Some tactics for writing in public
jvns.ca
jvns.ca
On the other hand, it's sad that the culture we have built on the internet forces talented people like Julia to censor themselves and narrow the scope of their writing.
> So I have a weird catalog in my head of things not to mention if I don’t want to start the same discussion about that thing for the 50th time.
Somehow we've built a culture where its socially acceptable, and even rewarded, to behave online in ways that would never be acceptable in other social settings. The exact flavors of that on HN, Slashdot, Twitter, Tumblr, etc are different, but the core issue is the same everywhere.
I don't think we've "built" the culture per se. I think it's more like humans evolved over millions of years for small, in-person groups, and we're not "built" (by nature) to handle the endless sea of online strangers. On the internet, the personal familiarity is gone, the proximity is gone, the facial expressions and tone are gone, and indeed the fear of repercussions is mostly gone.
The idea of writing and sharing thoughts is an ancient one. Engaging with that content in an easily publishable and shareable way, is.
The quoted sentence above is 100% right. If you replace "On the internet" with "In a book," and I think the sentence would highlight the differences with the internet a bit clearer.
The internet is unique from a book because others can engage with it in a real way (beyond a book club). A book club keeps that proximity, familiarity, and expressions together for better communication. An online forum loses all of these.
There are wildly different experiences with communities online. Communities are also a thing that can be built intentionally.
We can also learn from prior works. Lessig (1999) identifies four elements that regulate behavior online: Laws, norms, markets, and technology
- *Code/architecture* – the physical or technical constraints on activities (e.g. locks on doors or firewalls on the Internet)
- *Market* – economic forces
- *Law* – explicit mandates that can be enforced by the government
- *Norms* – social conventions that one often feels compelled to follow
Unfortunately, larger communities are effectively beyond moderation IMO. I don't think that the one or two moderators are enough on Hacker News, and of course the social media platforms are even worse. In the "real world", the non-online world, a significant portion of the population will flout the laws, regardless of government enforcement, and a significant portion will flout the social conventions. That will also occur in the online world.
To put it another way, all you need is one bad reply to ruin your day. :-)
I think there are limits but I also don’t feel that most platforms have hit them or really even tried. Most platforms that would benefit from a stronger sense of community typically do the bare minimum to not run afoul of laws (in terms of paid moderation). Even the ones with strong volunteer mods (like Reddit) are known for underinvesting in mod tools, that’s the source of the recent protests.
> one bad reply to ruin your day
On /r/ruby we have two kinds of problems that bubble up intentional and unintentional. The majority of slights are unintentional and when called out are very apologetic and seek to make things right. For the intentional abusers, there’s the ban.
I think of it less like building a wall and more like flattening the curve. If you can stop the cascade of frustration (where one pissed off user leads to another…) then it pays off dividends, even if you can’t catch 100% of the cases.
Anyway. Thanks for the opportunity for a chat. I love thinking about this stuff.
I think that's smaller than Hacker News, which has only 1 or 2 moderators, whereas it appears that r/ruby has 8 moderators?
As far as scale is concerned, it looks like r/ruby had 19 comments within the past 24 hours? https://www.reddit.com/r/ruby/comments/ Whereas HN had 19 comments within the past 2 minutes. https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments And a site like Twitter has something like 350,000 tweets per minute.
The most important difference, in my opinion, is that /r/ruby is focused on a single technical topic. In a sense, it's self-selecting and self-moderating, unlike HN or social media sites which are general-interest and include topics such as politics and other controversial social issues that are prone to generate nasty disagreements.
Is it? Because AFAICT people censorship themselves online all the time for the fear of repercussion. It's like being on tape 27/7 where anyone that doesn't like you can watch your old tapes and loook for problems.
Of course famous people can get into some trouble for what they said in the past, but they usually bounce back and then find a new crowd of followers with a different ideological cast than their previous crowd of followers.
No, you made the existence claim, so the burden of proof is on you:
> regular "anonymous randos" get doxed regularly and the crazies call up an demand they be 'fired', they get threats to their family, friends and livelyhood.
You can't even provide one example? I'll let you search for it. I'm not going to search for unicorns or pots of gold at the end of rainbows.
The question isn't whether it's possible, the question is whether it actually happens.
What happened exactly?
Because that's how discussions are supposed to work. You make a claim, and you support your claim with evidence and reasons. You don't refuse to give evidence and run away just because your interlocutor disagrees with you. After all, what would be the point in providing evidence to someone who already agrees with you?
I do think there are things that many people self-sensor, e.g. opinions that fall outside or on the edges of the orthodoxy of some bubble and is just going to trigger emotional arguments/stereotyping/downvotes/etc.
Should someone feel they have to self-censor just to avoid this?
I'm a little surprised to hear that people don't do this in person as well as online. There are numerous topics I avoid bringing up because I know nothing productive will result from the conversation. It is rarely about politics or religion, just topics whose novelty offer a low probability of productive insights and will probably require a sufficient time investment.
Choose your battles/topics of conversation, you only have so many hours in your life.
There are some topics guaranteed to attract 500+ comments that are mostly nothing but rants about big companies, Musk, the US, etc. Better to just avoid.
Sincere, productive conversations are mostly going to take place in more private forums like group chat or face to face. Public discussion threads are better suited for identifying friends and enemies, playing and joking around, and signaling status.
Most experts are idiots (specifically “intellectual yet idiot“). Protecting bad ideas (expert or not) against criticism is an immense danger to society.
If your ideas and findings can’t stand on their own, I can’t help but think they must not be very strong.
Oh and if you think that what you post on the internet is you, and it’s you personally that’s being attacked when people respond to your words…
Please ask yourself if that’s true.
Ideas have no such legal protection, for good reason. If they are stupid or poorly presented, they can be dunked on for cool points. This is one kind of activity people enjoy doing and spectating on public forums, and it's a net positive to society.
> I want experts to be able to talk about their work without feeling abused, harassed, or threatened
> Should someone feel they have to self-censor just to avoid this?
You keep mentioning feelings. This is what I'm responding to. I get the impression that you want the law to step in and silence other people when you feel bad. In public, such an arrangement is stupid. Conversely, it can be beneficial in private spaces where participants consent to community guidelines, formal or informal, at the outset.
If we agree that policing public speech based solely on what people feel is a bad policy, then this whole conversation has been sound and fury, signifying nothing.
And if we disagree, all I can leave you with is this: what if whatever harmless, perfectly legal thing you say makes somebody else feel bad? Should you be silenced?
> Somehow we've built a culture where its socially acceptable, and even rewarded, to behave online in ways that would never be acceptable in other social settings. The exact flavors of that on HN, Slashdot, Twitter, Tumblr, etc are different, but the core issue is the same everywhere.
People tend to enjoy bikeshedding when presented the opportunity to, and it's a good idea to avoid bringing up the bikesheds you don't want to debate.
To pick one of her examples, I've done a couple of toy projects with Tailwind. I think it's pretty neat, and I don't mind saying so! But I accept that people working full time on huge Tailwind projects at work probably care way more deeply about the topic than I do, are much more impacted by aspects of Tailwind that might be trivial to me in my toy use of it, and are going to invest an amount of time and passion discussing it that would frankly bore me to death. If I were running into that repeatedly, I would stop bringing Tailwind into discussions that I didn't want to be about Tailwind, and I wouldn't feel that bad about it.
There's nothing wrong with using it in that way, of course, or of thinking it's the best tool for the job in those scenarios. But for some reason I rarely see that caveat mentioned, and the idea of refactoring a legacy application to use it makes me queasy haha.
Easiest way to check is to just add tailwind with PostCSS and the `@tailwind` directives and see what happens to your app. Unfortunately, if there's substantial CSS it will most likely be a disaster because the Tailwind reset will clobber the assumptions made by the previous CSS. It can be really hard to refactor custom styles when you can't see how they were supposed to look without running a separate older commit.
You can try disabling the CSS reset tailwind adds but then you'll have to chase bugs in the assumptions Tailwind makes so it's a bit of a catch 22. If it's a really large project with dozens of developers in its history, chances are there is already a custom CSS utility framework in place that uses the obvious formats like "p-2"/"px-2" for padding (with a different scale, yay!) and other naming collisions. You can however use the `@apply` directive to inline the Tailwind styles in the legacy classes to make it easier.
It's an unfortunate consequence of the point-based reward systems that platforms use to incentivize participation. There are certain topics that large groups of people will always upvote or always downvote. It's a rational behavior to repeat the same comments whenever such a topic comes up if those comments can reliably mine rewards by doing so, even if the rewards in this case are adjustments to one's own dopamine balance.
In offline social settings, the ability to monetize comments is somewhat more difficult but not totally absent (popularity, elections, etc).
edit: change "jerks" and "annoying" to "repeating ad-nauseam the prevalent comments to garner points". I misread the latter part of your comment, went back and saw where i misread, and still like the general premise of my reply.
I think there are three main factors. Some cases are more one than the other.
1. Anonymity. Many places people know who you really are. Your family, friends, and coworkers arent judging you.
2. Using a mob for cover. As an analogy, its a lot safer to throw a Molotov cocktail from a crowd then by yourself.
3. No empathy for avatars. You aren’t talking to a real person, who you would empathize a lot more with.
After writing these, they are largely different shades of anonymity.
Editing == adjusting so the point is clearer or more easily understood.
Censorship/Self-censorship == avoiding a topic that the author wants to talk about due to fear or external forces.
An optimistic view is that people maintain blacklists of topics to avoid, as opposed to whitelists of noncontroversial topics that they are allowed to talk about ("Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?").
This excellent tactic for avoiding pointless debate and inviting helpful replies is sadly beyond many people in the software field. Software folks are used to the past where you could master things completely. With the continued growth of knowledge and the growth of the worlds complexity, it is quite impossible even for one super intelligent person that was present at the dawn of creation to keep up; failing to consider disagreement as a potentially useful pointer to the situation where you don't have as much knowledge as you think is a risk. (edited to add "is a risk" so that was a sentence.)
I have seen multiple projects led by extremely smart people fail because they didn't listen to key information from less smart people that were nonetheless better informed about the particular technologies involved.
Which I find so odd and absurd in a profession that's full of esoteric knowledge. Being experienced and smart obviously is a huge asset, but if you just aren't familiar with library X but new guy with no experience has been doing nothing but library X, the latter guy is the one to take advice from.
Few people have patience for a tool that will fail to even attempt to run a several-million-line program because there happens to be a trivial typo in one line in one file. It should be no surprise that kind of people for whom behavior like that is reasonable are the kind of people to think intelligence is all-or-nothing, and that are too happy to point out true but irrevelant inaccuracies in a piece of writing.
Actually smart people know what they know and don't know, constantly test their understanding, and are HAPPY when proven wrong, since that means they learned something new.
Everyone thinks that the way to convince people to trust them or acknowledge them is to be know-it-all, but the truth is just being authentic and help will come.
* Assume the person responding to you hasn't read the article, and has only briefly scanned your comment while mentally composing their reply.
* Anything abstract is going to get misunderstood; keep it concrete but vague.
* There is no consistent relationship between quality of a comment and how people respond to it.
* You can write a reply and then erase it without sending, and that's the best thing to do in most cases.
* When in doubt, collapse the thread and move on.
> You can write a reply and then erase it without sending, and that's the best thing to do in most cases.*
I do this maybe as much as 1/4 comments.
I would also add:
- Don't get into a back and fourth with a single other user, it's generally boring and goes nowhere.
- Don't rise to it if someone is trying to start an argument.
- Be generous, assume you are misunderstanding an apparent negative comment.
- Be complimentary, it makes peoples day.
Reminds me of a time I’d written a huge email - can’t remember now what had got me riled up. I showed it to a colleague to proof read and he just said “there’s only want way to improve this” and promptly hit the delete button…
If you need a list like this, I think a more productive thing you can do is work on is building up resilience to online discourse, usually by reducing ego.
It’ll enable you to take more things at face value, which in turn will expose you to a wider variety of viewpoints.
HN isn’t special, I’m not special, nobody owes me the time it would take to craft a quality response, and expecting or demanding something from strangers usually ends up in disappointment.
Sometimes I do this, but more commonly I will write my comment and then just not check that discussion ever again. I only check the discussion if it's a situation where I am willing to engage if there is a response. My experience has been that replies to any comment that's even mildly controversial are such that the other party will not bother trying to understand what I'm saying. In many cases I might be posting a piece of data (with a link to the source) and inevitably someone's going be upset because they don't like the data.
* Always assume that no one will reply to a comment. Threads of comments are at most loosely based on a theme.
And yet it's very common to get no replies to any given comment. And that fact in itself is a common reason for people not to reply. Because it's likely nobody will reply to them!
The default tone people tend to assume on the Internet is more brash, and that's the source of a lot of unnecessary problems. On the other hand, I don't mind a little snark or old-school Torvalds-style feistiness either (forced politeness would be boring) but that's going to attract a rowdier crowd. Not everyone needs to emulate that style of discourse.
Having dealt with what the author experienced, I'd like to add some advice:
- All online conversations are optional. You don't have to finish an exchange you don't enjoy. Leave idiots on read.
- You can't win everyone over. Some people are deliberately contrarian. Many argue in bad faith. Don't try to turn a provocation into a discussion.
- You don't owe your audience anything. They don't pay you.
I didn't like "pre-empt" because it results in tedious prose. She's obviously a skillful writer so it's smooth for her, but I cannot do it right.
"Don't argue" is good. I fail this one frequently. The trick that works for me is to remind myself that I'm training someone for free.
I can't say I'm very good at "analyse negative comments". Some sort of CBT technique is probably necessary here, but I feel the following in order:
- "omg was I wrong?" followed by a quick check
- if yes, good outcome. I can just correct. if no, causes anger
I don't know why but being right and misunderstood is far more frustrating than being wrong. The latter triggers the "well, damn" dopamine response of discovery. But I'll keep pecking at the damned subject if I was right but the other guy refuses to understand it. This is my prime motivation for blocking on Twitter - and ideally people who misunderstand me frequently would block me too so I won't engage.
The others are sensible and it's nice that they're listed, but I don't think they are novel (which is obviously fine - presumably everyone has a different novel set here).
> So I blocked a few people and wrote a quick post:
Of course I understand no responsibility to 'prove' anything and can guess the comments weren't written well - but I think there may be a genuine misunderstanding and miscommunication here, or maybe it's even a BrE/AmE thing, because 'to grope' around for something (often blindly in the dark or similar) isn't at all sexual, typically not even an animate thing you'd be groping for (e.g. a light switch) - and I'm fairly certain that that usage isn't by analogy to sexual assault.
Or am I just repeating what's 'besides the point'? I don't think it is, words can have multiple meanings, be used in foul ways, but still be usable fairly and legitimately. 'I coloured in a picture' isn't 'gross'? My 'garden hoe' is fine?
I think that would be especially true for women, who, being the common targets of sexual groping, are going to be more aware of it. So even if it weren't my first association, I would still think it a reasonable association for women to make.
As she says, original intent doesn't matter a ton. If I write something that's accidentally a problem for part of my audience, I'll change it. Because what I care about is getting my point across. When I see instead strident defense of language that's bothersome to a historically marginalized group, I have to wonder about the resistance to mild change. A change I'll note the dig maintainers made back in 2017, so it's not like they care.
If original intent doesn’t matter, your audience shouldn’t differentiate between writing which is intentionally offensive and accidentally so. That is, they may as well assume you are malicious. That’s not the world I want to live in.
It’s also not the world we do live in. English is the most widely spoken language on the planet, and its speakers come from all sorts of cultural and educational backgrounds. They don’t have the time or the privilege of knowing about every term which can potentially be offensive.
My point isn’t that we shouldn’t change “groper” to something more inclusive. My point is that in practical terms intent does matter.
Word meanings drift and we update as we go. That doesn't mean the previous author was evil; it means they were writing in a different context and the context is defunct. Especially for a living document like the documentation of a still-used tool, modifying word choice to avoid unintended negative connotation is wise.
That's easy to wonder when you're the one asking for the change. It's awfully convenient that "intent doesn't matter", as that puts the burden of action on the speaker/writer. If intent did matter, then the listener/reader would need to consider what the other person is trying to say and adjust their interpretation of the words accordingly. But since it doesn't, all that matters is that someone took offense at a particular word, and so it is the writer who needs to correct themselves.
I have on a number of occasions misread a statement as its opposite (skimming over a 'not' or forgetting important context, perhaps). That might offend me to the point of making an argument, and I think it would be crazy for me to expect an apology rather than a "I didn't say that, you argumentative prick".
That's the extreme case, where the error is unquestionably my own, but there's a vast gray area where I might default to a less than charitable interpretation of someone's words and they haven't done anything wrong. For example, if someone were to describe my word choice as gross[1], I might take that as a personal insult. Putting the responsibility on the writer to account for every possible interpretation from every possible audience member is a great way to abolish good writing altogether.
[1] Using this example not to go after the author here in particular, but to avoid using a more divisive example that's not already part of the conversation
So yes, when somebody pops up to basically say, "how dare anybody consider the feelings of women", I do have to wonder at their motivation. Do they also pen strident defenses of writers any time something is misunderstood? Or is there a more particular pattern to their vigorous reactions?
If Vanessa makes a complaint and I say "okay, but why should we care that you don't like it?", am I saying that we shouldn't care women don't like it, or am I saying we shouldn't care that Vanessa is the only one who doesn't like it?
>the best way I can demonstrate my good intent is by correcting anything that is out of line with my intent.
I mean, it's your writing. You can do whatever you want. I'm saying a) it's unreasonable to demand that others change what you don't like just because you don't like it, and b) it's not unreasonable for others to ask you to defend your request for changes.
In the Star Wars universe, the kind of music that Max Rebo plays is a lot like our Earth jazz. But they don't refer to it as jazz.
They call it jizz.
Words have multiple meanings. To ignore this and require that everyone just uses those meanings that you personally are aware of is an unreasonable request.
Regardless of whether your intentions are pure, if a certain term instills certain associations in your audience, you can either change it to remove the association or live with the consequences of not doing so. But it's not the audience's fault that "jizz" has an existing meaning that's cemented in their minds, and your newfangled space jazz probably won't supplant that.
We can suppose that if the slang for sperm didn't exist that the writer would definitely have chosen "jezz", "juzz", or "jozz" instead, but personally I don't have any evidence to make that claim.
“Jizz” in English is etymologically closely related to “jazz” in English, which some sources also attest to having a (historical) slang use identical to that of “jizz”, so, while you are absolutely correct about the point of choosing the word, that point is quite compatible with the person doing so of being aware of the slang use of “jizz”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz_(word)
jism -> jasm -> jass -> jazz and jism -> jizz
Though none of us were there and nothing is conclusive, so I guess who knows
The first (and the only non-slang one) definition of that is "a person or thing that gropes".
Context matters, as in "groping $person" versus "groping $object". You cannot sexually touch domain information, so that couldn't possibly be the meaning.
--- Edit: as pointed out below I hadn't noticed when I wrote this that the offending mastodon replies were apparently deleted so the 3 replies I mention here aren't actually relevant ---
I did click through to the Mastodon link from the OP and had a look at the "dudes in the replies demanding that i prove [...]" - the replies were largely supportive, apart from 2 "dudes" saying they hadn't considered the sexual-assault meaning before now & weren't sure if that was intended BUT still strongly agreeing that it should be removed, and 1 other dude (possibly non-native English speaker?) surprised that such a sexual-assault-related interpretation existed and asking for further context (not "demanding proof"). That's all followed by a lot of extremely confrontational replies from the OP assuming bad faith in every case.
Julia is a fantastic tech writer, & I'm sure I'll continue to read her blog regularly, but... this isn't a great look. Asking for the manpage to be changed is perfectly reasonable but the ad hominem really wasn't needed here.
Shrug, it's her choice and a valid move. But by employing the approach of "block-o-matic for all dissenters" strategy, the author has lost some credibility with me.
I also found it odd that the author cherry-picked a dictionary site which only contained the definition she found offensive. If you put "define: grope" into Google, the non-offensive definition is the first one listed:
Grope (verb) 1. to feel about or search blindly or uncertainly with the hands.
Which was why I latched onto this aspect in the first place - sexual groping has always been the minor definition in American English for at least the past 30 years. It's at least somewhat disingenuous to completely ignore this fact and focus only on the maximally offensive possibility.
fwiw, the author doesn't appear to be American and it's entirely possible that your minor definition is their major one
>A few dudes in the replies (who I think by now have all deleted their posts) asked me to prove that the original author intended it to be offensive…
When I read the Mastodon thread, this jumped out at me as well. A couple of the guys who raised the point clarified that they fully agreed that the removal of “groping” was a good thing, but by that point, the author wouldn’t be able to see the clarification.
I’m really torn on this. I fully support people’s choices to set boundaries and block abusive behavior. At the same time, “I disagree with you so I’m going to insta-block you and not even give you a chance to clarify” seems at the heart of the brokenness of online discourse.
But having seen what some of the women in my life go through re: abusive behavior online, I also understand the hair trigger.
I don’t know what the right balance is, and it’s likely very personal and contextual, but I’ve personally started to only engage with conversations if I’m willing to deal with all of the likely categories of response (barring obvious abuse). Disagree=block seems to increase polarization and seems counterproductive in the long run. It also seems like a good way to reinforce my own blind spots, even if it turns out that I’m “right” some of the time.
> having seen what some of the women in my life go through re: abusive behavior online, I also understand the hair trigger
Even from your own words, it sounds like the heart is not in the reaction, but what people are reacting to.
I am moderately mouthy on social media. I get a much, much smaller level of pushback than similar women do. When I do, the level of respect is higher, and I almost never get my credentials questioned. But I regularly see women with much stronger credentials get those inspected and/or dismissed. Just yesterday I saw a woman with a relevant PhD getting talked down to by some random guy. And then when she made a separate post about her frustration with reply guys and how she was thinking about leaving Mastodon, some different random dude told her to "get a live".
Historically, we spent thousands of years keeping women in "their place". That was partly legal, but mostly social. We've solved the legal stuff in the US, but only recently. (E.g., states only started to outlaw marital rape in the 1970s, and it wasn't fully outlawed until 1992.) It should be no surprise to anybody that the social mechanisms did not magically evaporate the moment we passed some laws. And I think one of those social mechanisms is the disproportionate negativity women get from men when they are not in "their place". When they have the audacity to act like they know things and have valid opinions just like men do.
If you want to read more on this, Manne's "Down Girl: the logic of misogyny" is a very careful examination of the mechanisms and their effects. If you're looking for "the heart", I think that's a good place to continue your search.
> Even from your own words, it sounds like the heart is not in the reaction, but what people are reacting to.
My point was that more broadly speaking, online discourse is fundamentally broken in most popular social spaces. Most people have abandoned discourse and refuse to have hard conversations. I’d argue that in most cases, this is counterproductive behavior. I’m also not saying this is the only thing broken - there are a myriad of systemic factors, and degrees and kinds of brokenness. Bad behavior towards women is also at the toxic core in my view. I don’t see this as either/or.
Dialogue is all we have available to change minds, and this broad erosion of communication is deeply worrisome. I’ve been beating this drum for some time.
When I first read the thread, I didn’t realize the author was a woman. The point of my comment was that:
1. I, too, noticed the pattern the parent comment mentioned
2. While I really dislike what online discourse has become, I have empathy for the author and can understand why especially women get sick of the bullshit and just block people
And that was my point about how personal and contextual decisions about these interactions are. That in this situation, I get it, but that it highlights the brokenness of the web. For what it’s worth, I’m increasingly convinced that the best move is to stop playing the social media game entirely.
I appreciate the book recommendation. As a person who views misogyny as a major problem and unacceptable behavior, and has spent a decent amount of time exploring the subject, do you have an elevator pitch for the insights in the book? I add to my (long) reading list cautiously, and I guess my question is: if I’m already fully convinced that this is a problem and take it seriously, will I still find value in reading?
I agree that the lack of hard conversations is a problem, although I'm not sure how much people have given it up versus just never did it at all with strangers, whom computers now thrust them in virtual proximity to. But again, I don't think the problem is with the people blocking. I think it's with the propagandists and the purposeful jerks. I think blocking is a fine response to encountering somebody who is not only uninterested in reason, but will be a pain in the ass as they try to silence any opposition to their views. Life's too short to waste time on the "change my mind" crowd. [1]
> do you have an elevator pitch for the insights in the book?
I think the book's value is mainly to people of an analytical bent. Her goal is partly what philosophers call ameliorative, meaning she's trying to sort through the many things that get called "misogyny" and come up with a productive definition for it. As part of that, she gives both a useful theoretical structure (especially valuable to me is her framing of misogyny as the enforcement arm of sexism, as well as her look at who is "owed" what and how people behave when those expectations are violated) and a lot of nuanced examinations of examples. I had no problem spotting open misogyny, but there were a lot of more subtle, stochastic examples that I only saw as a pattern after reading her book.
[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/steven-crowders-change-my-min...
I held this view for a long time, but anecdotally, people who disagree with me in person are generally willing to have a good faith conversation about it. I rarely encounter the "change my mind" (with no intention of doing so) type of individual outside of popular social media platforms, and don't think the attitude is as prevalent as Twitter/Facebook/Reddit/etc would lead us to believe. Over time I've come to believe that there are really two versions of this crowd:
- People who generally mean well but are aligned with groups that propagate questionable or bad ideas. These people will change their mind, or at least expand their understanding of other views, but are often discarded as hopeless due to their association with that crowd.
- People who do not mean well, do not engage in good faith, and intentionally foment discord. I believe this is a small percentage who have been enabled by the megaphone that is the Internet, and their bad behavior locks the first group into a dangerous situation.
I generally won't engage with this latter group, but I do think there's value/importance in leaving behind well-reasoned arguments for people from group 1 who find discussion threads later. I generally don't believe I'll change the mind of the person writing the comment in that moment, but think the comment is still important for the reasonable-but-unsure people who encounter it later, for the future training of LLMs, etc. In the marketplace of ideas, I think continuing to spread good ones is important.
I may be too idealistic/optimistic, but I tend to think "life's too short" will turn into "the world is no longer livable" if taken to the extreme. I'm not preaching that others should do the same, and I don't really know what the right answer is or if taking this stance is helping. I still think quitting social media is probably the best solution, but I don't think it's a solution many people are willing to consider.
Thanks for sharing the additional info about the book. This does sound interesting/useful.
Or here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Semite_and_Jew#Bad_faith
And I'll note that he was writing well before on-line discussion. The problems run deeper.
Yes, to the extent that you can use a bad-faith actor to show something to a broader crowd, they can be useful. I do plenty of that here. But a) on social media, that's rarely the case, in that few see arguments down in the reply chains, b) any actual points they have will get discussed by more persuadable interlocutors, and c) one can find and address those points without platforming or elevating the jerks in question.
So if you want to engage with the jerks as part of your own personal quest, go for it. I sometimes do. But I say again that blocking bad-faith actors is not, as you claim, the heart of why discourse is broken online, and that people who have a block-on-site strategy are making good and reasonable choices, especially when they are the regular target of historical inequities that you and I don't face.
I don't question that. My point was that the Internet magnifies it. It's far easier to encounter that type of individual now than at any other point in history.
> But I say again that blocking bad-faith actors is not, as you claim, the heart of why discourse is broken online
To be clear, this was not my claim, and I should have made that more clear. My point was that the instinct to block and the default assumption of bad faith is at the heart of the problems (and as I acknowledged, it's just one of many). My point was that people block other people without even considering whether the question was in good/bad faith, and assume bad faith based on the existence of any disagreement. You can find this happening from all ideological viewpoints across social media. When it's antisemitism, it's obviously bad behavior.
It's why places like HN still have pockets of decent discussion. Assuming good faith is encoded into the rules, which often reveals that disagreements are caused by an incomplete understanding of the other, rather than actual bad behavior. I couldn't have raised the points I raised in this thread on a place like Twitter without getting lambasted by people claiming I hate women, or support groping, or somesuch.
I'm all for blocking bad-faith actors and I do my flagging duty here when needed.
If you’re scared, don’t read anything. Reading is scary and dangerous.
- What I meant to say.
- The actual words I used. (And the cultural context around those words, that I may or may not be aware of).
- The impact of the words I use.
Like others have said, if you care about the people who are hearing your words, and they say "hey, the words you used had a negative impact" than it makes a lot of sense and is really not hard to say "oh, I'm sorry, I'll change my words because I don't want to make you feel that way" and then move on.
Or you can spend all day debating the intention of your words and how you didn't mean it that way and completely ignore the actual impact, and leave people feeling like you don't care about their feelings.
In particular, in your personal relationships I highly encourage you focus on your impact rather than what you meant to say, especially when apologizing.
> In particular, in your personal relationships I highly encourage you focus on your impact rather than what you meant to say, especially when apologizing.
I’d be more careful with this though. Ideally, this needs to look more like mutual respect/trust, and both parties are ideally:
1. Considering the impact of what they’re saying
2. Giving the other person the benefit of the doubt when something doesn’t sound right, and talking about it when things seem misaligned
Caring about impact is important. There’s also a failure mode here that results in complete communication breakdown as one party tries not to upset the other.
Communication is intrinsically a shared experience, and both parties bear some responsibility for how things are interpreted. As long as both parties engage in good faith and communicate about confusion, everyone learns/grows and it’s a self solving problem.
But I have never heard "groper" used for anything other than some engaging in sexual assault. The benign sense of "grope around" isn't a sufficient part of an identity to ever use the word "groper", while he sexual assault sense is, so "groper" implies the sexual assault meaning.
It's entirely likely that the original author of this phrasing was thinking about it in the benign sense, but didn't realize that the phrasing would make many readers interpret it in the sexual assault sense.
And 'dig' is a tool that searches (or 'digs') for certain information - one (and only one) of the meanings fits!
I'm not really interested in an argument about it, and I'm certainly not holding anything against or taking Evans to task over it, as I said initially it just seems like a misunderstanding or that the commenters were rude about it to me.
I thought TFA was otherwise excellent and I've enjoyed (& learnt from) her writing on many occasions.
The "they're just words" argument/defense is certainly never an acceptable response. It's one thing to go on a witch hunt and extrude connotation where there is none, but that's not what this is. Instead, use this as an opportunity to understand others better and learn to be more empathetic.
It's definitely possible to hurt someone by indulging their hypersensitivity, but it's also possible to hurt someone by completely ignoring them when they tell you "what you said hurt me."
Like engineering, communication in hard situations isn't about following rules legalistically - it's about understanding the nuances of the situation and your tools well and making the best judgments you can admit the different tradeoffs you're balancing in a given moment.
PS: I just noticed that all comments in this thread that are even slightly critical are downvoted below zero. My own comment too. It's normal to see critical comments ignored (not upvoted) here, but downvoting anything remotely critical below zero is unusual even by HN standards. I guess a post about self-censorship attracts audience that desires this strange new self-conscious world where everyone has to nod to everyone else.
> Is it just me or is this post screaming with self-consciousness and political correctness?
Good writers always consider the way their choice of words will affect their audience. Are you suggesting that this is a bad thing?
It's not the choice of words. It's the choice of topics.
> The author is tactically avoiding discussions that she considers unproductive
The author is not avoiding certain topics because they are unproductive but rather because she fears backlash on social media.
Quick on the trigger is exactly the point of the dig example. The author is reminding you that you have control over what you see and you should use it. Most people have a set of topics they can’t constructively engage in debate over. That’s fine. I’d rather they conserve their energy and keep posting on topics where they can.
—
Upvote means I agree. Downvote means I disagree. You might have other opinions about what they should represent but the nature of voting systems is that they trend towards this. Like how I wish people would rate things 3/5 by default rather than 5/5. Sadly only IMDB ended up like this.
Meanwhile, I remove -n from all tcpdump commands, because we use hostnames all the time at work, and I can remember them, and I can't remember a bunch of numbers.
1. Talk about facts
2. Tell stories
3. Ask technical questions
4. Fix mistakes
5. Ask for examples, not opinions
6. Start with a little context
7. Avoid flamebait triggers
8. Preempt common suggestions
9. Ignore people who challenge your viewpoint (my interpretation)
10. Don't pursue arguments
11. Pay attention to critical feedback
The result is a hivemind no different than Reddit. People here are just as afraid to post their opinions on language/framework/policy as they are on Reddit. None of these rules matter because the assailant (downvoter) can do what they do best without consequence. At least in a meatspace debate/talk/whatever the disagreeing party must reveal themselves to make a case.
HN has no zeitgeist, and "mid-to-far-left social policy" is not even close to my experience.
A lot of commenters seem to think that HN has some kind of consensus, but it doesn't, as dang himself (the HN moderator) can testify. A number of different factions coexist (uneasily) here.
My experience is that upvotes and downvotes are... pretty random, sometimes inexplicable. It really depends on who happens to see your comment at the moment in time.
“notice-dislike bias”: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
“hostile media effect”: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22hostile%20media%20effect%22...
I guess there's no one zeitgeist but I feel like the combination of groups collectively forms one.
If someone mentions Mozilla for example, I already know what the thread will be like for example
Like I've said before, a comment can be downvoted by every single user on HN and still be accurate and true. The truth is the only thing that matters. Unfortunately, we're each responsible for our own reactions to the feelings we have, and that often means, despite a commenter's best effort, they're still going to offend some and please others. Since we can't please everyone, the best way to do the most good with your words is to use them to spread the truth. The truth is always going to be hard to deal with for some, but they'll be better off with that awareness than with (perhaps blissful) ignorance because the choice of whether to stay ignorant is put into their own hands.
Side note: This also reduces the total amount of suffering in the world by reducing the number of people who end up having to pay for the consequences of their actions without any awareness of the existence of the consequences (such as breaking a law you were unaware of and being put in jail for something you didn't know was illegal)
I'm sure you have. And I've experienced the opposite. There's a natural tendency to pay more attention to criticism of one's own views and to come to believe that only one's own views are persecuted, based on one's anecdotal experience, but that view isn't empirically accurate in the aggregate. Again, dang, who has observed countless these kind of complaints on HN, has written about the phenomenon many times. He could probably cite a bunch of examples.
My point about dang is that (1) dang has seen more HN comments that literally anyone else in the world and thus has more knowledge about this topic than anyone else in the world; (2) dang specifically sees the posts and comments that have been flagged, because of his job as moderator; (3) dang has seen (and can probably cite) the comments from all ideological standpoints complaining that that the opposite viewpoint is dominant on HN and that their views have been censored.
It's an appeal to vast experience and knowledge.
and, while I don't know your viewpoints, i promise you I think mine are True and Important as well
The problem with the dig acronym isn't that it was intended to be bad, but that viewed with today's (American) social context, the phrase would likely be taken to be distasteful. Therefore, I think the issue with the commenters isn't that they "challenge" the viewpoint. At a minimum these commenters have failed to grasp the concept and more likely they are simply not responding in good faith.
I do think there's a separate discussion to be had about the role of political correctness/word policing in modern discourse, but in the author's version of events, the blocked commenters aren't trying to make that argument.
That's because many people in tech used to think that tech bro culture wasn't bad. Tech also used to be much very excluding. Back then, if you were not part of the tech bro culture, you already knew it was distasteful, and that you were being excluded.
Some conflicts are simply not worth pursuing. Even Bertrand Russell refused to debate Oswald Mosley.
In the Internet, we have built an unlimited stream of information. You could quit your job and do nothing but post and reply full-time, and you'd never get near being able to respond to every commenter if everyone who read what you wrote chose to comment.
Filtering signal from noise is a vital skill in the online era. And sure, if your filter is over-tight you'll end up in an echo chamber... But as there's no penalty for being wrong on the Internet, a healthy filter is downsampling a lot of information these days.
fwiw, all the people who dont read the articles, 9 isnt in there.
its actually "set some boundaries"
However it makes me sad that she blocked people for defending the author's meaning of "dig". Ignoring seems like a better path. I've often heard grope used in a non-sexual way, as in "groping in the dark" for something. This kind of over-reaction to language is a sore spot for me; like the Stanford language guidelines, telling people not to use the word "field" because it implies slavery. In the same way, she assumes someone defending the word is in favor of sexual assault. This is wrong and harmful, both to others and herself. To others because now they can't follow her posts; to herself because she's cut herself off from people who take the risk to argue something unpopular in good faith. This is how echo chambers form.
Not having those people in the discussion isn't an 'echo chamber', any more than asking a belligerent drunk gatecrasher to leave your birthday party creates an echo chamber.
Note that it doesn't matter whether or not these people are factually correct or not about the etymology of 'dig' for this to be the right conclusion for Julia to draw.
You speak on their behalf?
On the other hand, we all have limited time and patience for those who are likely arguing in bad faith. I won't fault someone for taking the quick route to defend their time and sanity.
Even if the others may be arguing in good faith, this isn't a court of law here. We don't have to assume EVERYONE is innocent, especially if they're mixed in a crowd of hecklers. Each person has the option of using the block functionality as an automatic way to ignore sets of people, even if it catches the innocent.
Nor would I. But there has to be a better solution than blocking, which is ostracism. It concerns me how easily we ostracize, how it cheapens people. This is especially true for someone internet famous like Julia Evans - she has so many followers, what does it matter to her? But I guarantee it mattered to the ones she blocked. It probably really hurt them, even if they wouldn't admit it.
She's human, just like everyone else. It matters precisely because of "internet fame": you become an incessant target. Anonymous randos love to take down people who are more famous than them. From the article: "I realize this section makes me sound like a Perfectly Logical Person who does not get upset by negative public criticism, I promise this is not at all the case and I have 100000 feelings about everything that happens on the internet and get upset all the time."
> But I guarantee it mattered to the ones she blocked. It probably really hurt them, even if they wouldn't admit it.
I guarantee it doesn't. In my long experience of blocking people on social media, I can't recall the blocked person ever being sad or repentant. They're mostly self-righteous or vindictive.
How would you know?
Technically, a block mostly just prevents an account from replying to you again — which is the primary goal when someone writes a nasty or annoying reply — but there are various ways of seeing another account's posts, such as private windows. And if it's not a mutual block, it may be even easier.
Mastodon has a time-gated mute feature, which is quite useful. If someone is being annoying, but not so annoying that you want to squelch them indefinitely, you can just hit them with mute for awhile so they can cool off.
... but Julia is under no obligation to serve as teacher of online etiquette to folks who don't know when to self-squelch, so if she wants to grab the block button instead, she's plenty entitled to do so. Her feed her rules; if people want the privilege of getting her signal, they can behave themselves.
The tacit assumption here is that being offended is a good thing. That its a point of pride. I disagree, very strongly. Offense weakens relationships, and dehumanizes the one giving offense. It's not the offense is always illegitimate, it's that it's a reaction of last resort, and encouraging others to take offense is bias in the wrong direction. We should encourage others (and ourselves) to take the least offense possible. That way when we do take offense it's quite meaningful.
No. Offense is a (complex) emotional signal that you may not be able to ally with someone because their worldview differs from yours in a way that your goals are likely to come into conflict. It's no more bad to be offended than it's bad to be angry, or sad, or happy; it's an emotional signal, one that binds to a complex sociological model.
> Doesn't it make sense to try as hard as possible to not get offended, to wait as long as possible, to give every benefit of the doubt, before being offended?
Maybe. Maybe not. It depends on the degree of the offense, the likelihood of adjustment of either party into a configuration where the offense is mitigated (very low for random internet interactions), and (here's the key) the potential upside of further interaction with the other party. For an Internet rando commenting on the feed of someone they don't know, the possible upside to that someone is low.
As much as we like to, each of us, think of ourselves as insightful luminaries and Renaissance men and women of the new era, spreading truth and novel insight and peering with the greatest minds of our generation on the egalitarian footing of social media... folks like Julia get to see dozens of folks parroting the same talking points as the ones she banned daily. If she's not planning to argue that point (and she has plenty of experience with the point to make that decision), it's fine to just toss a "The odds of any interaction we will have in the future producing value for either of us are near zero" ban on the account and go on with her day. Maybe some day she'll discover she banned someone who turns out to be fun to know in another social setting and she'll unban them. But the odds are near zero.
> We should encourage others (and ourselves) to take the least offense possible.
Why? What's the upside in a world of more than eight billion people in a context as casual as Mastodon posts?
I present to you a counter-model: maybe people should learn to do a lot more reading and a lot less posting. "Reading the room" is a more complicated skill when the room is virtual and varies from feed to feed in something as diverse as Mastodon... But it never stopped being a useful skill.
Indeed. I take issue though with assuming a person arguing that "grope" has meanings other than sexual assault wish her harm. That's a stretch, to say the least. It's certainly uncharitable and, in my view, chilling to open conversation. Moreover I think it weakens the idea of "wishing someone harm" by broadening it so widely that it becomes almost meaningless.
There is a game I invented called "Take it Personal" in which one player says anodyne things to the other and the other player has to take it personally and get offended, or they lose the point. It's a terrible game that I don't recommend. It's a game that everyone on the internet seems to enjoy playing, and in fact take pride in playing it and assert that anyone not playing it is a bad person.
Remarkable.