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Comment by operatingthetan | Hacker News Reader

My feeling is that the current state of the internet is just exposing how humans behave normally, the guardrails have just fallen away. Everyone is immune to shame, the threat of consequences etc. You see this in real life on the streets too.

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I think the opposite. The vast majority of kind and gently people are suddenly observing a small but ultra loud obnoxious minority take the stage and burn resources like nothing else to get maximum attention. Attention wins and you don’t get it by being gentle, balanced, kind and most importantly, don’t care about maximum attention.

Thank you

Yeah, I just came back from traveling a couple of weeks, and I have had such wonderful experiences with people. There were times where I just wanted to hug a taxi cab driver (ie when a Grab driver was holding an umbrella over my vomiting daughter [car sickness] and me, with his car stopped by at the side of a highway... etc.)

I hope you are right

Yes. I remember reading a piece on /r/SlateStarCodex subreddit many years that said something like, "Most of what you read on the internet is written by insane people," and that had an impact on me. In fact, many articles by Scott Alexander had an impact on me, though I don't know what he's up to these days.

Okay, found it -- https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...

Edit: It was written in October 2018 -- 8 years ago. Feels centuries ago, to be frank. We're moving at absolute breakneck speed in tech.

And the SlateStarCodex people are also, for the vast majority, batshit insane people behind a veil of "no but you see i'm a rationalist". That includes Scotty.

I'd say at least 1/3 of internet commenters clearly have GAD (generalized anxiety disorder). Most of them undiagnosed. Anxiety triggers ancient animalistic parts of the brain and the "need to do something NOW" which often then gets released into negative / angry / aggressive posts.

Depressed people are the opposite, they tend to lurk and not care that much

I remember back in the "old" internet pre-2010, there was basically zero anxious people posting.

I blame A/B testing.

Fear and anxiety sells best (even better than Sex). When you end up selecting procedures that ensures the maximum sales/clicks, you are actually optimizing for things that cause maximum fear and anxiety?

This is the right takeaway. Before the internet went mainstream, these ultra loud and obnoxious minorities were restricted to being obnoxious within their local communities, and their speech was restricted to what they were willing to say to others face-to-face.

Now, both of those restrictions have been lifted: they can now act obnoxious in front of a global audience that will be forced to listen to them, and they no longer have to worry about the potential consequences of being obnoxious in person.

Us kind souls are not forced to listen, however, something in our nature draws us to these extremes, and then, observing a lot of these extremes, our minds label them as “common”. It’s all quite unsurprising when put like this, imho.

The antidote is real interactions, and ignoring the online extremes.

There is the saying "the empty vessel makes the loudest noise". This was part of the reason I eventually left Reddit, as I was getting sucked in to the habit of making empty meme-like responses to posts.

Some of the worst places for comments I've seen are on youtube - just the lowest effort ("who is listening to this in 2026?!") or the most obnoxious, or just misunderstood. Partly this is because of voting systems combined with large numbers of people. Partly because of bots I suppose.

I watched the announcement on the detection on gravitational waves on YT. The comments scrolling by were like from another world, I even made some screenshots, insane, obnoxious. Could be bots I suppose, I hear from political commentators here who advocate for thoughtful commentary "from the middle", that their social media posts are always very quickly flooded by the same kind of polarizing low-level comments that drown out any intellectual and thoughtful debate. It's probably partly bots, partly a small minority of people that get sucked into it by the bots. I have no problem believing this is Russia, or NK, undermining our democracy in a fully automated fashion.

I came to comment the exact opposite. People are good, caring, kind, helpful, thoughtful, funny, interesting. It’s visible every day in real life beyond the streets… in both small and big interactions.

When you choose to see beyond the surface, it becomes clear this is the cause of a system. A system that is nearly impossible to escape, and which will last for the rest of our lives. But still a system, and not the people participating.

The internet has a big "dogs barking at each other through the closed gate" dynamic. People are much more rude and aggressive to each other from a safe distance.

The safe distance is anonymity. A few of the bold ones that are all in on the grift or just genuine assholes will own their opinions and behaviour.

All the little followers have a different tune when confronted with a real social situation, at least one that isn't a mob providing safety in numbers.

It's similar to the bully dynamics at school. Get one of the hangers-on by themselves and they are civil with you. When they are with the bully peer-pressure stops them from thinking for themselves.

I think it's actually inverted, the sudden arrival of this new information layer is bringing out the worst in people as they try to suddenly adapt to this new social environment. Even worse, is that it works(ed) and now the behavior is influencing real life.

This is how humans behave under anonymity, towards an anonymous crowd of people. It is something you don't see on the streets with the exception of a few assholes, but you see it a bit more on the road, where being in a vehicle puts some distance.

It is not a lack of shame and the treat of consequences. Take soldiers for instance, instinctively, they don't want the enemy they face dead, it takes a lot of conditioning to have them kill without hesitation and it often results in mental health issues later. And solders are rewarded for killing the enemy, it means the shame and threat of consequences go the other way. Normal people just don't want to hurt others.

But the more detached we become from the actual person, the easier it is to be an asshole. This is what happens on the internet where people are just entries in a database, at best a name and an avatar.

Well, the guardrails, by which I assume you mean legal and social accountability, were the norm for most of human history, which is why I don't consider the behaviour of anonymous and unaccountable humans on the internet to be "normal". Of course, humans are capable of great evil, but we are also pretty good at building social structures to prevent the worst of it. But those structures don't work so well on the anonymous internet.

> You see this in real life on the streets too.

To nowhere near the same extent, in my experience. Most people in real life are still fairly polite, even to strangers. It's insane to me how rude people can be on social media. Some of the aggressive responses I've received on Reddit (to fairly innocuous comments) I would never in a million years get in real life. (And this is also true of the 90s internet.)

Sort of the paradox of humanity. I actually like the majority of people I meet in person. But ‘humanity’ in the aggregate is just fucking terrible and constantly finds new and interesting ways to lower my expectations further.

I actually think the opposite, the hatred on the internet seems artificial to me.

In the current day when AI is so prevalent, it always makes me wonder how many posts are made by agents instructed to maximize engagement by making people angry.

so normal human behavior is immune to shame and consequences?

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