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Comment by lvxferre | Hacker News Reader

I've seen this once. But just now I noticed something:

>the fewer "repeat interactions" there are, the more distrust will spread.

Doesn't this explain quite well why big internet communities devolve into a cesspool? I'm not behaving like a jerk (or worse, a moron) if I know people around me will recognise and avoid me, but as the odds of that happening get closer to zero, it becomes more advantageous to fling shit.

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Not only that, but it becomes harder to recognise consistent norms. If you post an assertion and I respond with a 350-word cited explanation of how you are well-intentioned-but-factually-incorrect, am I

A. Behaving like a know-it-all jerk?

B. Behaving like a contributing member of a curiosity community?

Depends on the community norms and how well we understand them.

This is exactly why every month or so when I check out Facebook to see what's going on I don't respond to things I see like I would here, no matter how much I might want to for a bit.

Even if a similar topic comes up on FB and I've just posted a large comment here with multiple sources against a point of view, on FB at most I'd probably post "Eh, I'm not sure that's quite right, at least according to this. <link>". Almost nobody there is actually interested in having their point of view challenged or learning more about the thing they're posting, from my experience, so that's about all you can do in many situations without things just devolving or people ignoring you.

Yep. And it's totally fine for different forums to have different jobs!

So it’s sort of like the difference between a small town and a big city. In a city one is semi anonymous and can do lots of things that one otherwise couldn’t do in a small town where someone will know who you are and places social pressures which affects behavior.

I think you’re spot on, but a counterexample seems to be Twitter, where both low- and high-profile accounts engage in shit-flinging because it evokes reactions, and the algorithm doesn’t discriminate between positive and negative engagement.

Because of the character limit, I think Twitter is more conducive to emotional outbursts (both positive and negative, but considering that it takes a lot more emotional energy to be positive than negative we see more negativity) due to the quick nature of it. It only takes a couple seconds to pound out 250 chars.

My emotional outbursts can easily be thousands of words. There's no way to actually express emotions on Twitter. I suspect that's part of the reason for all the images and memes and links to articles.

Edit: and bitter arguments.

The character limit introduces a lot of misunderstandings.

This is my experience with Twitter. There isn't enough space to write out something in a way that minimizes the chances of misunderstandings. However, I think a big part of the problem is that those explanations are needed in the first place. Why do we so easily jump to awful interpretations? That's how you end up with rage that quickly spreads and even worsens as context for what the person said is lost or the quote isn't repeated at all but instead just the bad-faith interpretation is passed around.

The effects of that go beyond just the awful emotional impact. People get fired for that kind of controversy. (I hesitate to call it "cancel culture" because of the implications in that term of who's canceling who).

>Why do we so easily jump to awful interpretations?

I think the root cause is failure to assess certainty levels. For those people, "I know X" and "I don't know, but some weak evidence leads me to believe X" are exactly the same thing.

So they draw a conjecture based on what someone else said, assume that conjecture is correct, and vomit it as incontestable truth. Other assumers join in, take the anecdote as incontestable truth, and you have the rage spreading like a wildfire.

[Incidentally this kind of behaviour was what made me ditch Reddit. Not the power-tripping mods, or the corrupt admins, but the idiotic users. I'm glad I don't use Twitter, it seems like they fall in the same bag.]

Another thing that the game emphasized (based on the 1984 book “the Evolution of Cooperation“) is how misunderstandings increase mistrust. The Web is full of misunderstandings.

The other takeaway is to foster Win-win situations as opposed to zero-sum games.

Yes that and the more immediate absence in the particular interactions: a lot of people wouldn't be as hostile and disrespectful in person for fear of losing teeth.

I think you have a point, but the type of interaction is important too. IRL, you have to trust based on the fear that if you deviate, others might minimax you in the future. On social platforms, no one can really minimax you in a tangible way, hence all the cesspool behavior.

Not just internet communities. This applies to cities, or even countries, as well.

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