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Comment by almostgone | Hacker News Reader

When these attacks take on a racial or gender-focused hue, I think they end up having a terribly ironic effect: further isolating the group they sought to protect (e.g., POC, women, etc). That is, they win the battle, but lose the war. Each of these stories reinforces in my mind to not associate with those that are higher on the oppression totem pole. I know it is not their fault, and I feel bad for doing so, but the risk/reward simply does not make sense. It helps that I'm a loner anyway.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26612918 for the effect I'm speaking of. People will continue to distance themselves as (primarily American) society continues to be a flashpoint and Twitter a flashmob.

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Yes - and it's driving people further into tribes where the only way they feel "safe" is in and around their own "kind". This isn't civilization, but a regression and if it goes on for a few more generations it could be very damaging to our social fabric.

I just hope it's a weird early-21st century "intellectual" movement that eventually dies out.

I hate to point this out, but this isn't a "regression" and it's been part of our civilization since our civilization became a civilization.

It's just a change in who the targets are.

I think it is entirely plausible that social media / attention mining / etc are absolutely making society less civil than it could be / has been.

Than it could be? I dunno. Humans gotta human.

Until relatively recently, women and people from racial and ethnic minorities were pre-cancelled. And if they got too noisy, there was far worse on the menu---the first year in US history without a lynching was something like 1952, and that's literal torture, mutilation, and death; not having people say bad things about you on the Internet.

Was it more civil? Yeah, sure. It would only be spoken about in public rarely and the better classes of people would certainly never face it. It would certainly be more civil, as long as everyone stayed in their place.

An entirely different class of bad behaviors that were commonplace in the past has absolutely no bearing on whether or not social media makes us worse people and just confuses the issue for no reason.

I think this sort of thinking vastly overestimates the frequency with which these sorts of things happen. The risk seems high because you hear stories all the time, but that is because those stories are interesting and are shared widely. You don’t read about the 99.999% of the time that nothing bad happens.

This is like watching the evening news and deciding not to go outside ever because you are just sure you will murdered.. after all, every night they show a new murder!

This.

I am no longer willing to mentor female coders one on one after witnessing a friend get fired from allegations from a mentally unstable female peer. She ended up getting a second dude fired, until on her third attempt the claims fell apart, and it became clear she had fabricated all 3 claims. Too late for the first two.

This victimization cult has now caused me to adopt the "billy graham rule" that I used to make fun of fundamentalist Christians about.

And in another hilarious twist, vast numbers of HN members (likely the majority) encouraged this situation to happen.

Go back through any of the old threads at the height of the metoo campaign. The vast majority were on the side of the mob and anyone who tried to talk sense was down-voted, flagged and accused of -isms for pointing out where this would lead.

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