000.

There was a theory in 2004, known as GIFT: Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Fuckwad

Guess what? People without anonymity are total fuckwads too - this happens on Facebook, Instagram and Twitch, in an era where you could probably find someone's personal details if you look hard enough.

I think the key is audience. Bullying feels good for a lot of people. Bullies will go for low hanging fruit where they won't be struck back.

You see people acting this way even in once helpful sites like Stack Overflow; downvotes will pull bullies in like a magnet. You see people picking on anti-vax, flat earthers, Justin Bieber, not so much because they do harm, but because they're easy targets to hold down.

Viral algorithms amplify this effect. It highlights bad news that everyone can join in and rage on. It's not a new thing; news channels have done this for decades.

We can't really fix it. I'm more a community nomad these days. It's easy to move on to other new and old communities, away from this effect. I've been happy with HN, Discord, and IRC lately.. IRC has picked up back to 500 people per channel, and it's probably no coincidence.

> You see people picking on anti-vax, flat earthers, Justin Bieber, not so much because they do harm, but because they're easy targets to hold down.

Your other examples were solid, but anti-vax absolutely does cause harm, and it seems inappropriate to dismiss the possibility that in the case of anti-vax people are motivated by genuine fear for our collective safety and that of our children.

The claim wasn't that they're harmless, but that they're easy targets.

The claim was that people were motivated to argue by the ease of the target rather than by the genuine threat of harm. In the case of anti-vax, I don't agree. I think people see a threat to their kids and react accordingly.

It goes beyond hash criticism into gleeful joy making jokes about kids dying.

Anti-vaxxers are only a threat to kids who have another health condition that prevents them from being vaxinated. So, in most cases, it's a threat to somebody else's kids (who isn't even present in the conversation) not a threat to the anti-anti-vaxxer's kids.

This is not true. Vaccinations are not 100% effective. They're usually in the range of 90% to 99% effective. Protection also wanes over time. Because of this, herd immunity protects everyone, not just those who are unable to be vaccinated for health reasons.

Even if you don't feel strongly on the topic of vaccination, going out of your way to bash anti-vaxxers is great at signalling how you are scientifically woke. The GP is positing that people who bash anti-vaxxers do so overwhelmingly out of this motivation rather than true pro-vaccine activism.

I understand the GP's take. I think it's both incorrect and uncharitable. People care about their kids more than imaginary internet points.

I disagree. The loudest activists too often tend to be younger people who either don't have kids, or are /r/childfree types who actively disdain the concept.

Of course, by "activists", there's a difference between the genuine voices, versus the Reddit or HN meme-slingers. The latter group seems louder due to style. While they happen to be on the right side (from my POV), they're still quite awful as people.

> to dismiss the possibility that in the case of anti-vax people are motivated by genuine fear for our collective safety and that of our children.

People who are genuine in that NEVER bash. For the simple reason that bashing doesn't work. What they do do is respectfully argue with any false data.

But you'll never see someone like that insult people or call them stupid, ignorant, or doubt the love of an anti-vaxxer for their own children.

I'm not anti-vax, but this is a discussion on toxicity on the internet, and I see plenty of people who take great pleasure in just unloading on anti-vaxxers because they know it's a target nobody will scold them for being cruel to. It's pretty obvious these types don't really care about changing the minds of the anti-vaxxers either, people usually don't have an epiphany about their life just because somebody was mean to them online. If anything, it's an opportunity for anti-vaxxers to band together against people who are cruel to them and probably even more deeply ingrain their beliefs.

This doesn't mean anti-vaxxers should be tolerated as a viable alternative lifestyle, but throwing curses at them online and spamming memes that make them out to be mentally challenged really doesn't do anything but satisfy a bully.

I also think the lack of consequences makes it very easy for people to post all kinds of shit.

On HN this is greatly reduced by the point system and the opacity of bad posts. A bad post fades away so it doesn't look as important as other posts.

In real life you can get a punch in the face if you say nasty things to someone.

But on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube most trolls wont ever learn because they just can say whatever they want.

Worth considering that this isn't simply mechanical: to make those posts fade away requires humans clicking the downvote button. Which requires some kind of culture that includes clicking the button on "bad" posts, for whatever the definition of "bad" is. If there were downvoting on say, YouTube, I'm not sure that it would produce the same results that it does on HN.

Hacker News is indeed a special place on the internet and it would probably be difficult to reproduce its style of discussion. That being said I think it is worth considering why HN has succeeded and to what extent is this a function of the presentation algorithm (upvotes/downvotes)?

It is worth remembering that the visible part of an internet community is a small part of the total possible community. Following the classic 90-9-1 rule there are a lot more people who could participate than people who do participate. This means that the visible face of an online community has a lot of room to change.

> On HN this is greatly reduced by the point system and the opacity of bad posts. A bad post fades away so it doesn't look as important as other posts.

The problem is, this functionality is popularity based. Yes, posts that get downvoted are usually bad posts. However, some are simply disliked by the majority of people who wanted to vote on them and are not actually "bad" by the standards of this discussion. Similarly, I have seen toxic posts (that I have downvoted and flagged) upvoted (at least once) when the target of the toxicity was "acceptable".

I think consequences are an illusory deterrent personally. People thought real name policies would help. Even with people losing jobs over posting the needle didn't move.

In truth consequences can be an incentive for bad actors. To them saying offensive things and getting a burner account banned is boring compared to tricking people into getting banned.

> On HN this is greatly reduced by the point system and the opacity of bad posts. A bad post fades away so it doesn't look as important as other posts.

I really dislike that. But, I have put in CSS so that bad posts don't fade away, and enabled show dead so that all messages can be seen. But at least we have the choice!

I thought this was the case too.

One of the things that surprised me was how people who are horrible online are even worse offline.

I think there are plenty of online consequences. Post a controversial post and someone will verbally slap, share, shame you. Shaming might be far worse than a physical punch to some people.

I think a lot of people who become trolls don't become trolls for the sake of of trolling. They do it because they're trying to enforce consequences upon someone.

> People without anonymity are total fuckwads too

Hell, go read any "opinion" article from any newspaper since the dawn of the printing press. They were well-written fuckwads, but they were pretty much all fuckwads.

In the old days you only ever saw that embarrassing uncle with the extreme views on Thanksgiving. Now he's on your Facebook/Twitter feed every day.

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