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Comment by crate_barre | Hacker News Reader

Do you know how many writers are boring? Most people don’t read books. The books are boring, the awful writers became authors of books. Truly dreadful and boring writers. I don’t think people realize why people gravitate to ‘flammable’ writers on the internet. It’s the most interesting shit they ever read, literally, ever. Can we respect that on some level?

only for some jackass to pop into the thread for the first time with a borderline (non-moderatable) comment that lit everything back on fire.

My dear friend, I suffer from serious depression, and whatever chaos one person can create with words is pure joy to me. Do not moderate my happiness.

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> whatever chaos one person can create with words is pure joy to me. Do not moderate my happiness.

Perhaps online communities which share those values would be a better fit for you than one that explicitly stands against those practices.

I disagree, Mom. Also, 90% of what makes Eve fun is the arbitrary chaos humans create amongst themselves. It’s all in good fun and quite interesting.

Things are certainly getting weird, the more I live, the more I realize I relate to the Joker.

How did EVE online even show up in this discussion? Oh, you brought it up, and turns out I used to play it. Do you see? I can’t leave this place because you guys are just too much fun.

I hope you can find some peace, but please understand that for many other people that type of thing is extremely draining and exhausting. It's really stressful to come home after a long day of putting out fires at work just to see more inflammatory things happening online. Doubly so if people are spreading flamebait and misinformation that happens to be about you or your work. I actually completely quit online gaming because the toxicity is out of control, I couldn't seem to join a game without someone eventually tossing around insults or being casually racist/sexist. I really don't need that in my free time.

Internet flaming is only interesting for a little while, and then it gets boring and a little sickening, like a sugar high. Actually, it's usually not even interesting (in the intellectual sense) to begin with. It's exciting, agitating, activating—things that are easy to confuse with interest. Real interest is quieter and a little more stable.

I'm a big fan of classic hard-hitting literary wit, but it doesn't work on the internet. You need a smaller, closed system for it to work—like the literary salon Monty Python were making fun of here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uycsfu4574w.

Sugar is a great analogy, because frequent exposure to flaming does appear to adjust people's tastes, until they seek it out.

RIP pre-Internet discussion methods.

I've always had a vague sense that there's an underappreciation of the damage Starbucks did to American discourse by destroying the most widespread social forum: the coffee shop.

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