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Comment by amadeuspagel | Hacker News Reader

A classic on this topic, more general: Most of Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People[1].

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...

Someone has posted it here, perhaps in response to your comment:

Most of what you read on the internet is written by insane people (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32897812 - Sept 2022 (36 comments)

- but generally, we downweight follow-up/copycat posts, partly because frontpage space is so scarce that having two variations of the same discussion is space-inefficient, and partly because it tends to split the discussion.

(You did the preferable thing by talking about this in the original thread.)

Dang - related to OP’s post is there a 90/9/1 participation dynamic at play on HN?

I haven't read the OP but if you're asking whether 10% of users log in and 1% actually post things, that's pretty close IIRC.

There is a different explanation about the 'power posters' - not that they are "insane", but that it's their job. They get good amounts of money for doing what they do.

As an addition, for the extreme cases it's most likely not a single person, but multiple people, posting under the same name.

Some of them probably are effectively paid advertising teams. That doesn't really explain some of the people you used to get on forums though. Why pay someone to write 24/7 micro-serial "Transformers" fan-fiction?

Anyone who has been on the internet for awhile quickly realizes that the “all the posters I don’t like are paid shills” argument doesn’t hold up well at all. It’s often a cope - “my side/the good side would obviously be winning if it weren’t for these paid shills”.

There are way too many true believers who are terminally online and you can find almost anything out there.

Eh. It can happen. I know someone who's paid to moderate [1] a "grassroots" brand subreddit. It's just that "you're not real" is easier to believe than "you genuinely think Donald Trump is the prophesied Jewish messiah." Barring conclusive evidence (which rarely [2]) people gravitate in one direction.

I'd guess it's a mix, with a little straight money, a lot of obsession, and a middling amount of compensated cat herding.

[1] The playbook being basically "discuss reasonable criticism, remove unreasonable criticism" ie "nobody talk too much about that battery fire, but don't make it look suspicious."

[2] "On the Internet, you know everybody who disagrees with you is a dog."

> Anyone who has been on the internet for awhile quickly realizes that the “all the posters I don’t like are paid shills” argument doesn’t hold up well at all. It’s often a cope - “my side/the good side would obviously be winning if it weren’t for these paid shills”.

> There are way too many true believers who are terminally online and you can find almost anything out there.

There doesn't have to be a single explanation, though. It can be paid shills and obsessives.

Weird Internet used to be a few places. Now it (more precisely, the ideas) is everywhere, and reported on as if it is perfectly normal, because "journalism." This ends up legitimizing it further, even if it is painted as weird, as some ideas benefit from any sort of exposure ("the man is oppressing us by painting it as bad!").

Terminally online users are the problem. Until we regard their neurosis, addiction, and proclivity for unreality as a real problem, this will only get worse. Pulling on this string will drag several much harder problems along with it, such as equitable access to mental health care.

Transformers is not nearly niche enough to warrant being used here

There's another side to it as well, the people who want it to be their job, and just see it as another avenue to deliver contest similar to a stream.

Very ironically/interestingly, this was case for the big anti-american posts from mainland China:

Infamously anti-west personality Sima Nan: "Being anti-American is work while visiting the U.S. is life" https://youtu.be/Q0y84Oi3VW8

Short summary, his wife and child are U.S citizens, and he visits them often, but his entire career is made up of bashing the west, western values, and putting the ccp on a pedestal, and he's made a small fortune on this career... until his turn came.

I know the article doesn't literally mean "insane" as in mental illness, but it reminded me of something that happened long ago and its implications for the internet.

My buddy and I were watching a news show and it had a number to call in and "leave your opinion" - super common back in the 90's. Well, we called and it was a voicemail box. You guess what happened next, but we correctly guessed the admin code and could listen to all the voicemails left.

Now this is a news show with millions of nightly viewers. Pretty plain Jane, just the news-type-show, and this is before the Fox News vs. MSNBC stuff we have now, so I assume a pretty decent cross section of America watches it.

Unsurprisingly, the mailbox contained hundreds of voicemails and would be deleted daily to make room. But what was interesting listening to these "comments from just regular-Joe Americas" was that the vast majority were insane ramblings from clearly mentally ill people. They would call multiple times, talk about aliens or how someone was Jesus Christ. We're talking manic episodes, schizophrenia, drug-induced psychosis, whatever. And these messages were left every day, every week, for years and years.

And not to say there weren't regular folks - there were. Someone who thinks "we should get involved in another war" and "family is important". You know, normal things. But they were maybe 10-15%? Maybe. I assume most regular folks just watched the news and thought "why would I call a number? I got shit to do and it's not like they actually care."

It wasn't until a couple decades later that I realize they called because someone listened. It was an outlet. And for those with serious mental illness, likely their only outlet.

It was then I started to draw comparison to the internet. How much of what we read online is just the rambling of the same people who left 'detached from reality' messages on that voicemail service decades ago?

I'm starting to think it's a pretty good percent. And I don't mean "insane" in the way this article describes it, but "insane" in the sense of serious mental illness.

So while we like to talk about Russian disinformation and bots, my current theory is that the biggest "threat" on the internet is people believing what they read represents the actual views of average citizens. It's not.

Your average American doesn't even know what Reddit or HN is. And if they go online they probably read and upvote something and leave. The bulk of what we read online are the insane ramblings of 1% of the population who likely have diagnosable mental illness of some sort.

That's my hypothesis anyways. And hey, maybe I'm one of those mentally ill folks... right?

You don't even need serious mental illness. Just the desire to have someone listen because you are discontent but otherwise sane.

As people’s “real world” connections dwindle the desire to just talk continues - I’ve known people who are perfectly content with their crazy idea if they can talk about it now and then, but if they have no outlet at all it’s like it begins to grow and starts to dominate them.

> if they have no outlet at all it’s like it begins to grow and starts to dominate them.

We’re a social species so a big component of our thinking is in community with others. When that community is healthy our rougher edges are smoothed out, when that community is lopsided or absent altogether then we drift and warp.

Bulk? That seems hard to believe, is that outside of HN or are you including your own large paragraph here as part of the denominator?

> “insane" in the sense of serious mental illness.

Fatigue, stress, trauma, injury, alcohol, aging, other illness, ideology, anger, envy etc all can also induce irrational thought patterns and behavior for long enough to leave a voicemail. Add in trolls and pranksters and we’re practically doomed to wade through a sea of dross in any public communication mechanism.

Interesting story!

There is one major difference between then and now though; back in the '90s, those nutty voicemails never made it into the public domain, and thus those "ideas" were unable to spread.

In 2022, political rallies are playing Qanon theme music, because they know exactly how well those ideas have spread.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/18/us/politics/trump-rally-q...

Robert Anton Wilson's "Illuminatus" books were borne from his time as an editor for Penthouse's letters-to-the-editor section, where he had the same experience.

In writing the story, took all of the crazy conspiracy letters and entertained the idea of "what if every single one were true?"

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