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Comment by just-juan-post | Hacker News Reader

That's not now the modern internet works.

It's now competition and one of the best ways to score points in this competition is by manipulating the empathy of your fellow human.

I wish the internet was still about real discussion but now it's about heartstrings and upvotes.

Haven't you notice the same pattern with the "long covid" stories? Light on science, heavy on heartstrings.

An internet based off of rational discussion is long dead, even here on HN. Just watched the mods (hi @dang ) wipe nuke a story about Sweden's Covid-19 success off the front page. [1]

Oh well.

[1] = https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25112382

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Mods? Users flagged that one. No mod even saw it. (Edit: I've restored the post now.)

Edit: would you please stop using HN for political and ideological battle? It turns out you've been doing that a ton, and basically exclusively. That's not what this site is for, and we ban such accounts. Please view https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules.

It's surprising to me how difficult it is to have a discussion in the (cyberspace) open holding what I consider the internet-minority-viewpoint on covid. Even on HN (among other platforms), which is one of the places where I often go to find good balanced viewpoints, when sharing anything remotely different from toeing the covid line (i.e. vaccines will save the day, everyone must get vaccinated, we must force people to wear masks, schools should be closed, the virus is causing the economic disaster, etc.) I see people get downvoted, censored, etc. to oblivion. It's nice to see that there are other folks out there that don't exhibit the wild levels of fear and concern for what I consider to be much ado about nothing.

It doesn't at all help that we have both China [1] and political parties manipulating public opinion for votes [2]

I miss the old internet where I could talk to rational people like you but now Eternal September has truly arrived.

[1] - https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/china-covid...

[2] - https://www.newsweek.com/joe-biden-kamala-harris-got-big-soc...

> It's surprising to me how difficult it is to have a discussion in the (cyberspace) open holding what I consider the internet-minority-viewpoint on covid.

The thing is, not all viewpoints are equally valid, and some are both unreasonable given the facts and have actually dangerous implications.

For instance, minority viewpoints like promoting herd immunity as a solution at this point (like some prominent people were doing as recently as a month ago [1]) is about the dumbest thing ever. It's pretty much "let's try to get everyone sick (with the death and disability that entails) just before our vaccine effort bears fruit and would make that pain unnecessary. It's nonsense, and at this point it makes more sense to downvote than to beat the same dead horse yet again.

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-embraces-idea-herd-imm...

Why isn't it valid to acknowledge all the data/risks, and still feel like we should just let the virus run its course? I know of tons of people who feel this way. You are arguing against a straw-man. Yes, there are many conspiracy theory nutcases out there. But people who believe all the numbers and still think we are overreacting are still being censored/ignored to oblivion. Not only that, but my (highly reliable ;-) anecdata tells me that most of these people are busy raising kids and growing the food you eat. Just because they don't have the time to spray their opinions all over the internet and petition their govt officials to freak out doesn't mean that their viewpoints are less valid.

> Why isn't it valid to acknowledge all the data/risks, and still feel like we should just let the virus run its course?

It's technically valid, but tiresome to rehash the same broadly rejected viewpoints over an over. What you called "toeing the covid line" above is basically agreeing with the consensus of experts who actually know what they're talking about.

> But people who believe all the numbers and still think we are overreacting are still being censored/ignored to oblivion. Not only that, but my (highly reliable ;-) anecdata tells me that most of these people are busy raising kids and growing the food you eat. Just because they don't have the time to spray their opinions all over the internet and petition their govt officials to freak out doesn't mean that their viewpoints are less valid.

Oh, I know some of those people, and they're part of the reason the state my parents still live in has been a covid shitshow for several months and only just came around to imposing a mask mandate and occupancy limits. Their viewpoints are definitely less valid, being either wishful thinking or lack of concern for others.

I live in one of those "shitshow" states. And the vast majority of the population here is completely fine with how things are panning out - except maybe the reduced restaurant capacity and part-time schooling - those are pretty annoying. You can't force people to care about things they just do not care about. I acknowledge that some people (legitimately) have different values w.r.t. tradeoffs of dealing with covid. They don't have to be stupid or uniformed or brainwashed to think differently than me. And neither do I or many of those shitshow makers have to be brainwashed or uniformed to think/feel differently than you.

> You can't force people to care about things they just do not care about.

Exactly, so don't complain about downvotes again next time you want to resist "toeing the covid line." To make an analogy, there are probably people (maybe even whole communities) who want to resist "toeing the drunk driving line," but the ship has sailed on that and few people care to hear their arguments that they should be able to drive when the blow a 0.12 or whatever.

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