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Comment by deanCommie | Hacker News Reader

> virtue signaling

I despise this term. You don't know people's motivations. These may be genuinely important issues that they are using their audience and reach to magnify and promote. And if you've had the luck/misfortune of becoming famous, should you not use the attention and reach you wield to focus on issues that you think are important in society?

> Validation checkmarks will now cost $20/month.

A) They're not for validation. They're to combat fraud and misinformation through impersonation.

B) This is far from a done deal. All we know is Elon in his infinite wisdom is considering this, thinking - like you - that this is a pure ego play for people. He still may pull the trigger and destroy the very concept. Or the people at Twitter that he doesn't fire and don't quit change his mind.

It's a terrible idea, and I - an Elon skeptic - believe he's smart enough to figure that out eventually.

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> > virtue signaling

> I despise this term. You don't know people's motivations. These may be genuinely important issues that they are using their audience and reach to magnify and promote.

Accusations of virtue signalling get misused a lot, especially by people opposed to those important issues. But it's absolutely a real thing. I think the most notable form of virtue signalling is public prayer on TV by politicians. They want to display their piety in public for all to see. They're not raising any kind of awareness by doing so, they're just fishing for approval from the right crowd. (And of course this is exactly the kind of behaviour that Jesus condemned.)

It’s impossible to know people’s intentions, because we even can’t really explain 100% the things we do ourselves. So, it’s a bad starter for an argument… It’s better to judge people for their actions, rather, because even if someone does something involuntarily they should be responsible for it.

Of course it's better to judge people for their actions, but that doesn't mean you can't know people's intentions. Sometimes they're really incredibly clear about their intentions. Intentions and actions aren't separate things.

Absolutely no one who uses "virtue signalling" on the internet is talking about prayer - from TV preachers or politicians.

It's a word typically used associated with a whole set of vocabulary including "woke" and "social justice warrior/SJW".

It's meant to deride people talking about diversity initiatives, systemic inequalities, feminism, LGBTQ issues, etc.

The explicit implication of the term is that nobody actually genuinely cares about these issues, they just speak about them to virtue signal to their in-group (progressive/left/urban/etc) that they have permissible opinions and that they are not problematic.

Like I said, it gets misused a lot. Often by the very people using the word to silence honest ways to raise awareness.

>These may be genuinely important issues that they are using their audience and reach to magnify and promote.

This is still Twitter you're talking about. Blue checkmarks are overwhelmingly associated with 'woke' narcissists stoking the flames of the culture war

From the creator of Godwin's Law: https://twitter.com/sfmnemonic/status/1504687870006620163

Isn't "appeal to authority" a common fallacy?

No surprise Godwin disparages the use of 'woke', when he is most likely a 'woke-ist' himself.

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