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Comment by mardifoufs | Hacker News Reader

Is it me or are the comments on the article super weird? I've never seen an AnandTech comment section like this one. What's going on, why this one?

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You mean all the people talking about the Illuminati and calling him a pedophile? Looks like a completely normal comment section to me, nothing strange there.

But the comments on AnandTech are usually your run of the mill intel vs AMD (or any brand rivalry) flamewars... Not people accusing a dude that has no controversy around him of pedophilia or of being an illuminati while at the same time saying that he probably left because he was tired of Intel's "Israeli ownership"? And It's weird because it's not a one off comment it's multiple accusations against a... cpu designer?

He's famous now. Being a CPU designer won't protect you against the consequences of your name appearing in a newspaper.

That isn't quite our usual style of troll, and it seems to be coming mostly from a pair of brand-new accounts.

Mainstream news comments make me feel like we are on the precipice of the collapse of civilization.

I think the people making those comments are the same people you see out in the world who are visibly unstable. Disheveled, muttering to themselves angrily, cars plastered in political bumper stickers, getting into confrontations with service workers, etc.

In the world there is context. You're sitting in a cafe surrounded by 20 other average people getting on with their day, and there's some guy talking loudly to no in particular that Bill Gates is trying to steal our blood or whatever.

It's those people sitting on these comment sections all day. That's what I tell myself anyway, otherwise it's too disturbing to think about the other explanations.

I think there's something to this. The internet actually giving context to people who think Bill Gates is trying to steal our blood or whatever. They can find a little space on a forum, or a subreddit, or 4chan, or indeed newspaper comment sections and find other people who think the same way, and now they're all reinforcing each other.

And, letters to the newspaper have, for many years, been the province of grumpy retirees and people whose job literally involves writing letters to the editors (activist organizers, PR people, etc.). I'm always faintly bemused when I read the comments in the San Francisco Chronicle, which are near-universally from conservative cranks bemoaning how those big-spendin' liberals are ruinin' everythin' what with their welfare programs supportin' no-gooders and their public transit bringin' in crime why in my youth we had to walk up Telegraph Hill through the snow both ways comin' and goin' and we liked it. I'm pretty sure I could paste in a letter to the editor that appeared in the paper of my youth, the Tampa Tribune in the 1980s, with surprisingly little editing necessary.

The reinforcement is concerning. Well, I guess that's how we wind up at censorship and de-platforming issues.

Do you provide space in your cafe to accommodate all the neighborhood nutjobs to congregate, and they all start shouting in unison about gangstalking or Bill Gates stealing our blood. How far do you let them go? They rile themselves up and you get a guy barging into a pizza shop wielding an assault rifle to take down a non-existent pedophile ring.

There are social and geographic boundaries out in the world, so that doesn't happen naturally. But on the internet... sigh. It's a problem without an obvious solution.

I think one argument that can be made on the pro-deplatforming side is that it's necessary to protect the mentally ill and vulnerable. I've never seen anything like the Qanon phenomenon, and that's just the beginning. We're going to see Borg-scale folie a deux.

Wait'll you get a load of Twitter.

Were those comments wiped away? I cannot see any of them, also not in the dead section.

There are a few weird comments left, but I could swear a lot of them have been deleted since I made the first comment. It's much better now!

To see all the comments:

https://www.anandtech.com/Show/Index/15846?all=True

Honestly, we're bombarded with this type of behavior day in and day out. And it starts in the highest of places where one would expect more decorum. To a lot of people this behavior is contagious. It is much easier to be negative and to spew crap than to have an intellectual conversation.

Anandtech's review and article tends to be top notch if not the best in the industry. Its Comment section however, is just another comment section.

It’s called sliding, the idea is to fill a comments section up with crap and make it unusable. It’s a strategy employed by trolls, corporate reputation managers, political groups, and even apparently US government agencies.

This seems to be a challenging subject to search for.

Can you point to any sources to learn more about this phenomenon?

Better late than never!

https://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm

> Better late than never!

Same here, with the reply!

As it happens, I had that link saved before, but have not had a chance to really dig in to it.

But the high quality nature of its contents is immediately apparent, so it's near the top of that particular backlog.

Thanks for the reminder of its existence.

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