Ask HN: Why do people on Reddit hurt each other? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why do people on Reddit hurt each other?

4 pointskeepamovin18 comments

Because social media spaces are contestable territory. https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.03697

That's an interesting idea, I'll have to read that. So is it like a "contested chokepoint", like a doorway? Like a cab queue? Like any space with limited resources and competition among participants for those resources?

I'm saving that article. But if you have any more to say I'm interested.

To an extent, because attention is a limited (albeit renewable) resource. But I had in mind something closer to terrain, in the strategic/military sense. For example I think Musk bought Twitter not to make money off it but to have strategic control of a piece of near-realtime digital broadcast infrastructure. See also this paper on the structural nature of digital echo chambers: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.14501

Thank you for the other link. I also agree with you about Musk. His intention to purchase twitter was clearly strategic, even as adept as he is at framing everything through the "feelin' cute. might buy twitter. idk" kind of memelord lens or whatever, which might just be strategy, too! Haha

With Musk's deep connections in the US aerospace and defense industry, I often consider him an appealing, useful and distracting front-man for a larger enterprise run by the IC. I don't discount Musk's talents and intelligence. He's a captain of industry, I know some disagree but, that's what I think, he's legit in business.

However, I think he's part of something bigger, and Twitter would be a crown jewel for that, whatever that is--and whatever that is can kind of sketched in contours by the fact that Twitter would be a crown jewel for it. Sorry if this is not clear! I'm kind of in a rush haha :)

It's an echo chamber. People do not hurt each other in an echo chamber, they suppress dissenting voices. Reddit is the best tool ever developed to kill discussions and make people selfish dbags.

When someone asks about something people do not even upvote, thank or write a comment thanking the participating people. The single most important counter is missing: the reciprocal counter. If you post a question and do not participate, just read the answers, then you should pay the price and this must be shown. Also, bots are not filtered at all...

It's a cesspool. The sooner this mudpit gets drained, the better.

Yeah there's suppression, but there's also hurting each other. They can be different things. They can also overlap. But at a fundamental human level, it's about the hurt that people cause to each other. That emotional pain is less abstract than saying "suppressing dissenting voices" which is more of like an information warfare lens, where people are combatants and there's no moral right or wrong.

I think it's important to emphasize the morality and emotional pain to frame this discussion usefully.

But yeah, on everything else, agree! Haha :)

i think OP is talking about actual instances of when redditors hurt other people, like when they harassed the person they all decided was the boston marathon bomber but it was just some random guy.

Ah, yeah, but not just that. Just the average stuff, like say someone's comment being mean to me. Like, someone choosing: "How can I hurt this person? Let me say something to hurt them." There's so much.

Because the sad truth is that a lot of people really aren't very nice, and the anonymity of platforms like Reddit makes them feel empowered to act in ways that they would never consider doing in real life.

It would be a privacy nightmare, but if everyone was forced to sign up under there real name with robust identity verification you'd get a much less toxic community.

Yeah. I guess I'm thinking, what's the psychology of this. Like, in real life, walking around the city where I grew up, I find people lovely. I mean, people are not bad, mostly. But it's like all of this stuff online is crazy.

And sure, there's good there. There's a lot of good. But the amount of bad is surprising to me. I guess part of it, is the Internet is global. And not everyone is like where you grew up, so everyone's different. There are some places that are rougher than others, maybe that's what people there are like, but I kind of don't think so.

I still don't get it, after all these years. And I don't get why we don't have a solution. Like, not even on an individual level. Like individuals don't even know how to deal with this kind of stuff. Like there's not some like (what's the word...?) "custom of a way of responding" that everyone just uses when they encounter that, to deal with the amplified amount of online that are hurtful.

Which is so strange. Like we still haven't figured out how to nullify or reduce that hurt that gets caused between people online. Like nobody seems to have figured it out. Does anyone have any good ways of dealing with it?

You lose a lot of nuance in written text and its harder to infer tone (especially for non-native speakers), so written discussions can often come across more hostile than spoken ones (even in a workplace between people who know each other).

But I think a lot of it comes down to the freedom from consequences on the Internet. If people acted in real life like they do on Twitter or Facebook then there would be repercussions - whether social or legal or even physical. A lot of people hold views that are not considered socially acceptable - so they keep those views to themselves in public. But anonymity gives them the confidence to share and act upon.

In terms of how you can fix it, I don't think you really can without making huge sacrifices. It's hard to change people's views, and stripping anonymity from the Internet would have significant downsides (and be technically very difficult).

Although as is often the case, XKCD proposes an interesting suggestion:

https://xkcd.com/481/

That's very true. There's so many other escalatory/de-escalatory signals you can send across many channels in Face 2 Face or even voice.

I think it's also changing what's "socially acceptable" which in general I think is a good thing, by virtue of the internet making society more permeable to ideas.

I don't want to change people's views...only the way they express them. I think a lot of it is maybe growing pains...hopefully we will all grow out of bad behavior online over time.

Hahaha. I like that XKCD! Funny I use something similar when I'm suffering from a comment and don't know how to reply. It probably sounds ridiculous, but I will record myself reading the other person's comment, and then I will play that back, as if it were a conversation, and record myself speaking my response. Then transcribe that into the text of the internet! Haha

I just find there's such a huge difference between how I express myself naturally in voice and in text, and in situations where I'll get stuck in text, I'm free in voice. It just simplifies things a lot! :)

I don't think using your real name helps that much. Most people on Facebook use their real name and still many have no issues with insulting other people or even supporting violence against individuals or groups of people.

I think it's more distance and lack of consequences that causes toxic behaviour. People will be nicer to their friends, relatives and coworkers online than strangers, since hurting or alienating said people will have actual effects on their day to day life.

Meanwhile the average person on Reddit/Twitter/YouTube/whatever is someone you're very unlikely to ever deal with beyond a few passing comments online. So sadly, many people don't care much about being particularly civil towards them, since they're basically a non entity in the asshole's life. Regardless of whether that person has a real name or photo attached to their account.

Yeah, I'm interested in the psychology of that. Perhaps it's a little like "Stanford Prison Experiment". But I also suspect there's something fundamentally different. I don't know. I'm no expert on this.

It's not a panacea by any means - but the level of abuse that get on Facebook doesn't seem quite the same as on sites like Reddit or Twitter. Part of that may be down to the structure of the site, but you don't seem to get the huge mobs of people hurling death threats and abuse at someone on Facebook.

We'd knock each other down a peg in real life too if it weren't for fear of reprisal. All species evolved a put-down-others gene to attract mates.

Look, I agree with you on that, but I don't think it's all species. I think ape species are more like that...tho thinking about it, there is a lot of that male-male competition, and female-female competition out there.

Is it just that, tho? I mean, haven't we evolved more than our biology? Hahah, are we so hopelessly slaved to the baser instincts?

I think it contributes, but I mean, how much? I don't know--you could be on to something!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com