Addiction to Outrage (2020) | Hacker News Reader

Addiction to Outrage (2020)

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465 pointslxm240 comments

Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out.
Is one's first feeling, 'Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that,' or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible?
If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything -- God and our friends and ourselves included -- as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.

-- C.S. Lewis

And even worse than this, is that I see people go on to accuse the writer of the second story as being an apologist for the events in the first, and making them out to be even worse than the perpetrators of the first story. Essentially, whoever is the first to bring "bad things" to light, must be immediately trusted and considered completely truthful and no criticism is possible. Whoever "cancels" somebody first automatically wins. There is no chance for defence, counter-argument, or questioning the "evidence"/here-say. If you get in first with breaking a story, event, past mis-deed, then you win.

If you accused of crime and go to court, you will be guilty in the eyes of your neighbours no matter how baseless the court case was, no matter that someone else had confessed to that crime. That's the sad reality.

"That's the sad reality."

That's debatable, or incredible cynic imo. But even if so, losing your job is not comparable to losing reputation.

There's an unfortunate problem with the volume of internet voices.

Those with the most amount of free time, and the largest amount of outrage, have the loudest voices.

It creates an unhealthy amplification of irrationality and emotional response.

“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.”

Friedrich W. Nietzsche

Also,

'Be careful when you cast out your demons that you don't throw away the best of yourself.' — Friedrich Nietzsche

Which book or writing of C.S. Lewis is this from?

(Amazing quote by the way! Thank you for sharing.)

Mere Christianity I believe.

Most people never see the second article amending the first.

"A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." -- Mark Twain

Ironically (perhaps deliberately?) your quote may be misattributed:

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/

Doomscrolling caused by "engagement" metrics.

When engagement is all that matters, the most engagement comes when people are divisive, mad/angry or even pushed to extremes.

When you feel yourself getting bothered, angry and you have to prove someone wrong on the internet, step away. You are taking valuable time from your own projects and quality of life.

People can have different opinions and that is ok, your ideas and opinions are what make you, see that as your unique tool to success. On top of that many "organic opinions" are actually astroturfing and PR designed to promote or get you to "engage".

But getting bothered, angry and proving someone wrong on the internet ARE my own projects. What would I do without them? :/

Go outside?

I think FL's 13 month summers drove all our boomers on to the internet.

Hear hear.

For me at least it's been a vice for decades. First it was discussion/gaming forums, then it was Fark, then Digg, and then Reddit.

It's just as detrimental as being addicted to alcohol/drugs/games to distract you from life. In controlled doses it's okay but when it starts to take over an entire day or periods of a day/week from doing other things that could be giving your mind/body some life, that's when you really have to check in and ask yourself is this worth it?

Don’t forget slashdot

I find it helpful to go back and read my old content on social media and simply ask myself if this is the type of person I want to be.

This is a great thing to do. I've found some old chat logs from 20 years ago, and I don't want to be the person who said some of those things. Why didn't I realize at the time that what I said was wrong to say? Life in an echo chamber warps us, and it's good to step away sometimes and see it from the outside.

This is commendable. The rest of society also needs to be compassionate and understanding and not ostracise someone just for a couple of edgy tweets from a decade ago. But now such messages are a time bomb, and can be used against you at any point if you cross someone.

One of the forums that I post on has a thread specifically designed for requesting a suspension of your account to either take a break or cool down. It's recorded as a requested suspension, and moderators do not use it when factoring any future suspensions for breaking rules.

I generally take a three month break twice a year, several months apart, when I find myself too sucked into what is going on there. Sure, I miss some of the "drama", but those sabbaticals are what makes sure that my side projects are productive.

One of these days, I'm going to ask that they upgrade the suspension into a full on ban, but we're not quite there yet. There's too much nostalgia in that place for me to be ready to completely let go.

Social media "vacations" are a good idea, "engagecations" or "disengagecations".

Another comment mentioned in this thread is "enragement is engagement" and really that is true with most algorithms. The algorithms and addiction patterns are created not necessarily for nefarious reasons but from a macro level look nefarious, human nature just reacts to salacious/divisive content more probably for survival reasons. Too much fear/division/misinformation out there.

Repeat after me: "social media is not reality".

The problem is it is leading people to be real world divisive and dividing themselves. For instance, Facebook has broken up many friends and family over some post or opinion, everyone knows people that this has happened to. We're almost too connected and tuned in.

Nintendo had a feature that if you played video games too long it asked if you wanted to take a break, "You've been playing for a while. Why don't you take a break?". That is a feature that will be more seen in the future from platforms that do care about their users and the dopamine addiction cycles, less is more sometimes.

Much like privacy, cool down periods or engagement "vacations" will be a popular feature in the future.

Same here. As a tech-interested kid growing up in the 90's, a very significant amount of my formative years and social development has happened online. I'm now starting to realise what a mistake that may have been (not that I could have avoided the temptation, even if I knew it for what it is).

I have recently completed a digital purge, and now have no social media accounts at all (except HN), and no smartphone. Fortunately I live in a country where that is still viable, but I am excited to re-build my life in "real life".

This is a double-edged sword. I'm definitely in the same boat as you, in that I spent most of my formative years online. But the people I interacted with, and the skills I developed, really had no parallel in the real world around me.

While other kids my age talked about sports, which they'd likely never go on to play, I got some real-world project management experience by helping work on a Web browser.

While other kids my age developed cliques and bullied the kids that weren't in them, I got to help build communities, and facilitate repairing divisions when they did occur. I still do. Community building is important to me.

Very importantly: while other kids my age, not to mention family members, acted with outrage (as per the article) when it came to people's differences, I learned that straight and gay people can be best of friends, there are political leanings other than "conservative" and "Communist", climate change is probably a thing I should take some steps on... The list goes on. These are probably not things I'd have learned if my upbringing had skewed heavily towards real-world.

I understand that your situation might be different - for others, the real world may be more palatable and practical. But I actually see the fact that I did this as a strength.

Sure. But what do you do about it when people make a free choice to use engagement-optimized platforms? The problem of doomscrolling and outrage addiction is just a special case of the problem of superstimuli hijacking our savanna-derived ancestral social instincts and directing them in a profitable and maladaptive direction.

What do you do about it? Ban this algorithm here or that UI pattern there? Impossible. You can't blunt the desires (even the harmful desires) of billions of people through some kind of centralized rulemaking. Look at the total shitshow that emerged after NYC tried to impose a tiny tax on sugary soft drinks, which are obviously bad for you. Why would an attempt to control engagement optimized platforms work when the soda tax didn't even the harms of engagement metrics are much less clear and the product more universally desirable?

The only thing that's going to help us deal with the problem of internet outrage wireheading is giving society time to develop cultural antibodies naturally. Eventually, one way or another, spending your days arguing with strangers will become low status and shameful --- just like drinking a big gulp with 32768 calories per cup is low status now. (Not that status fully solves the problem.)

In the meantime, well, we just have to hold on. The problem isn't engagement metrics. The problem is human nature. We are literally the dumbest possible primate that could form a civilization: keep that in mind.

1. Ensure there are non-engagement-optimized alternative platforms on offer — or even platforms that specifically avoid recommending inflammatory content. (If we don’t even have this much done, there’s very little we can recommend for effective change. What are you going to tell people who live their lives indoors—as we’re all mostly doing right now? Don’t be social at all?)

2. Once we have non-engagement-optimized platforms, promote them as healthful, the way new diet fads get promoted. Get therapists/psychiatrists in on it. Run Public Service Advertisements that don’t mention a specific platform by name but just encourage the use of “healthy platforms.” Lobby for laws preventing depiction of use of engagement-optimized platforms in children’s media (i.e. treat depictions of Facebook the same as depictions of smoking.)

Yeah. I can see a niche for a platform that uses engagement targeting for good. "Use our platform, not Facetube. We have an engagement optimization target of 30 minutes per day. Our competitors want to be your life. We want you to have a life."

Bootstrapping will be very hard however.

Honestly I think that in the long view of history, “engagement optimization” etc. will end up being seen in approximately the same light as nicotine and/or gambling. Based on how the narrative is shifting right now I could see it being something like big tobacco, but since the harm is less material I think long-term it may be more like gambling, in that these practices are allowed but have to be labeled with counseling and addiction support hotlines etc. and aren’t allowed for minors under 18.

> spending your days arguing with strangers

But that isn't what is happening now. Instead of interacting so much with strangers, modern social media platforms have increasingly put people in bubbles where they interact mainly with those who share the same views. Yes, people express outrage at those they perceive as outsiders, but they are not actually talking so much to those outsiders, who are off in their own communities. Instead, they are building community with like-minded people through shared rituals.

Some amount of people will take the outrage and attempt to directly impact the lives of the target of that outrage, but those are (even when they look like mobs) still just a minority of people.

I’d argue we have more interaction with different people and ideas now than we have in the entire history of the world.

And i’d argue people were far more siloed with people before than they are now.

Joining up with people or clubs or groups who share your interests or passions is hardly new phenomena.

Good point! We might be better off if everyone was arguing.

> just like drinking a big gulp with 32768 calories per cup is low status now

The reason it backfired is ignorant statements like this. A 12 ounce mocha Frappuccino contains nearly double the calories of a 12 ounce Coke. The Starbucks drink is exempt from the tax because it has a bunch of milk.

The soda tax is a tax on the poor only moderately related to health.

The solution is to make people actively aware of the downsides of social media. It took a few decades, but cigarette usage peaked and now has been on a long downward trend. Use the anti-smoking playbook.

The internet has magnified it but outrage had been driving American culture for decades before social media. At least since 24 hour news, and that too was just expanding an old playbook for new tech (cable television).

Unplugging is a good tool for all of us but the real problem is that outrage is ruining all our lives, not just those who indulge it.

Recently watched a Simpsons episode from the mid-90s with the quote “Anger is what makes America great,” so other people had the same notion quite a while back.

Going back further Network (1976) is all about this.

Nightcrawler is also about this. Both excellent movies and observations of what drives content that gets attention.

Both were about TV, with the internet, this is even more of a competition since it is worldwide so they push to the extremes because the extremes sell.

Everyone is now competing with the world.

That puts a completely different spin on MAGA than I've heard anyone talk about...

What we call “engagement metrics” on the internet is called “ratings” in the TV world. One network in particular discovered the way to maximize their ratings decades ago and has been at the top of the ratings ever since.

The problems we have with social media are the same we’ve had with Fox News and AM talk radio for decades, but now people want to fight it because the social media companies started banning their worst offenders.

Outrage sold stacks of newspapers long before TV was invented.

The term "Yellow Journalism" was coined with shady stories in WR Hearst newspapers.

Probably caused the Spanish-American War, outrage over Fatty Arbuckle, Sacco & Vanzetti, the Red Scare of the 1920s, etc.

This (both the article and the comment) makes me think of David Allen’s concept of “appropriate engagement”. Outrage is how to end up with a growing todo list each week.

When you’re feeling the angriest, Zuckerberg is cackling the loudest.

> When you feel yourself getting bothered, angry and you have to prove someone wrong on the internet, step away. You are taking valuable time from your own projects and quality of life.

The insidious problem is that, by the time you have that feeling, it is too late. It takes more time to let it go than it took to have that experience. Sometimes, responding feels like the only way to get closure. Better to never put yourself in a situation where having that experience is possible...unless you choose to have it.

I think this is more of a conditioned response. If you continually engage, walking away will be difficult. If you regularly avoid or walk away, it’s easy.

As someone who does not engage, that has not been my experience.

Spot on -- that's the point. Spew BS and any sort of race / gender / class / whatever bating and then have the hoards of folks rush in to clarify, argue, pushback, and fight for nuance.

After a year or two of that, no one feels a need to do it. It's exhausting, and eventually leads to disengagement.

Or. As I prefer to put it, and will probably die on the hill of popularising this phrase:

“Enragement is engagement.”

Everything is driven by engagement metrics. When was the last time you set out to read something or have an experience that wasn't engaging in some way?

I can assure you that every good author of both fiction and non-fiction is constantly thinking "how can I make this story more engaging?" Clicks provide an empirical method to measure that, for better or worse.

Trying to improve metrics is the path of least resistance in most situations. Should all writing be more informative, thought provoking and rewarding? Yes, but that's hard af. By comparison it's pretty easy to see what got clicks and try to do that again.

I'm not even a tiny bit convinced that "engagement metrics" are actually a useful measure of the experiences that people typically care about when they use the word "engaging" in a positive light.

In fact, I'm not sure how much I believe that such metrics even represent an attempt at such a measure.

Yes exactly, the problem is in how engagement is measured, which is clicks/retweets/upvotes etc. These are cheap measures of whether or not you have been moved to act in the moment. If I'm engaged by a piece of content in the way that I think about the next day in the shower, no algorithm is going to measure this.

I think that's part of the reason podcasts are so much more nuanced and edifying than most digital content. With podcasts, at least in my experience, the main discovery method is word-of-mouth. In order for a podcast to be discovered, it has to be interesting enough to come up in conversation.

> Doomscrolling caused by "engagement" metrics.

And then they ban the comment section because people engage.

I can’t square this conventional wisdom with the observation that ML-curated Facebook can hold my attention for a few minutes at most, while I have lost a good chunk of my youth to community-curated HN and Reddit. Engagement optimizations pale in comparison to simple popularity contests.

100% agree with the premise. Outrage culture is ruining all reasonable discourse in this country (and world), and is now massively fueled by politicians, corporations, media for their own gains.

I do not, however, agree with their solution. Turning off the news/Facebook/Twitter and ignoring everything happening around you is not going to make things better.

The world has made a lot of progress over the last few centuries (as the article calls out), but all of it has been driven by common people like you and me getting outraged over things that might not directly concern us. Anger is sometimes justified.

Instead, when you read something that angers you, take a few minutes and do that extra step of research. Could it be completely fake? Does the headline reflect the contents of the article correctly (it is normally not written by the author)? Is the data researched and sourced? Is what you are reading heavily opinionated? Are you subscribed to a healthy mix of sources?

If enough people actually did this (instead of reading the title and going straight to Twitter/Reddit/HN), meaningless outrage will disappear without the trade-off of not being informed about the world. You will organically discover that everything is a lot more reasonable and moderate than people want you to believe. And if something actually isn't, you will be able to see it.

Well I don't think it has to be taken so literally. 1% of the news is actual new info that you should know, the other 99% is repetition, opinion, speculation, propaganda, etc. You can check the news once a day from a reasonably neautal source and know all the relevant information.

You can check the news far less than once a day. If you apply a low-pass filter to current events by, say, checking once a week or even less, the broad movements and important things will remain while the shallow and ephemeral will naturally be filtered out.

> the other 99% is repetition, opinion, speculation, propaganda, etc.

I'd respectfully amend this to: the other 99% is repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition, sportball, sportball, sportball, sportball, celebs, celebs, opinion, speculation, propaganda, etc.

There exists a quote ( probably from Mark Twain or Aristotle ) that one should put away the daily paper and read it 14 days later.

If somebody can help out and dig up a link : please do.

While I 100% agree with you, I think 2 things are somewhat implied in the article: that a ton of the outrage bait is in bad faith, overblown or in some instances completely fabricated, and that everyone will not do what you say everyone should do, so the outrage machine will continue. If these are both true, then yes, the solution 99% of the time is to tune out. And where it isn't, when something is really that bad and so important to you, just getting outraged about it makes you feel like you care even though you aren't doing anything. Discuss it clearly, without getting emotional, and if it is really important, try to do something about it if you can.

But in the modern environment, a lot of people can't take a few minutes, because they're exposed to too many things that anger them. A Twitter poweruser can easily see 100 maddening tweets in a day, and most are unlikely to have the 5 free hours it would take to investigate each.

I have time and time again debunked fake news sent to me by friends whom usually I would call intelligent, and kindly asked to next time do a minimum of fact checking. It's useless.

It's depressing but people don't care about truth. Not acknowledging this will give you a lot of frustration.

From OP's post

> If enough people actually did this

A classic HN comment misstep. Most people aren't like the typical reader here (for better, for worse). It's not wise to act like they are.

Then what's the point of even posting the article? Most people aren't going to take any advice, but you yourself still can.

To be fair, even HN is not so perfect - we are brilliant when abstractly discussing outrage, fake news, etc - but visit any thread where the article is an object level example of a story that contains these characteristics, and compare the quality of discourse you find there to that which you find in threads like this.

I just stick to local news outlet now of the localities that matter the most to me. They really are the last bastion of real journalism.

Local news is just as subject to the same nonsense just at a smaller scale, how many local news stories are "this local business did something outrageous" or "local gov't regulations are hurting this business" for example?

I disagree. It's far harder in towns where the degree of separation is 3. Everyone knows someone close to the matter. Never heard of a local news outlet making up quotes or began an article with "according to a source near the official in question". And it might not be true for big cities, but hearing that regulation is hurting a well known company of your town will usually trigger swift changes from officials. This happens a lot where I come from.

For me, I find a shockingly large number of local news stories can be reduced down to the formula "this person in the community is mad about something and they talked to the newspaper about it to try and get attention on the issue."

Over the last weeks I have watched hours and hours of historical TV from The Netherlands ( NL ). In the 70s and 80s people were protesting left and right, against nuclear reactors, nuclear weapons, against polution, against (child) traffic deaths, to preserve nature, womens rights, for better wages etc.

There was no public internet at the time. I remember parts of these times.

Nowadays engagement is pretty effortless. One only needs to feel enraged.

I was taught early on to "question everything", so it comes naturally. But it's really really tiring to do, when everything is at least a little bit wrong (and the things that are not obviously wrong are often the most insidious).

The most reasonable people in the world often end up in a fact-checking loop, where they will never have any real influence on the world. For me that's what sparks my outrage, when I realize everything I'm reading is full of truthful lies. Maybe you're right that this could fuel change; I am less optimistic.

one of my peeves is the ongoing attention that outrage itself has garnered (think terms like cancel culture, sjw, karen, etc.). it's sickening because it's a diversion from the real issues that matter, like economic fairness and equality of opportunity. there is so much we could do to improve the meaningful aspects of our lives, and yet we focus on the bullshit that doesn't matter.

for instance, who cares if someone calls you a (perhaps racist) name, even if they do it incessantly and meanspiritedly? it's meaningless and you can choose to not to let it affect you (yes it's hard, but doable). but instead, stuff like this is where the dominant/popular narrative is spinning its wheels to keep our attention away from substantive matters that can actually alter the dynamics that favor the already wealthy and powerful and spread opportunities further and wider.

What do you think about this idea: a social media platform that is based on the principle of epistemically sound discussions, where the culture of the site is truth seeking and comprehensive accuracy?

Of course, this is not going to have big subscriber numbers, a plausible business model, and many other traditional human concerns - but consciously leaving these aside, do you think such an approach could yield some value to humanity?

Exactly, outrage is bad but we can't just ignore the outside world.

For me, it's environmentalism that gets me. I do believe I have a reason to be outraged by this topic and our inactions, although so does everyone who is outraged. My thoughts basically hit all the checkboxes in the article, but does that make them excessively outraged, or is just that the situation itself is truly outraging?

I stopped participating in social media outside of old-school forums, and my stress level went way down. I took a look around, saw that fewer people were living in poverty than ever, I have a quality of life my parents never had, and all the predictions of doom over the past decade or so never came about. Life is pretty much the same or slightly better for me since then. Maybe I am lucky, but a lot of the broad stats back up that this is a great time to be alive.

You are the winner. There are multiple lenses to look at everything. Chose the lenses that works for you - optimism is just as realistic as pessimism and nihilism.

While I am glad you have found inner peace or some thing ignoring the world won't make it any less shitty for those who have to deal with the consequences. While social media is fueling outrage people have reasons to be angry with the world and to ignore it is to be ignorant of the problems that real people have to deal with.

The point of this article is to, instead of feeling and spreading outrage for the shitty things you cannot change, go work to change and enjoy the things you can.

To add some nuance: Me being angry over systemic harm to vulnerable individuals - harm perpetuated by powerful interests - this anger is reasonable, often productive.

Me being part of a 1M strong mob dog-piling the single racist nitwit - I am the powerful interest in this scenario.

Acknowledging that we have a lot of work to do improving things further doesn't require us to simultaneously accept the idea that the world is a worse place today than it was a generation ago.

Indeed, noting that real progress has been made made, as the parent does, seems like the first step toward hopefully pursuing further progress—it's proof it can work!

You're a very lucky man that the bulk of your stress is caused by social media.

> all the predictions of doom over the past decade or so never came about

Only if you're ignoring climate change

I am not sure how the person you are replying to feels but one could easily say that whatever is true of climate change, "doom" has not happened.

I just got off a two month, almost completely disconnected van dwelling trip. With such little Internet, I literally forgot who the president was. The complete detoxification from the outrage machine... it was like pure heroin.

The snap back to reality almost broke me. Humans are not meant to doomscroll. They are not meant to be this angry, this often. Just like disconnecting felt like a high, coming back was the come down.

Those months/weeks completely changed my view on media and doomscrolling. I can't stomache it anymore, and avoiding that behavior has helped me be more positive over the last week.

I've done this a few times, although I usually had Internet wherever I stopped.

What surprises me every time is how few notifications and important things I miss. It seems to plateau quickly, and whether I leave for a day or a month, it's about the same.

I guess the outrage doesn't affect me so much. However, being constantly hooked on a source of dopamine does. After an hour away from the screen, I start planning activities, fixing things around the house etc.

> Addiction to Outrage Is Ruining Your Life

How I came to this same conclusion.

I voted for GwBush 2x. I found myself annoyed by compulsive Bush hatred; it often seemed divorced from the reasons given. However, I did come to realize that the parallels between Bush hatred and my earlier Clinton hatred were too strong to deny.

FF and Obama wins 2008. I wasn't at all happy but so be it. Fifteen minutes later - as in 15 actual minutes - red rooms exploded with threads calling for his impeachment. Why? IDK. The reasons were incoherent. More than anything, it seemed like an arms-race escalation of rage-driven thinking.

It was enough for me tho. I wanted to be done being an outrage junkie.

I find it outrageous that you fail to see why people compulsively hate Bush - did you miss the whole Iraq war?

Compulsive hate isn't known to be healthy.

and

The challenge wasn't the reasonable outrage over the Iraq war, it was the selective outrage. The earliest protests tended to be from folks who were silent during Clinton incursions. One could make worthy arguments that some wars are not outrageous while others are - however it may not hold up well when one considers how Bush's war became largely uninteresting (to protesters and to news orgs) when it transferred into Obama's hands. Code Pink (who has been wholly consistent) couldn't get the time of day after 1/20/2009.

To be clear, my assertion isn't intended to demonize the left but to highlight a general inconsistency.

Refined with age, my position this: By failing to hold reasonable PotUS accountable, we gift power to unreasonable ones. (ref: see FastTrack Authority or Record Number Of Whistleblowers Prosecuted For Espionage)

Bush expanded executive power tremendously in his first term - how did you hold him accountable by voting for him again after that?

I mostly came around during the 2nd term. By the end I was consistently speaking out against them.

Unfortunately, the press appetite for addressing administration misdeeds dropped off a cliff, once the the subsequent administration took office. That provided lots of cover to expand them - as the record number of whistleblowers who were prosecuted for espionage can testify.

Which press specifically are you referring to? I've seen many articles from both sides of the political spectrum calling out Obama for his whistleblower crackdown. IMO the real issue isn't press coverage, it's the lack of credible solutions from the right to address the problems (or even just good-faith discussion).

> Which press specifically are you referring to?

Are you asking for the names of specific news orgs? Would requests for publishing stats and word count follow?

This doesn't measure any one/more 'press specifically' - or even media directly - but it does reflect the moments that the media lost interest in the Iraq War https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=i...

I'd offer trends about Obama+whistleblower+espionage but there don't seem to be any. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=Obama%20espionage...

> I've seen many articles from both sides of the political spectrum calling out Obama for his whistleblower crackdown.

If you are recalling days of headline clusters criticizing the Obama admin for prosecuting whistleblowers - then we are clearly debating from different physical universes. Of the ~doz journalists I've approached on Twitter, one was sort of aware of Obama admin's record espionage prosecutions. Most suspected it was another invented RW delusion, at first.

Of note: There has been even less coverage of Trump admin's mistreatment of whistleblowers - the number which may have exceeded Obama admin. It illustrates why my criticism of the press long ago shifted from one of bias to one of general, persistent ineptitude. However, 4 years of Trump admin coverage brings me some hope - that some journalists have relearned their 1A implied duties; that they may not repeat their 8yr Obama hiatus with this admin.

sidebar: I'm on a mission to convince RW America to shift their complaint from press bias to press incompetency.

> Are you asking for the names of specific news orgs? Would requests for publishing stats and word count follow?

What I'm getting at is I recall seeing a number of articles about it during his presidency, and with some quick searching I was easily able to dig up articles from CNN, WaPo, HuffPost, other left-leaning outlets calling him out. A slight tweak to your trend search further corroborates that it wasn't ignored: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=O...

As for interest in the Iraq War waning, surely you can see that A. Obama didn't start it, he inherited a quagmire, and while much can be said about how well he did or didn't handle it, it was fundamentally created by Bush and B. the country had a far more pressing issue with the great recession in the timeframe in question.

Regarding supposed press ineptitude - would you not agree that the right is by far the bigger problem in this equation with Fox, Breitbart, and a well-documented proclivity for spreading fake news? I'm all for calling out bad journalism - I just don't agree that your both-sides take is accurate.

> IMO the real issue isn't press coverage, it's the lack of credible solutions from the right to address the problems (or even just good-faith discussion).

You'll get no argument from me that much of the RW electorate and leadership have retreated to an unreachable place of unreasonable delusion.

If you are asserting that center-left Congress is brimming with desire for meaningful US Gov accountability, I'd offer that Pelosi's tireless efforts to bury the CIA torture report fairly represents the actual mindset.

I remember when I started working I got hooked on this subreddit tumblrinaction. At first it was just funny "Oh PC culture you're so ridiculous,", but over a few months it got really dark and I started impulsively heading there to feed this weird anger. On reflection I realized it was the same thing that happened to a family member with Fox News, but here it happened much more quickly.

Sounds a bit like Orwell's Two Minutes Hate.

There's a Chrome widget that flags posters to a set of subreddits (i.e. Trump supporters et al, general rightwingers and dark enlightenment folks) with extra red signs on the posts specifying which 'bad' subreddits the poster posts to. (I'd like to see a wider range of flagging, perhaps different colors)

tumblrinaction is most definitely one of the subreddits marked for 'warning signs'. I think I could propose a set of complementary subreddits for a contrasting color, which uses politically opposite extreme views… to accomplish literally the same effect. Hence my desire for the additional tool, because I've used the 'flagging' tool as a way to not be drawn into argument and outrage. Sort of 'wearing your sponsors on your sleeve' but for reddit posts. Wouldn't mind seeing that extended more broadly.

The problem is that you can't go anywhere that's safe from outrage-bait.

You can't watch local news, network news, or cable news. You can't use Twitter, Facebook, or reddit.

All of those things mix objective info with outrage, and you can't seem to get the former without the latter.

I myself have given up all social media and use RSS readers now, but the "recommended" or "trending" stories on news sites still have some of those stories in them.

I think how you use a thing might make for some middle ground. Facebook has consumed many forums I use for my hobby, and so I now go to Facebook for that. I don't read my feed or whatever it's called, I only go for some very specific groups which focus on a single interest. No doom scrolling, no anger, just the occasional sense of awe at the creativity people in those groups are capable of.

The old way my family and friends used to use social media (keeping in touch and up to date on family stuff) has migrated to first Whatsapp and now Telegram.

I do however doomscroll on Pintrest, although for positive reasons -- primarily inspiration, and some learning.

The solution is to read more curated better quality stuff.

There are more quality books written in the last 100 years than you'll ever finish. There are high quality magazines like Lapham's Quarterly. Even weekly magazines like The Economist have a marked increase in quality compared to daily news or social media.

My point here is, do you really need to know what big thing happened every single hour? If it's so important, you'll come to know of it anyways. It's okay to let time filter out the low quality stuff and then consume the high quality stuff instead.

I take your point, but I live in a state in the US where the government is constantly trying to take away voting rights. Democracy is important, so I pay attention.

I also need to keep up with many/most industries for work, because I have clients in many areas and need to sound knowledgeable when I talk to them.

It's crazy how 75%+ of the content on reddit has the single unifying theme of "this should outrage you"

For real. Cut down on my reddit usage last year - mostly lurking anway.

Might also have something to do with discovering hn around the same time :)

Agree completely. Whenever I see the phrase, "let that sink in," that's a signal for me to stop reading. They're just going to tell me to be angry.

Over the past few years I've definitely been addicted to outrage porn and anything related to SJWs and cancel culture. Now I impulsively read YouTube comments to feel like I'm right. None of this has added any value to my life, if anything made me more antagonistic and feeling like the world is screwed. Meanwhile there are probably plenty of people out there who aren't caught up in the culture wars and are just working away at their craft, getting jobs they want and paid more.

They (SJWs) do seem to have the bit in their teeth as of late, and the stories do make for good rage-bait.

Of course, there's not a thing you can do about it besides improve your own lot in life and build productive local relationships. I've gone down the same path, but now it seems to me like there are two possibilities..(1)the insane people lose inertia and it all dies off or (2)the Red Guard really takes off and those newfound local relationships will save your bacon.

tl;dr. I hear ya old son.

unfortunately a lot of people have a hard time realizing 99% of the content they're exposed to is pointless and solely meant to waste your time/put you into a heightened emotional state. lot of mental illness on social media/twitter brought on by getting baited into interacting with all the noise

for the people using these platforms to build, I understand using them. for the rest of the users it's probably a net negative to themselves and the ones around them.

I like the argument that Taleb makes in _Fooled by randomness_, which is essentially that most news has negative informative value because most of it is just noise. Only with time does the signal appear.

The premise is so compelling - you can improve your mental health, free up your time and improve your relationships by insulating yourself from any source of outrage. You, you, you, you. Sometimes we need to think about others too. Of course we shouldn't be outraged by everything or spend all our time doom scrolling. That much we can all agree on. But the solution proposed here - unplugging completely, has consequences too.

Last summer there were tragic deaths in America that triggered massive protests. One of the many heartening things about those protests is that many of those protesting weren't personally affected [1] by the issue at hand - policing of black communities. But they cared about their fellow citizens and they showed up. You want to call that outrage and demean it? Sure. But those people did something good.

If we turn inward and only care about ourselves, we might find that no one cares when we need help.

[1] - One Big Difference About George Floyd Protests: Many White Faces. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/us/george-floyd-white-pro...

Sadly this pushes the people with the most insight and capability off the platforms where the outrage takes place. I've seen many capable people de-zucking and refusing to consume newspaper/radio/TV news. Notably a lot of HN readers too. These platforms although (insert outrage) heavily criticised, for me have fuelled the tech explosion which has brought so much collaboration and benefit - now all the techies are leaving because they're sick of it, is that good or bad?

This is a very privileged, ignorant take.

He seems to be lumping in all outrage as the same. People being outraged at Nike doing something is the equivalent to voter rights being taken away because certain people of a certain race vote a certain way. These things aren't remote the same.

And his idea that political parties should "work together" often means you're negotiating the rights of people, who neither party member usually is part of, either to have more or less rights, and you're negotiating them like they're bargaining chips.

This author and so many people who aren't part of marginalized groups really can't grasp this.

Irrespective of how justifiable the anger is, the root issue that compulsive anger is both poisonous to mental health and that it gets in the way of critical thinking in ways that make it easy to be manipulated are both true.

Things don't need to be morally equivalent to have the same mental, emotional, and physiological effects. It is also possible to be mad about stuff and take productive action on them without regularly having to stoke the outrage fires. In fact that's critical to being able to think strategically about it.

Not all causes are made equal, and they're not necessarily important to the same degree for everybody. That's not being "privileged" or "ignorant", that's the patent truth.

Sounds to me like you're deliberately missing the point to as to protect your own outrage. "Of course what they are outraged about is bullshit, but what I'm outraged about is 100% valid and reasonable." The article isn't saying there aren't things to be legitimately outraged about. The article is saying 1) being outraged doesn't fix anything, and 2) of course you feel strongly about what you're outraged about, but objectively there's a high chance you're overreacting to your own detriment and the detriment of those around you.

More to your view though, the history of politics is negotiating the rights of people, look at how the UN Declaration on Human Rights was negotiated.

Finally, this gatekeeping idea that basically says that anyone that disagrees with you cannot possibly understand, that is complete horseshit. Words like "privileged" and "marginalized groups" give away this completely wrong mentality. We all really can grasp it. We just disagree. We might have very good reasons to disagree, you just refuse to try to understand them. If you did maybe you'd find a way to show us how they're wrong.

Sorry but being outraged never solved anything. "I'm angry look at me" never attracted any kind of widespread support. MLK understood this and his speeches reflected that with messages of hope, not anger, meanwhile the other radical part of the civil rights movement tend to swept under the rug and for good reasons. There are more ways, better ways, to impose political pressure and they tend to work best in practice with incremental practical improvements as opposed to bloody wars and destructive revolutions.

And it seems that you have a very binary view of the world. Us vs them. It's our way or tyranny. "They" can't understand, but only "we" can. All doctrines that view the world along a single dimension is prone to disastrous results. As for rights, they can be and will always be negotiated. They are not born out of thin air and the question of balancing them with responsibility will never truly be entirely settled.

Finally your whole arguments relies on the Genetic Fallacy. I don't need to have had a third degree burn over 90% of my body to know it must hurt like hell. I don't ask my cardiologist if he ever had a cardiac arrest before I see him to know if he's competent. Most people will know what injustice feels like even if they didn't experience the ones based on race. This is such a juvenile argument.

Please don't invoke MLK as a bastion of peace and hope. it's so contrite: "look at this well behaved person there. Be more like him"

Except MLK also called out the passiveness of people, he called out the folks who were moderates. He worked with many who were deemed troublemakers and are hero's today. He spoke with anger and rage many a time.

So when people point at MLK and Gandhi as "peaceful models to follow", it's just a dog whistle to sit down and behave, and not step out of line. MLK didn't make the movement for civil liberties by being polite and taking everything in his stride. Neither did Gandhi. This is just plain white washing of history to appeal to "order" that befits people who don't need to care.

And no, you can't simply just understand what other people are going through just by proxy. No, most people don't know what Injustice feels like until they experience it, many don't even know when they do. It's about a conscious shifting of minds, and understanding that other people go through life differently than you, so maybe instead of saying "I understand", it's okay to say you don't and that you're there for them. Because you cannot understand. You cannot understand unless you live it. You can only sympathize, but first you need to even acknowledge the depth of the problems.

I'll involve who I want the way I want even if it rustles a few "holier than thou" feathers. And MLK is cited as a model to follow, what are you talking about? Standing up to an angry mobs who wanted to kill him? Dude, we'd need some of that right now.

> He worked with many who were deemed troublemakers and are hero's today.

"Worked with", maybe (that's hardly arguable, and not because of their violence but despite of it), but he always stood for non-violence that's just a fact.

> So when people point at MLK and Gandhi as "peaceful models to follow", it's just a dog whistle to sit down and behave, and not step out of line. MLK didn't make the movement for civil liberties by being polite and taking everything in his stride. Neither did Gandhi. This is just plain white washing of history to appeal to "order" that befits people who don't need to care.

And no, they didn't just "sit down and behave", that's just not factually true if you read anything about the civil rights movement. You're simply conflating "peaceful" with "passive" which I never meant or said. And the idea of "dog whistles" is just BS. I mean, secret codes that people pass around as if they were part of a nation wide grand conspiracy is just frivolous. It's clear that it is used only because it's an accusation that's impossible to disprove, which easily shows how honest people using that term really are. And I'm not appealing nothing to befit nobody, that's just a trial of intentions at this point.

> And no, you can't simply just understand what other people are going through just by proxy. No, most people don't know what Injustice feels like until they experience it, many don't even know when they do. It's about a conscious shifting of minds, and understanding that other people go through life differently than you, so maybe instead of saying "I understand", it's okay to say you don't and that you're there for them. Because you cannot understand. You cannot understand unless you live it. You can only sympathize, but first you need to even acknowledge the depth of the problems.

Ooof, I wouldn't want you to be my dentist...

This is demonstrably not true. Empathy definitely exists in most of people, otherwise we would not be able to live in society and it would literally be the law of the jungle. The fact that most activist didn't even experience what they're fighting against just completely destroys that notion. I think this section of your post is more a reflection of your psyche than anything else but I digress.

Firstly, I think you need to reread what I said, because some of your responses are non sensical in context of what I'm saying. I'm not saying that MLK shouldn't be a role model. He's a great role model I'm just calling out your use of him as a purely hopeful idol. Many of MLKs most famous speeches and letters are full of outrage. It's only the white washed history of him that paints him as this one dimensional person to point to when people get "uppity".

Thinking that dog whistles don't exist speaks to your privilege. That in and of itself shows why you can't understand what other people go through. Because you don't believe that the things they go through exist.

The whole concept of dog whistles is to build a strawman argument. There may be some small groups that use some coded language, but extrapolating that out to the entire population is a straw man argument. It basically allows you to alter what the other side says and demonize them for that interpretation instead of what is actually said.

The entire concept of dog whistles is pretty nefarious and only causes more division by causing one side to be able to assume the worst of the other side. It's also silly to assume that the people who actually think the things that you interpret the dog whistles to mean, are somehow afraid to actually say the things you interpret them as saying. Actual white supremacists don't talk in code, they say actual, clearly racist things. They don't feel the need to hide it.

I read a funny article recently that many minority groups supported the "dog whistle" policies, when it comes to securing the border. The author seemed confused that all the minority groups were racist against undocumented immigrants, or just not understanding that the policies listed in the survey were "dog whistles." The most likely explanation is the simplest, many Americans are against illegal/undocumented immigration.

Minorities , are shockingly, still human and not exempt from tribalism and racism themselves.

Dog whistles are a thing, and well documented. Your characterization of it as a way to say it's not a thing feels to me like white fragility. It's akin to saying sexual harassment isn't a thing and is used by women to paint men in a bad light, as long as it's not overt.

> Firstly, I think you need to reread what I said, because some of your responses are nonsensical in context of what I'm saying.

How? I directly quoted you.

> I'm just calling out your use of him as a purely hopeful idol. Many of MLKs most famous speeches and letters are full of outrage.

Of course if you speak in absolutes, there was outrage, I never made the purity argument. I'm simply pointing tout that it wasn't the message nor that the main point was to express outrage or complaining in hope of pity. MLK's message was appealing, the other radicals' are not, even to this day.

> It's only the white washed history of him that paints him as this one dimensional person to point to when people get "uppity".

It's your opinion that you backed up by nothing and therefore it takes nothing to dismiss it.

> Thinking that dog whistles don't exist speaks to your privilege.

Do you accuse anyone who disagrees with you of being "too privileged to understand"? This is just an empty accusation based on the quality of someone you don't even know. "Privilege" is a meme at this point. In fact, I think you are tool privileged to understand, prove me wrong.

> That in and of itself shows why you can't understand what other people go through. Because you don't believe that the things they go through exist.

Sorry you can't be taken seriously after that. I mean, people nationwide coordinating in a secret language? Maybe that just doesn't make sense?

The person is rightfully saying you are describing MLK in a way in which he was not. At his core, his anger and his saying a whole lot of angry things as well as much more hyper leftist and radical thinking towards his later years are not discussed much if at all. Instead society presents this basic image of him. Which is what the OP and myself now are pointing out to you. MLK should not be invoked the way you did because it’s not correct.

Not because MLK is not a role model. The guy is amazing. The more I read of his outrage and radical thinking, the more I like him. Personally speaking.

—

The OP isn’t saying they ever sat down and behaved. They are saying that invoking the white washed versions of Gandhi and MLK are some ways to tell people either directly or indirectly to calm down, chill out, and relatively speaking, keep the status quo.

—

Empathy isn’t necessarily that helpful in these sort of situations. I appreciate Yale’s Paul Bloom’s idea of compassion over empathy.

MLK's message was never about "I'm angry at you, I demand reparations" like we're seeing today and he NEVER advocated for violence or "positive" segregation. The idea that he's radical the same way we're seeing the radical anti-racists of today is simply ridiculous.

> The OP isn’t saying they ever sat down and behaved. They are saying that invoking the white washed versions of Gandhi and MLK are some ways to tell people either directly or indirectly to calm down, chill out, and relatively speaking, keep the status quo.

You simply reframed what he said. He made a big straw man making statements based on nothing and therefore I simply pointed out it can be dismissed with nothing.

> Empathy isn’t necessarily that helpful in these sort of situations. I appreciate Yale’s Paul Bloom’s idea of compassion over empathy.

Why it's not useful? If seeing and recognizing injustice does nothing at the emotional level there would never have been a motivation to make things right. Even Bloom recognizes that. The idea that "you can't know if you're not it" just doesn't make sense and has plenty of counter-examples from every day life.

You’re doing and have kept doing many of the things you claim others are doing. He is unlike “radical anti-racists of today”. Who are these people? They can be grouped into one? I’m not violent. Yet I fit the description.

For your last pt - no one said it isn’t useful. I didn’t. Your entire argument is based off a made up scenario.

—

I believe you’ve dug your feet in and can not accept you are not 100% correct and the rest of us are all wrong and do not know MLK or history. No point in continuing discussing when the intellectual discourse goes away and it becomes semantics snd minor bickering.

Thanks for your comments in this thread. Per your last paragraph. That’s why I’ve begun going through the idea of compassion over empathy. For many reasons including what you’re saying.

Outrage absolutely played a key role in the Civil Rights movement. There's a reason Emmett Till stands out in American history; the outrage it stoked among white Americans helped bring treatment of black people to the fore.

Your take on MLK comes from the safe, sanitized version extrapolated from two sentences in a speech he gave that one time. The reality is that he was angry, radical, and extremely controversial. Universal adoration came only after his death, when he could no longer say anything that might make people upset.

Thank you for pointing out Emmett Till. I think the closest modern day (and I know he wasn't even that long ago) equivalent to him is George Floyd. Not so much in the horror they both experienced, but in both cases (obviously Emmett was significantly more brutal though both were heartbreaking) , actually having the horror laid bare for people caused them to finally stop suppressing the outrage.

Also thanking you for the Till mention. I need to do some more reading up.

Your first paragraph is white washed. The “radical” parts of the civil rights movement weren’t swept under the rug. In comparison to what? Who MLK really was appears to be swept under the rug here.

As said in other comments, it does sound like you’re saying the, among other things, centrist / status quo wanting of people to sit down and be quiet.

I agree with you 100%. This is the take of people who have little on the line, and don't face issues everyday, falsely lumping all matters of outrage together. They're now upset, outraged even, that their status quo is challenged, and write about how we need to chill out and slowly work towards change. Well, yes slow change works if they've got little to lose from it.

I'm honestly flummoxed by all the people in the comments here talking out against this supposed "outrage culture" without breaking down the nuance of what people are outraged about.

Are we talking about outrage over sexual and racial harassment? Is that not worth being outraged about?

Or are we talking about Hasbro making gender neutral Potato heads, and the end of sales of some racist Dr Seuss books?

Articles like this help people lump everything in together, and feel better about themselves for being above it all. It's a supremely privileged position.

> This is the take of people who have little on the line, and don't face issues everyday

This kind of narrative is an easy way to dismiss the opinions of people who disagree with you, but it bears little resemblance to the real world, where people of all kinds face issues that you may or may not know about, and people of all demographics actually do care about things like beloved Dr Seuss books going out of print: https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/and-then-they-came-for-...

I think you missed my point completely if that's the part you're latching on to out of context.

My whole point is that you can't dismiss outrage as a whole, and lump all issues together.

You want to a priori establish some outrage as virtuous and legitimate (ie. critiques around sexism/racism) while dismissing other outrage as silly and trivial (ie. critiques around pressure campaigns to censor culture).

Is it possible that there is some legitimacy in both complaints?

I'm not saying either is trivial or silly though. I'm saying there's different values and things at stake. I never said one was invalid, that was your own take on things, and you're misconstruing what I said.

Is sexual and racial harassment the same level as the potato Head thing? No, of course not. But articles like this, put them all in the same bucket.

Sure, the article lumps together all kinds of outrage, some of it more serious than others. For example, it also lumps together outrage that someone would commit a micro-aggression like asking "where are you from?" together with much more serious issues like people losing their careers or reputations over questionable or downright false accusations of racism. These are clearly not on the same level, but it would be silly to get mad at the author for not introducing this distinction.

What does it say about this moment in time when a person can't even speak about certain human emotions like outrage as a universal human experience without being accused of things and called names?

Who called them names? It feels like you're reading far more into what I'm saying than is there

> This is the take of people who have little on the line, and don't face issues everyday, falsely lumping all matters of outrage together. They're now upset, outraged even, that their status quo is challenged, and write about how we need to chill out and slowly work towards change. Well, yes slow change works if they've got little to lose from it.

> Articles like this help people lump everything in together, and feel better about themselves for being above it all. It's a supremely privileged position.

This is not a substantive response to anything the author wrote, it is pure ad hominem, and purely speculative, unless you know much more about the author than can be gleaned from this article alone. How do you presume to know what issues this author does or does not face every day?

Sigh there's no point even discussing with you because you're obsessed with some kind of persecution here.

I don't really care if the author has problems or not. What I do care is that they and the other people who agree with the author are belittling the what outraged people with significant things on the line. End of the day, that's it, And that's the place of privilege I'm talking about. Because the author belittles other people's outrage by lumping it in with everything else and saying it's unnecessary and overblown. It's a strawman.

In short, I don't need to know the authors full life story to see the effect of their post trivializes people's issues. If they have issues themselves, so be it. That's a wholly unrelated matter.

Anyway this is a tiresome topic. I feel like we're just talking past each other, and you are willfully taking things I say out of context.

100% spot on. i would like to be your friend IRL

yeah, this was my reading of the article as well.

It's certainly ruining all ad-based social media platforms

And all kinds of formerly respectable media. Over the last decade newspapers that were either dry and centrist or devoted to particular causes outside of the current culture wars, suddenly began to run daily articles that were strident from either one side of the culture wars or the other. The reason for that is almost solely desire for maximum clicks to ensure ad-based revenue.

People should keep that in mind when they feel outrage at an article and are tempted to say "of course, X publication said that, they are supporters of Y!" In fact, the newspaper’s management may not actually support the political or social cause appearing in its editorials, they simply run that content because advertising revenue is higher with it. This mercenery disingenuousness is one of the greatest crises of our time, I feel.

But outrage is also a powerful motivator for changing society for the better.

Right now in the UK people are protesting an authoritarian anti-protest bill. How many are out there because they were outraged by it? What if they were at home, happily following their respective hobbies instead? If no one ever speaks up, what prevents society from sliding towards fascism / 1984 / etc?

Do you believe the protest is working well, achieving meaningful change? Have protestors so far been able to stem the slide toward 1984?

I think they are losing, but I’m glad they are trying. I don’t think I would be so brave if I were in Hong Kong, for example.

Things that work in some context may turn fairly dangerous outside of it.

An example. Being hungry and finding high-calorie food is, in our natural state, a very important mechanism for survival. Our tribal ancestors wouldn't have survived all the famines and periods of bad luck or bad weather if we weren't programmed to seek high-calorie food.

Unfortunately, in the developed world of 2021, we have so much cheap high-calorie food in our lives that blind obedience to the ancient "gorge yourself!" impulse is killing us.

The same applies to outrage. Twitter is an outrage mall, with outrage screaming at you from every shop window there. It is not in anyone's interest to buy it all.

The irony is that the Bristol protesters are doing a great job at swinging public opinion towards the bill.

The police have been really accommodating of protests. It’s an incredibly fine line they have to walk, between the fairly soft rules of engagement, the right to protest, and the COVID restrictions.

No I really think society can only improve, albeit slowly, by problem-solving. Firstly one has to identify a problem and take ownership of it. But outrage is about blaming other people and refusing to take ownership.

Not everyone has the tools or ability, but public "outrage" or signaling somehow to some one that does like politicians does make change. Like this article reffered to women's rights not being worth his time? You should be empathetic to a marganilzed group, but really what can an individual do besides signal to politicians that this needs to change

It's because, ultimately, the post is about nothing more than the author being tired of hearing and seeing other people's outrage. The author notes that the world is improving but treats that as magically disconnected from anyone having problems with the status quo. Everyone is just some rando online with no effect on the world. (Why then try to write an article to change people's minds? is an open question...)

And the great rhetorical weapon of today is framing what you don't like as a pathology of those you disprove of. They aren't doing what you want? They're dysfunctional or sick. They do something you dislike or value something you don't? They're infected or addicted. Etc.

The anger I feel now is much weaker than it was before. When I was addicted to weed and before I found my girlfriend which I currently have a child. The anger was my friend, thanks to it I never felt lonely, I never was alone (but I was, I was just alienated teen-ager that couldn't cope with life and my feelings). The anger I felt gave my strength. Strength to resolve problems and issues with relations and interactions. I felt so powerful I knew I could stand up to that person (father) that never told me good thing, never prised me, never agreed... The anger I felt to my parents I protected onto other people. The strong anger I felt sometimes was causing next day so blue that my mind was just wandering if suicide is the solution.

Outrage is a problem, but I don't think it's just (social) media that are responsible. The article says that things are better than they were 100 years ago, but politically speaking I'm pretty sure they're not better than they were 20 or 40 years ago, and they may well be worse. In the US and UK, at least, democracy seems pretty creaky.

So yes, your outrage is being gamed, but it is also real. The challenge is to channel it into something useful, and (social) media is little help with that.

Edit: on brief reflection, maybe (social) media is the problem after all, since perhaps politicians themselves are now optimising (social) media exposure via maximum outrage, and chance the consequences.

You seriously think that life now, with all of the advancements in technology and healthcare, is not better than it was 40 years ago? Not better than the 1980s?

Oddly, the unemployment rate is better than it was in the early 1980s.

You can clearly see this in action: open reddit in an incognito tab and half of the posts on the front page are from outrage “porn” subreddits: PublicFreakouts, JusticeServed, instant_regret, IdiotsInCars. Go ahead and try it.

Outrage is highly engaging.

Does anyone else just cringe and not enjoy those subreddits? Sometimes, I see a place like twoXchromosomes with an outrage post about mysogyny and even that makes me cringe. I think the top 1% of these topics skimmed off for us will be highly entertaining for many who love outrage porn.

I prefer mindless memery and simple jokes to all those outrage posts. I'm not being productive but it doesn't poison my mood.

A lot of modern technology is something like the evolution of an angler fish.

Design a technology, optimize that technology for some metric, figure out a way to profit from it.

An angler fish lights up, attracts prey which hasn't learned to know any better, and eats it.

A tech company lights up with a feed, optimizes it (often blindly) to whatever attracts the most prey... er ... audience, and then takes from them what it can.

We didn't evolve in an environment with this kind of psychologically manipulative trickery, and the tech companies often barely know that what they are doing is manipulation at all, they're just measuring success and iterating to enhance that metric.

If you're like me, and you feel like you need to see some stuff for business reasons, but you hate all the shit the "engagers" put in our face (looking at you Twitter....), I can't recommend enough learning to add custom CSS. Actually, if you use the Stylebot chrome extension, it's so easy you don't even need to. I just hide everything i don't want to see. no recommendations, no trending bullshit, just the very select people who post only content I actually want to find out about.

Drugs are getting weird, but I suppose that was predictable. In fact, here's a prediction from 11 years ago.

The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago. And unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40.

http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html

The author's question reminds me of a pivotal scene in "American History X". Sweeney, a black high school principal, visits Derek, his former student and a white supremacist who is in jail for murder. Derek has just been hospitalized by other white people in a prison gang, and Sweeney asks Derek, "Has anything you've done made your life better?" In my own words, what is the point of anger if it does not result in better outcomes?

This was wonderful to read. I believe that I am guilty of the thing the author calls the martyr complex. The world right now is indeed the best that it ever was and here I was constantly outraged about things I have no power to change. Life is too short. For me personally, it is time for a change.

You can probably be addicted to the adrenalin produced during stressful situations even if you don't like being in those at all. Your body is addicted to the adrenalin it produces as it expects a (usually verbal) fight. If you cannot understand this, just think of the pulse you have looking down somewhere very high without any kind of railing. Some people might like that feeling more than they fear the quite certain death by the unlikely but very much possible fall.

This stress is comparable to outrage in that it can be mostly synthetic and self-imposed. E.g. you don't have to search for a fight with friends, colleagues or family and some people constantly do. You also don't have to be outraged on the internet and some people constantly search out content that helps them get outraged.

It is if you stay tuned into these outlets. Pop culture is not healthy, it is exploitative. Its greatest strength is emotional manipulation.

I can't relate with the collective "we" in this article. I feel a lot more stable and closer to reality after disengaging from big social media corporations.

I agree 100% with the article, but I will just point out that the outrage ruins everyone's lives, not just the ones conducting the outrage. This is why it's difficult to ignore, even if (like me) you eliminate/reduce social media participation.

history will not look kindly on Twitter, Facebook and the news media. they're even worse than the tobacco industry.

Turning away can't be the real solution, of course can't blame anyone who chooses so. I find the article interesting but oversimplifying. OP suggests that we don't discuss & try to solve large-scale problems and instead focus on actionable smaller bites. But, if we no longer can discuss problems how do we progress further as a society? How do I know what others with different views think of the matter? Harari argues everyone must gather as much information as possible so they make informed decisions as in our globalized world every decision counts.

Addiction to outrage is also extremely profitable. Perhaps we’ll see those manufacturing addictive outrage face similar consequences as those manufacturing addictive painkillers.

Archive link: https://archive.is/nMiHk

Thank you, Medium is ruining my life.

There's got to be a better HN policy-level solution than this. This author put their article behind a paywall because they get paid for that. And here we are, a pretty well-to-do community, stealing it. I don't see how it's our choice to do that. If this author wanted to share it with us, they have a non-paywall article link they could share (or they would have published it outside the paywall).

We could just not allow any paywalled content in the feeds. That would include the NYT. Or we could mark it so that people knew not to click through if they didn't have a membership. Or... I bet several of the big publications, Better Programming which I run and Towards Data Science would be fine reflexively posting the non-paywalled version here. They key though is that the authors really deserve to be part of that discussion.

For reference see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html for the question regarding paywalled content.

Obama called out the "super woke" generation a few years back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaHLd8de6nM

"If all you're doing is casting stones, you're probably not going to get very far"...

While completely unplugging from social or mainstream media for a while is one strategy to keep outrage levels at bay, you can also choose a strategy of quality over quantity for consuming information about the world.

This is also a strategy that involves depth over breadth of information sources. Choose longer and more thoughtful articles in respected journals instead of headline news bursts. Read books that provide deeper analysis and context of topics given insufficient context in headline news.

Watch shows like Last Week Tonight with John Oliver or The Daily Show that make you laugh while often giving you more thoughtful reporting and analyses of current events than traditional news sources. I might have included Real Time with Bill Maher, but lately I've found that show dials up my outrage against the host. In any event, you should tailor this strategy to your own outrage triggers.

Finally, while excess outrage can be harmful to your mental health, it also provides input about what is important to you. Or at least, what you think is important to you. For this reason, it's probably also useful to take the opportunity to be mindful of what it is that is triggering the outrage and determine if there is a deeper issue provoking the outrage. Doing this might actually help you regulate your own emotions while processing difficult information.

I cannot watch John Oliver’s show on HBO anymore. I understand that it addresses some public policy question worth looking at. But the reality is that rather than thoughtful content, it’s a finely tuned formula intended to produce maximum outrage. It doesn’t even matter what the topic is, the formula remains the same. The viewer gets the high of fake moral superiority while remaining fairly ill-informed. But hey, it’s cool, they’re comedy not a news program.

His shows is investigative journalism with a comedic twist. What should a should journalism do then? His last show about plastic recycling was informative.

I stopped watching him as well, even though near as I can tell his politics and attitudes closely match my own.

Better that I should just vote, and act, in line with my beliefs without spending extra time getting worked up into a state of rage in the service of them. John Oliver, Keith Olbermann, folks like that, are the Alex Jones of left-wing perspectives. You can share the views and still object to the mechanism for engagement they employ.

I feel like we're learning hard lessons on what these mechanisms for being human, signify. It's a pity we're learning the lessons in such a damaging way.

I'm not so sure if Oliver is just pushing a left wing position. Certainly not to an Alex Jones level of deceptiveness, and to a much higher degree of public service.

When he explains how some shithead county sheriff starved an inmate to death or shows how one public defender is forced to take on 400 clients a year (I'm not being accurate here, though he is) then that's not a left wing position. Left vs right accusations just become excuses for inaction.

This article would resonate with me almost entirely if not for this part:

> Here’s the thing — the world right now, despite all its problems, nastiness and tragedy, is far better than it was a hundred years ago. The world a hundred years ago was better than it was a hundred years before that. In other words, the world might not be improving fast enough for you, but it’s improving every day.

Optimism is wonderful and necessary, and also I think it's important to recognize ways in which the world might not be improving every day. I think optimism is great when it's forward looking and about hope. When applied backwards, I don't personally like it that much. I'm reminded of this short (12 minute) video clip "In Defense of Optimism w/ John Nichols" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qj7pN6Assu0

Is anyone using website blockers? I broke a Google News habit by modifying my Windows hosts file once, but there are more sophisticated solutions now. Quick search reveals tools like "Freedom" and "Cold Turkey".

Outrage is helpful only if one is willing and able to do something about the problems, either in one's personal life or globally. If not, it doesn't go beyond being harmful to one's own health.

It also doesn't seem to be accomplishing much - after tearing down the statues and protesting for months, both sides seem even less willing to consider the other side's point of view.

There are hundreds new laws and actual policy changes. And I covered both sides by previous sentence. Neither side goal was for other side to love them. Getting policies and laws is the ultimate goal.

I consider it a positive that we don't venerate slave loving traitors in public, don't you? Slavery is the blackest sin upon the American history, outrage machine doesn't change that.

While I agree with the overall feeling of the article, I couldn't help but smile at the irony of its clickbait title (which seemed unintended). Sensationalism definitely attracts the eye.

Addiction to outrage isn't ruining anybody's life. It's an inability to control one's emotions that's ruining people's lives.

When somebody says something offensive to a well-adjusted person, do you know what they do? They shrug it off, because words are just that.

For some less-adjusted people, it seems an offensive statement is an existential threat of sorts.

Unfortunately, social media concentrates the less-adjusted people as well as the well-adjusted. It's just the less-adjusted have plenty of time to spend on social media.

It also doesn't help that most people don't really spend any time developing their mental resiliency as a child because educational environments are overly protective.

People shrugged off all the anti-Asian rhetoric pushed in American politics for the past five years especially the last year. Now we have major increase in anti-Asian hate crimes and attacks including one mass shooting. I guess the Asian-American community should continue to shrug it off, as you say.

I'm sorry, but how does this have anything to do with "addiction to outrage"? Unless you're implying the Asian-Americans upset are unjustifiably "addicted to outrage" or "less-adjusted", which I'm going to assume isn't your intention.

This is admittedly a low quality comment, but I really feel like saying: herewego.jpg

I haven't heard anything about "anti-Asian" sentiment till last week. Maybe it, you know, doesn't exist at the level you think it does?

I've noticed this too.

It is like suddenly this whole anti-asian hate thing popped out of nowhere. From 0 to it being everywhere; friends re-posting things on insta, etc...

BLM also seems to have disappeared suddenly (Now I can support asian developers instead of black developers on the apple store!!!). Guess the propaganda machine got a new narrative to push.

Am I crazy or just being gaslit super hard?

Isn't being gaslit sort of the theme of the age? I know some specific sources, but I hardly think it comes down to just one Big Enemy gaslighting us super hard.

More likely that's become the immediate go-to approach for a host of state and organizational actors, just as soon as they worked out they could direct populations through social pressure. It ain't in just one direction, so we're looking at some serious chaos out there. Only common denominator is engagement.

The other alternative is that it was happening, but happening outside the places (virtual and physical) that you inhabit. A lot of things happen in this world that we aren’t aware of.

Sometimes, our bubbles pop and we are shown something that has been happening, it wasn’t in our view. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t a bid deal or that it isn’t real, just that we don’t see most of the world at any given time.

I would say that weaponization of outrage for the purposes of accomplishing goals is what's ruining lives. I've seen it happen. Seems like it's the new innovation.

We didn't used to have mechanisms for so efficiently manipulating populations in distributed ways, before. Social media's got a lot to answer for. I had to quit it, myself. I'm sure it's still a huge pile of bad-faith and manipulativeness, but I can't justify trying to keep track of how bad it's become.

I don't think its fair to completely blame Social Media and relieve people of all responsibilities. After all, human beings aren't lemmings, if they are being manipulated, then they should bear responsibility for being manipulated.

My theme is basically: no, statistically, they are lemmings, and they can't. An individual human can resist propagandization, can resist bad faith, can take responsibility for their perspectives.

Get access to a large enough population and humanity, viewed as an aggregate, can't. The capacity for individual choice is real and it's not enough.

It's great to be one of the exceptions: I totally endorse it, as an individual. It won't matter, which is why we gotta find collective solutions for collective problems that absolutely will not be fixed by personal responsibility.

Social media does bear responsibility for how it is designed. From AI algorithms that detect what you react to (actively learning to show you your triggers) to upvote/downvote mechanisms that promote the most reactionary content.

Before social media, the aphorism was that an angry customer will tell 10 people. The modern version is that an angry person will broadcast to the world and may also be picked up by groups that exist to amplify anger.

People are not some static thing (e.g. "well-adjusted"), but change constantly. And todays external influences push everyone to this outrage culture, even if they come from environment where this culture did not exist.

I would argue that people whose emotions are easily affected by an external influence is the definition of not-well-adjusted.

Bullshit. Heroin is addictive no matter your biology or background. So are certain psychological triggers and mechanisms. Even the well adjusted get angry when they see various forms of abuse, for example. So if news is framed as abuse, victimization, etc it will trigger your oh so well adjusted self.

To illustrate my point I’ve deliberately inserted “bullshit” as my preface and “oh so well adjusted” as sarcasm. Be honest with yourself about how this anger inducing copy compels you to reply. You may not. But the feeling exists because you have similar triggers to the rest of us, and it is these that are being exploited.

Ps: Sorry about the sarcasm. Hopefully it makes the point.

Sure, people will have instinctual reactions; but if I dangle a naked girl in front of a man, most will get an erection and desire for sex. But even in this fantastical scenario, it doesn't make rape any more tolerable- because we expect human beings to be able to control their basic instincts. Isn't that what separates us from animals after-all?

Even animals have some ability to control their basic instincts; dogs can be trained to hold a treat right on their nose until a command is given.

We're separated from animals by tools and culture and language. Our basal emotions and desires are shared heavily with other primates, many humans would cheat on their spouse in your scenario. But dogs can't use JavaScript or go to school to learn to use JS either.

> When somebody says something offensive to a well-adjusted person, do you know what they do? They shrug it off, because words are just that.

Doormats gets bullied. I have seen this dynamic multiple times already and was on receiving end of it multiple times.

Shrugging makes them do it again and again, then others join, and originaln person escalates. And you not just be insulted, but they wont take your ideas seriously, cause they will have you fixed as someone without respect.

You have to stand up for yourself.

Shrugging off insults doesn't equate to being a doormat.

If you insult your boss, do you expect him to flip out and lash back at you to prove his status within the company? Or does he just laugh it off and then ask his assistant to make a memo to fire you later in the day?

Do you realize that the first boss actually sounds way better then the second one? The first boss in your example is safer to deal with, cause if you overstep you have chance to learn. And he is still not doormat.

The second boss is someone who is to be avoided and also someone who will create shitty culture.

I expect the ideal boss to react to the situation, shut the thing down. I don't expect him to fire everyone involved.

That's not the point. The point is that you can stand up for yourself without throwing a fit, because genuine power doesn't come from how angry you can get.

The second boss did threw fit and did not stoop up for himself. He even needed secretary to do the firing.

Also, he literally runs business based on his emotions. He had power, but also does not seem to me like someone I could respect. He does not seem well adjusted. Also, he did not had power that would be related to his own personality or skills, if someone he cant fire would insult him, he is powerless.

His power against employee is purely from his ability to fire them. And yes, if you have that sort of power, a lot of things are easier, because people end up scared of very real damage you will cause them. Getting angry, if it achieves the same goal is more ethical and does not require disproportionally harming people.

Isn't it possible that the more or less adjusted people that you speak of are simply naturally, inherently that way? If they didn't do anything to make themselves impulsive or reactive, why is it their fault? Shouldn't it be on social media for blasting everyone with it, knowing it will harm naturally sensitive people?

No, the things causing outrage are ruining our lives. There are multiple systems of society, at least in the U.S. that are flat out failing.

You don't seriously believe this? Have you been outside in the last few months?

I’m seeing my fiancée for the first time in well over a year today, the separation caused by systems failures, so yes, I do seriously believe this.

People got killed as a consequence of outrage from false information.

One antidote is open-mindedness. Yes, open to new information, new ideas, new concepts and new experiences.

But the key point is, open even though that new information may contradict what you already believe is true.

People need to be able to look at a statement and realize there are potential inflammatory elements, and then measure the extent of their investigation by the level of flames that could ensue. The more severe the implications, the more due diligence we need to do before accepting that information as true, and reacting to it.

It's an important discipline and it seemed to be very lacking over the last couple of years. One graphic example was when the US pulled out of Syria and the Kurds there were put in jeopardy. ABC News reported that after the troops left, Kurds were being slaughtered by the Turks and Syrians. The report was accompanied by disturbing video of high-powered, high caliber automatic weapons destroying apartment buildings.

Come to find out a few days later, there was no slaughter and that video was from a military weapon trade show that took place in Kentucky.

ABC News is considered by many boomers to be a credible and professional news company. Many Boomers haven't recognized that over the last 15 years, all the major incumbents have degenerated to National Enquirer methods, perhaps ultimately for survival, but nonetheless, this type of reporting is beyond irresponsible. It feeds the outrage that ultimately led to a nation that collectively seemed to just look the other way as our cities were looted and burned. Meanwhile, the spotlight of shame shone on law enforcement, not for failing to contain it, but for causing it in the first place. If you were convinced of law enforcements' culpability either way, what did you do to confirm your belief was based on facts? It turns out that trusting the same primary news sources that have been the mainstay of information in the US for decades is no longer of any value.

We need to do what we can to ensure we have done our own due diligence and confirmed to the base factual evidence that what we believe is actually true.

When you read news, the first thing you should be asking is, does this actually matter?

I think if more folks did this, they'd be lots happier.

“Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.” - Mark Twain

I agree with this a lot. I feel way less stressed out completely leaving reddit, all news, and so on.

I wonder how many people can read that and remember the "literally shaking" crowd thrashing about to the revelation that someone had two scoops of ice cream. TWO.

The thing is, the people that this article is about are going to give themselves a pass. They love being outraged, they love the feeling of being outraged, and it eclipses any kind of self-reflection.

The sweet sweet thing about the comments section is watching all the down voting.

Everyone needs their daily dose of irony.

Maybe, if nothing else, it lends strength to the Ted Kaczynski notion that people need to have lives filled with difficult but not impossible tasks that are necessary (ie. not hobbies). Dunno if mailing letter bombs gets you to that place, but he is worth reading.

This article is the dark underbelly of "I Like that the Big Boat is Stuck".

Generally, people can be classified into three groups: First, those who believe everything they consume; Second, those who no longer believe anything; Third, those who critically examine what they consume and form their judgments accordingly. Numerically, the first group is by far the strongest, being composed of the broad masses of the people. Intellectually, it forms the simplest portion of the nation. It cannot be classified according to occupation but only into grades of intelligence. Under this category come all those who have not been born to think for themselves or who have not learnt to do so and who, partly through incompetence and partly through ignorance, believe everything that is set before them in print. To these we must add that type of lazy individual who, although capable of thinking for himself out of sheer laziness gratefully absorbs everything that others had thought over, modestly believing this to have been thoroughly done. The second group is numerically smaller, being partly composed of those who were formerly in the first group and after a series of bitter disappointments are now prepared to believe nothing of what they see in print. They hate all newspapers. Either they do not read them at all or they become exceptionally annoyed at their contents, which they hold to be nothing but a congeries of lies and misstatements. The third group is easily the smallest, being composed of real intellectuals whom natural aptitude and education have taught to think for themselves and who in all things try to form their own judgments, while at the same time carefully sifting what they read. They will not read any newspaper without using their own intelligence to collaborate with that of the writer and naturally this does not set writers an easy task. Journalists appreciate this type of reader only with a certain amount of reservation. Hence the trash that newspapers are capable of serving up is of little danger much less of importance to the members of the third group of readers. In the majority of cases these readers have learnt to regard every journalist as fundamentally a rogue who sometimes speaks the truth. Most unfortunately, the value of these readers lies in their intelligence and not in their numerical strength, an unhappy state of affairs in a period where wisdom counts for nothing and majorities for everything. Nowadays when the voting papers of the masses are the deciding factor; the decision lies in the hands of the numerically strongest group; that is to say the first group, the crowd of simpletons and the credulous. It is an all-important interest of the State and a national duty to prevent these people from falling into the hands of false, ignorant or even evil-minded teachers. Therefore it is the duty of the State to supervise their education and prevent every form of offence in this respect. Particular attention should be paid to the Press; for its influence on these people is by far the strongest and most penetrating of all; since its effect is not transitory but continual. Its immense significance lies in the uniform and persistent repetition of its teaching.

I think the mention of specific company policies really weakens the argument here. What Nike does is just irrelevant in scale compared to what Twitter or Facebook do. They are the platforms that threaten to destabilise the free world.

I remain optimistic that society will outgrow its desire to feed the hate machine. The younger generations will realize how stupid it is and outrage bait will be relegated to the corner of the internet for angry millennials, just like mainstream news and the boomers before us.

Recognizing Propaganda Propaganda appears in a variety of forms and uses common techniques to successfully influence people, including:

Activating strong emotions Responding to audience needs & values Simplifying information & ideas Attacking opponents Technique: Activate Strong Emotions Technique: Activate Strong Emotions Propaganda plays on human emotions—fear, hope, anger, frustration, sympathy—to direct audiences toward the desired goal. In the deepest sense, propaganda is a mind game—the skilful propagandist exploits people’s fears and prejudices. Successful propagandists understand how to psychologically tailor messages to people’s emotions in order to create a sense of excitement and arousal that suppresses critical thinking.

By activating emotions, the recipient is emotionally moved by the message of the propagandist. Labelling is another weapon of choice for the propagandist. What emotions are important for those who create propaganda? Fear, pity, anger, arousal, compassion, hatred, resentment - all these emotions can be intensified by using the right labels.

Technique: Simplify Information & Ideas Technique: Simplify Information & Ideas Propaganda may use accurate and truthful information, or half-truths, opinions, lies and falsehoods. Successful propaganda tells simple stories that are familiar and trusted, often using metaphors, imagery and repetition to make them seem natural or "true."

Oversimplification is effective when catchy and memorable short phrases become a substitute for critical thinking. Oversimplifying information does not contribute to knowledge or understanding, but because people naturally seek to reduce complexity, this form of propaganda can be effective.

Technique: Respond to Audience Needs & Values Technique: Respond to Audience Needs & Values Effective propaganda conveys messages, themes, and language that appeal directly, and many times exclusively, to specific and distinct groups within a population. Propagandists may appeal to you as a member of a family, or your racial or ethnic identity, or even your hobbies, your favourite celebrities, your beliefs and values, or even your personal aspirations and hopes for the future.

Sometimes, universal values are activated, as when our deepest human values—the need to love and be loved, to feel a sense of belonging and a sense of place—are activated by propaganda. By creating messages that appeal directly to the needs, hopes, and fears of specific groups, propaganda becomes personal and relevant. When messages are personally relevant, people pay attention and absorb key information and ideas.

Technique: Attack Opponents Technique: Attack Opponents Propaganda can serve as a form of political and social warfare to identify and vilify opponents. It can call into question the legitimacy, credibility, accuracy, and even the character of one’s opponents and their ideas.

Because people are naturally attracted to conflict, a propagandist can make strategic use of controversy to get attention. Attacking opponents also encourages "either-or" or "us-them" thinking which suppresses the consideration of more complex information and ideas.

Propaganda can also be used to discredit individuals, destroy their reputation, exclude specific groups of people, incite hatred or cultivate indifference.

People are surprised hearing that I never had a Twitter account, me being the tech nerd who likes arguing with strangers. First of all the characters length limit is clearly meant to favor witty jabs over well structured arguments. And then there's the fact that the only times I hear about Twitter are when people are getting outraged or their life destroyed. Why would I even be part of that? If I am to be part of a dangerous mob I'd rather go to a mushpit and have fun with me fellow headbangers.

Then there was Reddit. Reddit used to be cool and all about diversity of ideas even with its left wing bias. But they never really appreciated the problem of coordinated account farming and their policy of who gets to be moderator which is by nature wide open to manipulation by giant PR firms and other online mobs. Now it's mostly uninteresting outrage like farming "racist" comments by creeping out old ladies, obvious product placements (I doubt most of Reddit user base became fans of the NBA, F1 and the NHL overnight) and political "blogs" maintained by PACs. Looking at the archived front page over the years I can really see sanity disappear slowly and pure folly take over like this grandparent we used to know who used to be nice when we were young but now shouts when you leave the door opened.

I'd delete Facebook too, but family. At least delete the app from my phone. Good thing they made Messenger its own app. I used to follow various state media of various countries, and then I began mocking the CCP's propaganda, and low and behold it's always on my front page. Seeing it happened in real time is just very creepy, even if I engage in other pages much often.

Meh, as if people who argue on twitter all day don't know it's stupid. They know. We all know.

1/3 of Americans are obese, you think they don't know? They know. We all know.

These are systemic problems. If you try to solve them at an individual level of Jordan Peterson aka clean your room or Tony Robbins jump around yelling 'yes' to loud music, that'll last you a week, a month, a year and a life for 0.00001%.

When the system is built to have shit food everywhere and healthy food in select places, when the infrastructure is built to make communities impossible, when you get taught useless shit for 12 years in school and more stupid shit through entertainment your whole life - don't blame the people who go haywire, the system makes you go crazy because it doesn't make any sense.

Look at the developed world - these people are going extinct - they're having fewer than 2 children on average, eating themselves to death while talking about 'social media'.

It's not social media, it's your culture and worldview. Of course who wants to have that conversation - just go read Steven Pinker about how we're doing better than ever.

On the other hand, how many historians say that passive support and wilful blindness by ordinary Germans facilitated Nazi atrocities?

Follow the article to its logical conclusion: outrage is subverted and moral relativism is the consequence. If we fear a resurgence of nazism, for example, then some outrage over recent events is warranted. Acting upon that is even a moral imperative.

So the author is right that we can't mindlessly let it consume us, but misses the point with the question has "outrage made your life any better?" Has fighting for a country or a cause made any soldier's life better? Has it for the healthy able advocating for the sick or disabled? If a better life for ourselves is all we seek then the glue of society evaporates.

But he follows the lazy path of attributing it to mainstream media. Pick up an old school western newspaper and it's mostly unsexy, even boring stories about reserve rate predictions, library openings, a corruption investigation into some councilman, some news from abroad about a peace accord or a conflict. Retractions, editorials, classifieds. It served us well enough for a couple of centuries, but now suddenly mainstream news outlets are the enemy. Because Trump said so, because the lazy parroted him, because the quacks promoted conspiracies for their freshly disillusioned new readers.

I call bullshit. What changed is that social media could amplify the few polarising stories coming from hundreds of mainstream sources, with enough inaccuracies on all sides to sew general distrust.

Real, professional journalism is a critical resource, and for now it's still mainstream outlets that that employ the most real journalists. Count the number of retractions for inaccurate reporting in mainstream vs social media. Social media despises the boring truth. Mainstream media grudgingly tolerates it.

That false equivalence, that lazy misattribution tars all media, undermining valid outrage. Outrage that has exposed treatment of Uighurs, exposed Sétif, Operation Condor, vivisection, Katyn, has helped women get the vote, helped emancipate slaves, and helps with progress generally.

> On the other hand, how many historians say that passive support and wilful blindness by ordinary Germans facilitated Nazi atrocities?

The thing is, if we are swimming in manufactured outrage, actually outrageous acts are just hidden in the noise. Everything turns into a 2-days hate fest with no meaning.

Which is why I criticise his falsely blaming mainstream media for that outrage. But I'll still take my chances swimming in manufactured outrage over manufactured facts. It is going to take experts - serious journalists, not youtube pundits - to sort out the difference.

  The world a hundred years ago was better than it was a hundred years before that.
  In other words, the world might not be improving fast enough for you, but it’s improving every day.

What a gross overgeneralization. What are we talking about exactly? Technological advancements? Yes, that's a lot better now. What technology is being used for? No, that's worse than 100 years ago. Climate? Worse than 100 years ago. And we could go on...

This piece is a prime example of being very selective in what you're willing to consider, in order to build a narrative around something the person thinks is bad, and then everything perceived to be part of that lands in the negative.

This then allows the writer to put themselves up as a voice of reason. Which is exactly what the author complains about, in a general sense. The idea of others that they are smarter than you, which the author tries to defeat by... throwing himself up as smarter than the people he's complaining about...

He doesn't literally say it. Instead, he shits on everything these people do and goes "here's what you can do instead". Let's not split hairs: that's something you do when you believe you're smarter than someone. Anyone can take their time to write something in a fashion that seems calm and eloquent and when people call you out go "I didn't say that". We can still notice you worked your way around it.

And no, not all opinions are equal. If someone's opinion is that the color of your skin, or the country you live in, or your sexual orientation, or your gender, etc... means it's okay for you to be attacked, that's not an opinion I have respect for.

It firmly stands out that the "all opinions are equal" crowd seem to have always forgotten about opinions that involve discrimination.

The problem here is the classic idea of "the democratic process is perfect and cannot be subverted in any way" while it clearly can.

It's partly a hero fantasy, where your view of the world makes you oh-so-much smarter than people who don't hold it (ironically, what the author is complaining about).

And partly a "perfect world" fantasy, in which people cannot bring themselves to consider that the world holds great injustices. Instead, only small inconveniences exist, and people who complain are exaggerating.

Both come from a lack of experience and an unwillingness to believe others.

Dr. King already said it in his letter from a Birmingham jail: "wait" almost always means "never".

The only person to decide if things are changing fast enough, is the person who is being disadvantaged, when they are not feeling defeatist.

Worse yet, it's destroying the fabric of our society. I've know my neighbor since I was a kid, always having a friendly relationship. Just yesterday we were talking about my uncle and somehow he jumped how angry he was at "Coke for training their employees to 'be less white'". So I pull out my phone, and first hit is a fact-check showing it's a right-wing, culture war fabrication. I see the same on the other side with younger generation. We've lost a shared set of facts.

Social media and the filter bubble it creates is destroying our country by radicalizing people with addictive disinformation.

Probably the most forgiving take on the subject.

https://www.newsweek.com/coca-cola-facing-backlash-says-less...

mea culpa. Here I am, feeding the beast.

I should have left out any details because they are a distraction. My point was I could not have a friendly conversation with my neighbor, because he was all wound up over a culture war issue fed by Facebook. But for the record, here was what I saw on my quick phone fact-check at the time, that contradicted his claims about Coke having an anti-white/anti-conservative policy[1][2].

> In a statement, Coca-Cola denied the video and images circulating on social media were part of the company’s learning curriculum.

But these details really didn't matter. What would have been a positive neighborly interaction 20 years ago, was soured because of today's environment. This is going on all across America.

[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/03/02/fac...

[2] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/coca-cola-training-less-wh...

You should at least entertain the idea that you might be the one who is wrong in that interaction. I googled your exact quote and it looks like it’s 100% true not some right wing conspiracy. Even if you are going to try and bend over backward and claim that’s not what coco cola intended, the literal fact is they require their employees to take a training and in that training they are told to be less white. That makes your quote above literally a true thing that happened. I can see why he would be angry at you for trying to pretend the literal facts in front of his face are not true.

I'm not sure it was true, I haven't seen evidence yet. Is there evidence that Coke promoted the course to its employees? It sounds to me like it might have just been some course on a platform that Coke didn't create. For example if Coke required employees to watch a youtube video, then some other weird video showed up in the youtube recommendations, that wouldn't be Coke requiring or promoting that weird video.

It is not the outrage, but the outrageous, that is responsible.

What a maddeningly lukewarm and privileged take. Your anger is being nurtured and harvested financial gain? Politicians are stoking outrage and fear to distract you from graft and corruption? You should disengage from it all and just, like, chill out, man? How bold.

There are made-up outrages, blown out of proportion outrages, and real, genuine outrages. There are productive things you can do about them and there are worthless things you can do about them. These are all mired together, and there will never be clear, objective boundaries between them all. It's hard, but you have to deal with it if your goal is to try improve things. There are real, systemic issues, issues perpetuated, often knowingly, by people with power. Those aren't going to get fixed by being nicer to your social circle and ignoring everything else. To take an old example, the Civil Rights movement only succeeded because people became rightfully outraged by segregation and racial oppression. If your answer to that is "Sure, but that was then. We don't have any big, systemic problems like that anymore," you'll probably find agreement with most white Americans in 1953.

This guy's choice of examples is telling. Calling people "a Nazi, a sexist, or a bigot" is what we should worry about. Not the society-wide protection of serial sexual abusers, not the rise of white nationalism, not the wildfire of state bills trying to legitimize transphobia. Those things don't matter to me, so what's the point?

Obviously, spending all your time getting mad on Twitter is neither productive nor good for you. It's okay to not be a 100% all-the-time zealous advocate for good causes. And even if you are, you still need to take care of yourself. But the solution is not to just blow off everything that doesn't affect you.

Spot on!

Outrage is one part of the problem but it's the lack of shame and guilt that allows it to flourish. People are too insulated from feeling shameful about their own behavior these days. Everyone's got a quick excuse to justify their animalistic behaviors now

This article deeply, deeply fails to resonate with me. I'm not outraged. I'm not outraged by some guy making some poltiically incorrect statement, I'm not particularly outrage by the people who sleuth through their twitter comments to find a reason to be outraged. It's just not important. What's more- it seems it's only important to people who already think it's important. It was both a reason for RMS to leave the FSF and not a reason for him to leave the FSF. It was entirely determined by how much he felt accountable to outrage.

The thing is though, I don't personally believe that it should be all or nothing. I don't want to go on your crusade, but I do want to discuss things and I think we can say things are bad without the tandem groups who are "cancelling" people and decrying "cancelling" people. Both those groups take extreme stances to stifle reasonable discussion. The constant railing against "cancellation" is just as stupid and unthinking as the people who want to form a mob and "cancel" people.

What is stupid about the constant railing against cancellation, when groups exist that do want to form mobs and ruin somebody's career over a comment made 10 years ago?

What I'm saying is that the correct response to those mobs is to ignore them or discuss their points on their merits. What often happens (particularly on HN) is a counter-mob forms that rails against the general idea of cancellation, despite the fact that often there are actually underlying reasons for being aggreived. If someone said something stupid 10 years ago the correct answer isn't for them to be fired, it's for them to apologise. But instead we see one group proclaim "Off with his head" and another group simply counter-mobilize. You see it even in the most extreme scenarios, today on HN we've literally got an article about Harvard closing down something because of it's links to Epstein, and people talking about "cancel culture". There actually are degrees of badness that we need to talk about beyond tagging everything as "cancel culture".

Because it's a dumbass catchphrase made up to make you outraged and you're buying in to it.

It looks like you've crossed into using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's one line at which we ban an account—regardless of what side you're battling for or against—because it's not what this site is for and destroys what it is for.

I'm not going to ban you right now, but if you would please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the intended spirit of this site—thoughtful conversation and intellectual curiosity—more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Every user needs to follow the rules and use HN as intended regardless of how wrong the other person is or how badly they behave. Otherwise we just end up in a downward spiral.

I agree selling outrage is a problem, (I like the phrase outrage porn) but you do need some balance. You shouldn't just only focus on your self. Your pretty privileged to do that (take a deep breathe before you freak out about me refering to privilege, or maybe read the article again heh)

The things he mentioned are important, I don't think ignoring societies faults is the right thing to do. Maybe some education. Collective outrage does make change happen too, and things do need to change. I guess outrage is needed, but it needs to actual important topics. Not manufactured packaged and sold to certain audiences like the Dr Seuss stuff

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