Rebecca Solnit: How to Comment on Social Media | Hacker News Reader

Rebecca Solnit: How to Comment on Social Media

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50 pointsleotravis1034 comments

> Also you have the right to check their papers, as in to demand they prove to you their commitments and beliefs, and their unwillingness to do so on demand is a sign of culpability too.

It's funny but points to a fundamental reason I got off social media. In healthy relationships, you can (healthily) infer a lot in a conversation because you have invested in getting to know the other individual. I can say things like, "You know I wouldn't agree with that," and I don't need to offer up dozens of pieces of evidence to prove it.

Tell people they're not only wrong, they're also evil.

I miss the internet when it was a limited access resource.

The internet of the 90's and 00's had drama and trolls, but they were few and far between.

Most people had patience (dialup), technical competency, interest (no low effort), and engaged in things they earnestly cared about.

There was no engagement / rage algorithm to fuel fires.

The flame wars were funny even back then, they were exaggerated conflicts, I never thought people took them seriously. Nowadays, instagram, twitters, fb? The rage on these platforms is unbeliveable! Forum-based flamewars usually had multi-paragraph detailed rants on why such and such was incorrect and why "my" way was "so much better". The modern version is one sentence sound-bites _at most_!

The internet was better when it was smaller, but maybe that's the way it is with anything.

> The internet was better when it was smaller, but maybe that's the way it is with anything.

I'm glad more people have access to the Internet. I just wish I had access to that special place again. It's gone.

HN is a shadow of that lost world.

> HN is a shadow of that lost world.

Should we...have a flame war just for old times' sake? Kidding aside, I grew up on BBSes, so small online places is my comfort zone too.

If its any consolation, IMHO the internet has started its next seismic shift: final destruction of the world wide web's rotting corpse. There's no telling where we all end up next. Small communities could make a comeback if we really want them. Exciting times!

Dial up? That's what ruined the internet. http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/S/September-that-never-ended...

In theory it should be possible to say this as a shorthand to "we do not share the same values", but of course in practice these discussions get emotional really fast.

This recent one comes to mind, note how the author takes a lot of precautions around it, but still...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39285804

N. Remember that you can (almost) always accuse anyone of sealioning, and if they try to respond in any way, this will prove that they are sealioning. This is infinitely more worthwhile than simply not responding any more (which is of course all you want them to do), and you'll feel great [0].

N+1. Be sure to let people know that you are blocking them, before blocking them. It's not enough of a deterrent to know that one can be blocked, so it is very important that you ensure people know that they are being blocked. Depending on the social media in question, it can be important to get these steps in the correct order.

[0] for example, this entire snarky comment can be accused of sealioning, and even that level of meta-sealioning won't provide the author with any escape. It's like a rhetorical klein bottle: you will never know what is and what isn't covered by the definition, and any attempt to discuss that is covered by the definition.

For N it works just as well when you accuse anybody of "hostility" or "aggression." The words themselves mean nothing but you pre-emptively frame anything they respond with as something negative.

What's a sealioning?

Everyone I disagree with is a Russian bot.

Definitely sounds like something a Russian bot would point out

"Internet commenter! What is good in life?!"

"To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to watch their posts get heavily downvoted."

I couldn't tell whether you'd prefer i up or downvote you (up: you bring truth; down: i agree with you)

Upvote if it made you laugh?

She talks about men replying to women's posts, but forgot to talk about women replying to men.

At this point in time, I try, very hard, to never comment.

It's tough to get that message out there, but, never comment.

Never.

No, not even then.

But you just... commented! There! That's a comment!

social media posting dynamics:

* micro-dopamine hits from likes are the primary motivator

* attention spans are wildly overtaxed

* goal: maximize likes and minimize effort

* maximize likes: focus on people on your team, ignore everyone else

* minimize effort: use terse sloganized shibboleths, similar to sports and marketing. "let's go cowboys"

* fin

One of my favorite parts of the Death Stranding (before my overtaxed attention span led to me abandoning it for another game) was that "Likes" were the actual currency in the world

They're not currency, they're your score. Ultimately meaningless since it's not like you could buy anything with them.

I suspect that at most it influences your weight on the social graph.

* Bullet points make it easier to read for some reason

I didn't completely read OP's post and commenting.

And this will be my first reply of eleventy, calling out the OP as wrong and callous and makes Hitler look like a saint in comparison.

Basically she's worse than King Jam I'll (that Korean guy)

King Jam Ill would be a sweet name for a rasta rapper though

King James II ?

Kim Jong Il?

From the perspective of the typical commenter it could be either lol

> People who don’t like tech corporations are good targets for this too; they should build their movements through communicating by cuneiform tablet on clay harvested from local mudbanks;

Funny, considering how much she complained about tech (in particular, shuttles) after selling her house to a Googler in the mission.

Congrats for demonstrating her point (which was that commenters often claim that anyone who ever benefitted from tech in any way must not criticize tech).

My grief was, of course, more meta - I’m merely criticizing her criticizing people who criticized her - so don’t criticize me about it.

My real beef was about how things went down. She sold her apartment, checked into the brutal reality of bay area housing in 2012, and then wrote a bunch about how terrible it all was because prices went up and rentals were hyper competitive.

To be fair, it was all terrible, but it was hard to have sympathy for a former homeowner selling in a booming market.

This truth clearly invalidates anything she’s ever said about Google! /s

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