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Comment by dlivingston | Hacker News Reader

I find it so bitterly ironic that the people whose opinions we read the most of - the terminally online Redditors and tweeters - are exactly the kind of people we should not be listening to.

Like you alluded to, the terminally online people who post the most tend to be those with neuroticism, isolation, severe anxiety, etc. There's a famous Reddit post about this I can't seem to find - "Everyone Online Is Insane" or something.

I really think this is why the past decade+ of American culture, politics, and society has been so off-the-wall insane. The Overton Window - another overused Redditism - of society has shifted towards the opinions of the neurotic and anxious. Those are the people whose words fill the comment sections and posts that we all read, which then infuse our minds to expect these thoughts as the baseline/median opinion of society.

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"Every piece of social advice on Reddit is designed to ensure that you die alone"

https://old.reddit.com/r/redscarepod/comments/1kkey4d/every_...

> Doesn't matter who you ask on this site. The incel, the rad fem, the regular liberal, the happily married person, the casanova; they will all tell you some variety to stay in your own lane and shut up. They will all use different language, but the meanings will always be the same: they live a life of constant loneliness and have found kinship with others who agree that to ever do something to counter that loneliness is beyond abhorrent behaviour.

Yes, this is a theory I've been thinking about too.

Explains the rise of various political leaders very well.

I find it funny that even the people who comment on the "Everyone Online Is Insane" post sound obsessive or outside the norm.

I find it messes with my mental health when I read too many comments. In the real world I normally find people to be nice and kind. But then I go online and the world is totally different - I have to keep in perspective that its just a small outsized fraction.

> I find it funny that even the people who comment on the "Everyone Online Is Insane" post sound obsessive or outside the norm.

Well, yeah. I agree with the statement that "everyone online is insane", while also recognizing that I myself am online a lot, and think and behave differently from societal norms.

I think that's part of what is needed. There's absolutely nothing wrong with thinking and behaving differently from other people. What's abnormal is when people become absorbed in the internet, to the point that they fail to recognize that people in real life, people outside their Internet echo chambers, think and behave very differently.

> I really think this is why the past decade+ of American culture, politics, and society has been so off-the-wall insane. The Overton Window - another overused Redditism - of society has shifted towards the opinions of the neurotic and anxious. Those are the people whose words fill the comment sections and posts that we all read, which then infuse our minds to expect these thoughts as the baseline/median opinion of society.

Why should anyone entertain this theory? You’re a comment box.

Edit: Thirty years ago us online freaks would just interact with other online freaks. Because normal people had real hobbies.

But now that we are all doomscrollers: why would normal people be interested in the comment boxes of online freaks? They’ve got YouTube shorts and whatever to watch.

That things like 4Chan has had an outsized effect is a different matter. It’s all mediated through twenty layers. It’s not normal people reading 4Chan and other freaks directly.

What's great about neurotic online personalities is that they're all contained within the little box on your lap or in your pocket. You turn it off and they all go away...

> You turn it off and they all go away...

They disappear to you, but not to all of the other people who you share a society with who are still staring at their little boxes. And, for better or worse, you still have to live in a world with and share elections with those people too.

I agree, completely, that it's good to get offline. But the pervasive societal effects of extremely online psychology can't be solved simply by opting oneself out of the game.

One great failure of the Internet was taking the lonely crazies and putting them in the position of building their own community online. Unable to moderate their thoughts by interacting with normal people, now feeding off one another's neuroticism, and spreading it.

To push back on your last point, I truly believe that yes, they can.

Very naive for you to say that.

Post you mentioned (Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People): https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...

It's true but then again, for most things, the correct answer is somewhere there, amongst the BS, so if you have a good BS detector and want some ideas, you could do worse. You can't outsource the part where you see for yourself if stuff works, and form your own opinions.

You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and misanthropy than reddit.

https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1o87cy4/oc...

Redditors want you to cut contact with all your loved ones so you can spend more time on reddit, telling people to cut contact with their loved ones. It's like a cult.

I think this mindset is maybe too close to being just "people that don't think like I do are just crazy" and dismissive of people's actual concerns.

And now those words are infusing the training runs of LLMs as well. The words of the extrovert who's already outside living life aren't written down.

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