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Comment by me_again | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious: anyone feel they have ever successfully "talked someone down from a ledge" in an online forum in this way? Presumably it must happen but it seems vanishingly rare.

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You see it here on HN all the time. An inflammatory post gets scolded/graciously questioned and the person retracts/apologizes/softens. Not every time, but a lot.

But HN might be unique in that regard? Or maybe there's just a scale beyond which it doesn't work?

There's a stark difference between the audience here at HN and say 8ch or even the taken down Parler. Most users here you can reason with, can't say much for extremists. Also the crowd over there won't give you the mic unless you feed them what they want to hear. They troop to these hidden places for a specific reason(s).

I believe HN is unique in this regard. I myself have been both scolded and graciously questioned by HN users on my writing, and it is always done in such a concise and well-written way. I am honestly completely new to writing anything online, and consider myself fortunate that there is a community of highly intellectual people willing to take the time to give my writing succinct criticism, without feeling the need to attack me personally.

It has also made me aware of how well-researched many HN user's opinions are on both sides. My opinions have largely been formed in conversations with young people of the liberal city I live in. They will cheer at anything that attacks whoever they see as their opponents, regardless of the research quality or partisan tone behind them. I have received a far greater range of perspective from brilliant HN users on both sides, which has prompted me to take a step back and re-evaluate how I am writing about this incendiary topic.

I did some cursory examination of the traffic other us presidential electables enjoy and was kind of blown away by how all except the top 2 basically have no traffic at all. The facebook likes and youtube clicks are so low it doesn't account for direct friends and relatives. This means not even the journalists around the world bothered to look at any of them. They had on average 1/3 article written about their electibility usually with the author explaining he didnt know anything about their program. Those who didnt disclaimer it all equally failed to say anything about the program.

There are to many of them for a [private] person to really look at all the programs but that out of many many hundreds of millions (in and outside the us) no one bothered to look at any of them rules out objectivity by the full 100%

It means people get all of their information from other people who also know nothing. Information limited to the top 2 groups. If team blue gets all of its information about team red from other team blue members you will have a similar total exclusion of reality.

End of the day you have to get off the ledge yourself either way based on the information you've gathered.

If we want you to know what anarchy, communism or Christianity are we should have you talk wiht the anarchist, the communist or the christian.

I do feel so, yes. The internet is not real life. Comments of people you know may lead to real life conversations, and yes, myself and others have come to common ground after being on extreme sides based on internet comments.

The internet is real life, though. More and more, people are experiencing relationships through the lenses of their online personas. The online world is different from the offline world, and it works by different rules, but it is very much real. A conversation in chat is no different than a phone call, and we don't say that phone conversations aren't real life.

You bring up a good point about people behaving differently in in-person conversations and even perhaps being more willing to change their minds. I think there's a lot of truth there, but I think it comes from thinking that our online personas aren't real and from being physically distanced from the effects of what we say online.

It never occurred to me that my sarcasm online would be a factor in a friend's suicide, but now I live with the consequences of not understanding the very real effects of the things I said.

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