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Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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?

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.)

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