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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

Agreed, there's so many headlines on X and Reddit that are obviously highly spun and could take 5 seconds of reading into it to see through the BS. But they kill as long as people agree with the phrasing and people go right to the comments to cheer it on instead of reading the article.

It's tough on the internet being a skeptic or generally thoughtful about the world. It's not even worth debunking stuff anymore. Much healthier to not engage entirely.

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I can no longer engage in (controversial) debates on other social medias, as responses often indicate a lack of understanding with the other person - they glance over the arguments, make a prejudice-based opinion, and then they respond to their straw man, often loaded with bad emotions. It's quite frustrating and as you say, sadly only solution is to disengage, but in so doing the polarisation only increases as dissenting opinions are removing themselves.

> but in so doing the polarization only increases as dissenting opinions are removing themselves.

It used to make sense when the internet was smaller but now? Not so much. Especially when the people running platforms/media, content moderators and influencers explicitly don't care about the truth. You're not just fighting some dummy posting a comment.

The only positive thing I've seen in the last decade to address this was Community Notes on X.

Agree, with current dynamics, attempting to "correct" discourse as a user is like attempting to correct law in a society as a citizen. The impact moderation/police have is far too large for the users/citizens to really matter much.

I feel ya. It is true on hn too sadly. There are certain subjects that trigger people to fall into a rhetoric mode of clapbacks and us vs them mindset. Eg the individual disappears replaced by some form of ideology. It isnt a left right up down thing but a phenomenon of hyper polarization. It is especially scary to see it in person. Mobs are a dangerous thing.

It's super hard to have good faith discussions on the internet for years now. When someone has different opinions, those opinions are associated with certain groups (liberals, conservatives, etc). And it's very easy to demonize other groups, because social media shows curated content with extremely idiotic and malicious people in that group. Even if we have only slightly biased opinions, the algorithm knows watching content which follow your existing opinions are super engaging. We can't resist the satisfaction and dopamine hit of finding out our opinion is right. Attacking obviously wrong people from a moral high ground without risking being attacked by other people is also really attractive. After consuming such content for a long time, we come to see other groups as nothing but evil, and it makes it very difficult to have good faith conversations.

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