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Comment by mjb | Hacker News Reader

This is really great, actionable, sensible, advice for folks who write on the internet. It agrees with my experiences, too.

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.

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> 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.

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.

> fear of repercussions is mostly gone.

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.

People are incredibly masked online, that is true. They run their posts before the “upvotable” heuristic before submitting. But in a small familial community you can’t just be technically correct while also being an ass in how you make your point. Most of the smarmy self-righteous posts you find on Reddit would be met with an open-palm smack, or worse, if delivered in the same way to a tribal leader 10,000 years ago. All of the human connection is gone in this form of communication. It is a system filled with ideologically mind broken serfs who all jockey for a small bit of clout in order to break free of their perceived chains. The things said here are as true as the statement “that is wet” when looking at a beautiful waterfall.

For obscure people, especially anonymous randos, there are practically no consequences. When I hear people complain about "repercussions" from online speech, they usually just mean criticism. And that's all the article author seems to mean too. "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."

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.

This is not true, 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.

Do you have any examples?

I'm not in the habit of keeping recorded data of on these, but internet witch hunts are not a new thing. I'll let you search for it.

> I'll let you search for it.

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.

I can, but why bother when you're itching for a fight over the obvious. Enjoy your day.

> I can, but why bother

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?

Writing style and unique patterns (like time of posting, argument frequency, ideology affiliation, and so on) are some of the things that could reveal someone’s identity and result in actions taken against him.

> that could

The question isn't whether it's possible, the question is whether it actually happens.

It happened to me and a friend, who too is in the IT and we go to great length to be anonymous. If something is possible to such a degree, it ought to happen. If it happened to us, it surely happens to somebody else too, especially considering that most people are not too concerned about hiding their trails.

> It happened to me and a friend, who too is in the IT

What happened exactly?

> 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.

I agree with you that we’re in the infancy of context free communication (text only posts). But disagree that it wasn’t built (or couldn’t be changed, my extended interpretation)

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

I think the biggest factor is actually moderation. Smaller communities can be effectively moderated. This may fall under "Norms", but the difference is that (non-government) moderators will enforce the social conventions regardless of whether you feel compelled to follow them. But perhaps familiarity is still a factor in smaller online communities, because the participants often get to know each other.

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’m a mod on /r/ruby and it’s got 80,000 subscribers. I like to think it’s not “beyond moderation”. We have fairly aggressive rules (around tone and impact) and very high standards and I would say most of the time the community meets or exceeds those standards

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’m a mod on /r/ruby and it’s got 80,000 subscribers.

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.

I don’t disagree with any differences you pointed out. I still think a lot of the internet could have much higher standards than it does today.

did you use this handle on slashnet?

I'm not sure I'd use censor in the context of Julia's post. It read more like the next thing you quoted. Something's well-trod and people have strong opinions but absolutely no one is going to change their mind or really make a novel point or learn anything new.

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.

Imagine, for example, there's a really interesting scientific paper someone would love to talk about but it's in the field of Climate Science. Everyone knows the comments a blog post on it is going to get. And they're (almost) all going to be the same no matter what the paper is actually about. Every time.

Should someone feel they have to self-censor just to avoid this?

If it seriously challenged the orthodoxy of, say, HN, nothing's keeping me from submitting it but, no, I probably wouldn't comment even if it made what I think are some interesting points, in part because I'm not an expert on the area.

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.

People are going to feel all kinds of things. Asking whether or not they should feel them is a dead end in the context of public forums, because nobody controls anybody else's feelings, or how each individual reacts to a feeling.

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.

It's not a dead end, because public forums are not natural phenomena. They are things we design, build, maintain, and police. Personally, I want experts to be able to talk about their work without feeling abused, harassed, or threatened. I want it not just for myself, but so that we can have a society based on truth, not just on who can shout the loudest or who can be the biggest jerk.

> I want experts to be able to talk about their work without feeling abused, harassed, or threatened

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.

Your inability (or, more likely, refusal) to distinguish between valid criticism of ideas and abuse, harassment and threats is a fine example of a core problem of online dialog.

abuse, harassment and threats targeted at people are illegal. I agree that they're unacceptable.

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?

> 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.

If you're interested in the ways in which especially women receive strident pushback in a way that trains them to self-censor, I'd suggest reading Manne's "Down Girl: the logic of misogyny". She's an analytic philosophy professor, so it's a bit academic in spots. But I think it does a good job cataloging the many ways in which women are put "in their place", a place that very much includes a lot of self-censorship.

What you're talking about is a real thing (I've seen its effect on women in my life) but I'd prefer to take Julia's post at face value, which shows her as someone with a quiet enthusiasm for tech who doesn't enjoy pointless Internet arguments. Honestly, we could probably do with more people like that.

>> 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.

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.

I think it's fair that some people have stronger feelings about and more appetite for discussing a topic than I do.

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.

Sure, but on the other hand people can learn to read the room. I am interested in lots of things, but that doesn't stop me from trying to fit the context and the interests of the other participants. E.g., I have a lot to say about cryptocurrency, but there was a time when it seemed like almost any HN discussion ended up with a tenuous cryptocurrency tangent. It was annoying and exhausting, and I'm glad we've mostly gotten past it.

I wonder if we've reached that point for LLMs/AI/ML yet. Sometimes it definitely seems like the discussion on HN is very influenced by the VC fad of the day.

You know, that's interesting. I tend to avoid Tailwind discussion because I feel like I don't see enough opinions from people working full time on huge projects using it. Most of the time, it seems like the strongest opinions in favor come from folks who have only used it in toy apps, side projects, or completely greenfield small-to-medium applications.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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).

As someone who has been on the internet about 3-4 times as long as "point systems" on comments/posts/etc i don't see any correlation to point systems. People were jerks in AOL chatrooms, IRC, myspace, and forums long before the likes of reddit and /. gamified being annoying.

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.

> The exact flavors of that on HN, Slashdot, Twitter, Tumblr, etc are different, but the core issue is the same everywhere.

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.

Ah, the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboa...

Steering persuasive and technical writing away from topics like Emacs vs. Vim isn't censorship, it's just good writing.

I agree with the sentiment that greater freedom of expression is a noble goal and society loses something with these soft restrictions. Having a catalog of unmentionables is not a new thing though, and definitely is not "unacceptable in other social settings". It's a basic social skill from long before the internet existed. It's been rude to bring up politics and devicive issues in conversation for literal centuries.

When it's opt-in, it's called editing, not censoring. Nothing is forcing them to censor themselves, contrary to what you have asserted.

Self-censorship is, in fact, a thing: <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Self-censorship&o...>

I get the pedantic line you are trying to draw here, but self-censorship is different than editing.

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.

If you choose not to discuss something because you know it's an unpopular opinion in some circle and may lead to nasty and from your perspective unconstructive criticism, it seems reasonable to call that self-censorship even if it doesn't fit the dictionary definition of censoring (which primarily applies to the government or other authority body).

> I have a weird catalog in my head of things not to mention

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?").

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