You don't have to engage with people on the Internet

If it was in a 1:1 online conversation, I agree, it would be mostly pointless. But a forum is more like a public debate (provided the audience is an audience you vaguely care about).

Now I don't argue to try to change the person's mind, but rather to plant the seed of critical thinking that may help an onlooker find the truth.

I think applying this has generally made me more successful outside of the Internet, too, by being more conscious about how I approach conflict. Unfortunately, in the less pseudonymous world where preconceptions and reputation have more weight, the advice also holds, but the calculus is a big mess. Arguments can have only downside risk, but you don't have the option to disengage.

I'd say by analogy you could also say: "You don't have to pursue people romantically." It's really, really true: you don't. No one will blame you for keeping to yourself. In many settings it may even be better (example: a club, where the club organizers find the drama caused by romantic entanglements annoying).

But there's a problem behind this problem, which is: while it's not necessary, if I act is if I don't 'need' to do it all (again: strictly true), that also causes problems.

Basically I have an impulse towards sex, and towards being social, which exists in a hard to measure but much-more-than-zero state. The social impulse in particular needs attention daily.

So - put that way - I kind of do have to engage. Because I work remotely I spend too long away from other people in my opinion to not engage socially whatsoever, during work hours.

Like I said, I struggle with this. But my middle-of-the-road position is that, while any individual act of engagement (like a comment) is expendable, the general behavior of seeking community on the Internet is something which I can accurately treat like a need (especially in the sense that, if I haven't done it in hours, it's time to do it).

I was pretty excited a couple of years back when some bigger news sites explicitly turned off their comments saying they only generated distracting noise and added no value.

Then, after that I can rigorously filter what I see - on Reddit I have multireddits that I care about, and set those to Home using Apollo to browse, and I keep only generally positive sub-reddits in there.

I think there's huge value in going out of you way to block negative noise in bulk. Same reason I deleted Facebook - don't invite in the noise, and don't engage with trolls.

It's the same old strategy - the only way to win is not to play.

I won’t go into all of them, but the biggest by far is when the real world and online world collide, and you encounter stakeholders not willing to work on a good-faith basis.

I live in a small town of around 6,000 people in NJ. Very rural, you have to drive 30+ minutes to get most anywhere. Yet our bucolic town is a hot bed of intrigue because a small but very vocal group of people have come to dominate online conversations. The local Facebook pages have become toxic. A regular stream of lies, false accusations, made up “threats” to the community, false narratives on school referendums, etc are propagated online in an effort to change the actual fiber of our towns.

Attempts to engage in good faith leads to the predictable results - name calling, doxxing, character assassination, fake posters. It escalates into stalking, obscene graffiti spray painted on driveways, etc. Facebook is far and away the biggest problem here.

The end result is many of the saner people have exited all the local Facebook groups. For me it’s sad that I am now less connected with what’s going on. But it is worth it for getting rid of the drama and stress.

Neighbors IRL can disagree (even radically) and still be neighbors. Neighbors on the Internet rapidly devolves into the unhinged and depraved and frankly immoral people (from a golden rule perspective) dominating every conversation.

Moderation would seem to be the answer, but hasn’t worked.

This is key! At a lower level, if you're modding a Discord server or whatever, you can ignore people, and if they become a real problem you can just ban them. You don't need to engage with their drama, you don't owe them anything.

We are horrible at it because the rules of "real" life engagement, honed over millenia of civilization building don't apply, but unless we figure out the new rules we miss out on something important.

The reason that after several decades of 'online' we dont converge on something agreeable has much to do with the ever changing technical platforms, outside of the control of users, which seldom have this aspect as one of their driving concern.

From their perspective the cynical "any engagement is good engagement" reigns supreme

There’s no damage if you don’t take it or don’t look at it (in case of a toxic auditory).

My rule of thumb is: I’m not lazy to write a constructive-ish comment and there’s a good chance it could change, extend or represent some opinions and there’s still something left unsaid either itt or in general.

E.g. if I’m lazy, or it’s unlikely someone could benefit from reading it, or everything was already said in that thread or is assumed to be well-known, then I don’t engage.

It's your choice and it's matter of taste. It's never a hard rule.

I feel like this is close to another point that has been hard to learn for me too: often, when talking about something, people care more about the talking than the something, or at least they care more about the talking and less about the something than me. This is not a value judgement, I don't think one way is "better" than the other, it's just one of those things that can cause a lot of trouble when you don't know about it.

It also helps not engaging with people. What usually attracts me when I engage with people that I don't know very well is that they're talking about something that I know, and thus I feel in a way involved in the conversation, I can contribute something. But when I see it through the lens of a group of people that know each others and just happen to talk about something that I know, it's easier to let it go.

As a more general comment, I really appreciate this blog. There's some variety in the subjects, the writing is engaging, sometimes there are cool technical tricks, sometimes interesting insights.

Here's a better rule: don't argue about, comment on, criticize or even defend your employer in public at all. No good can come of it. You're almost never going to convince someone otherwise and the worst case is you find yourself quoted in the New York Times as "employee of X" (yes, I've seen this happen). Your employer isn't your family. You're not invested in how they're perceived. Your relationship is transactional if they're not paying you to represent them, don't. They will pick you rname on a spreadsheet and fire you tomorrow to slightly improve their bottom line.

As for arguing with randoms you generally want to quickly identify which bucket someone falls into:

1. People who reasonably disagree; or

2. The "my feelings matter more than your facts" crowd. You cannot reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.

IME you can quickly separate the two and as soon as someone is clearly in the second camp, just block them (on platforms you can) or stop responding (where you can't). No good can come of it.

Furhter engagement can actually turn someone into a "hater". They will follow you around, comment on everything you say and do and may go as far as mass reporting you. Don't let them get that invested.

I have tried this often, while it is really useful, sometimes it isn't enough. What I found more useful a good chunk of the time (on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit..) is to start blocking people. There are some people that are so far off the mark that what they say not only gets in the way, it actively erodes the quality of what's out there. I've found it far more beneficial than just shrugging and moving on.

I also like the comments on HN at least as much as the articles, and I like to contribute.

I remember being at a party where two people got into an argument about abortion. It was exactly what you would imagine, a completely pointless exchange of rehashed ideas that the 10 people watching the conversation have heard a million times.

Then someone chimed in - not to argue but just to drop a fact they possessed that nobody else in the room knew. It didn't change the arguers' minds but it took the other ten people aback like "how come we heard this debate a 1000 times but this very important fact never gets mentioned?"

So that random quip influenced 10 people on a very polarizing issue. That's powerful.

Is it though? Agree with overall sentiment expressed on not needing to engage but this part seems off.The mega corps ruined everything sentiment strikes me as quite pervasive throughout society.

May be there should be at least some effort to address "realistic looking" misinfo, so that the lack thereof could not be interpreted as avoiding to engage out of fear.

Combine it with hydrogen first and pour the resultant liquid on the fire (or silicon, and use the resultant solid).

Being able to say “I just don’t know” or “I don’t have the necessary facts” or “this isn't my area of expertise” or, better, to simply say nothing at all is something many “influencers” would do well to learn.

Just because you have 50million followers on some platform doesn’t mean you have the expertise to talk about vaccines or whatever the hot topic of the day happens to be.

Of course saying you don’t know requires a level of humility that many people simple don’t seem to have but hey, there you go.

Taken me years to learn to turn it off and walk away. Life is much better now.

Also, it often works in real life too

It seems that engaging in social media, especially Twitter, is very unhealthy for people.

Google => cancel products, spy, don't update OS, no human support

Facebook => spy, Cambridge Analytica, ruined Oculus,

Apple => expensive, closed ecosystem, high rake

I think it would be cool, once we have speed to LLM inference high enough, for each person to receive a "your comment was generated x times in 100 seeds by LLMs that were prompted by this headline".

This is the anti-Turing ratio: how botlike are you?

Discussion, online or off, is ultimately serving some goal. Online mass discussion is often some mix of tactical and strategic.

A late realisation of mine, having been engaged in online discussion since Usenet in the 1980s, is that there are two major divisions of online discussion: dialectical, which is aimed at understanding some greater truth, and rhetorical, which is typically engaged in partisan or ideological promotion. This is a tradition dating to at least the time of the Greeks, see Plato and his tirades against the Sophists, as well as Aristotle's "Sophistical Refutations", or as I prefer to describe it: "Bullshit Arguments Which Must Die".

(There are of course numerous other modes of communication and their study is also of interest: narrative, phatic, persuasive, performative (where the speech act itself executes some function, as in swearing an oath or declaring "I do" in a marriage ceremony), descriptive, entertaining, distraction (as with much stage patter in legerdemain, or financial marketing), etc.)

It's helpful to realise what type of discussion you're entering into, as well as what audiences exist (there are often multiple). The audience is often not merely your interlocutor.

For a domain which has come to dominate media, I've found that people in the tech world are often highly dismissive of the field of communications study (and its antecedents in rhetoric and philosophy). "Communications" whilst a popular field of study when I was at uni was not seen as an especially robust or challenging one, a perception of my own I've somewhat come to regret.

Harold Lasswell proposed a five-element model of communications in the 1940s: 1) who 2) says what 3) in what channel 4) to whom 5) with what effect.

I'd add a sixth element: with what intent, though in practice intent is often subordinate to effect for numerous reasons, e.g., ascribing a single intent to a collective entity, unintended and unforeseen consequences, etc.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lasswell%27s_model_of_communic...>

There's also the matter of understanding mass vs. personal communications, which can be particularly challenging to keep in mind on platforms in which personal exchanges between two parties are also (or can rapidly become) mass or at least public exchanges. (Failure to recognise this seems a frequently recurring source of friction on the Fediverse in particular, with various people asserting the right to speak publicly without others joining in on the discussion.) Simple human psychology makes coping with responses from multiple people, even where that number is relatively low in comparison to a the larger community from which it emerges is challenging. See for example many cases of performers and creators who don't pay attention to general critics and criticism, which is to say, even amongst people whose milieu is the field of mass communications, this can be hard. No wonder it's a challenge to mere mortals....

In a world of hot takes, memetic warfare, and frequently-encountered low-effort, low-comprehension responses, one tactic I've seen (and occasionally used) with some effect is to have and refine over time countermeasures which can be deployed with little effort or cognitive drain, but which effectively communicate a rebutting or countering message. A good example close at hand would be HN's own moderation responses within threads, where many admonitions are frequently recycled, e.g., "Please don't post in the flamewar style".

<https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>

While I'll often write dedicated responses to comments or posts (as here), I've also over time developed a few of my own specific rebuttals to commonly-encountered fallacies and myths, though I try not to post those so frequently that they become an annoyance. I'll also refine thoughts on a specific topic over time (universal content syndication comes to mind) which would be an example of why engaging in specific arguments can prove useful in those instances.

I'm happy to do my part commit denial-of-attention attacks on tired takes as well though, and pay attention to what's living rent-free in my consciousness.

It's solid advice.