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Comment by darth_avocado | Hacker News Reader

It’s not only online. Just last weekend, someone heckled me at Costco because my wife was pushing a heavy ass cart while I was walking freely next to her. She chose to do it, I offered to take it and she refused. But somehow a random stranger had something to say about it.

Online behavior is unfortunately a slightly worse mirror of real life. If you want to experience people outside of your bubble, just go to any public hearings or meetings and you’ll find that a lot of people are quite out there.

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I admired a man tending to his partner at a restaurant, and my then-girlfriend told me that she could tell from observing them that he was controlling, and his deference was purely performative.

Because "of similar situations she'd seen".

She had magically deep telepathic abilities, it seems.

Ok, but like were you offended, I feel like it's mostly a harmless slightly funny observation. I wasn't there but like were they really trying to be mean spirited with it? I live in the south and there's a pretty much constant running stream of public commentary on any and everything going on and 99.9% of it is friendly intentioned even if on the surface it's deriding. So really the idea of thinking someone is making a meaningful judgement is strange. And of course, even if they really were, why care?

I’ll jump in- why care? Because it sucks to have people taking pot shots at you. If it is just one, then sure, that isn’t so bad, but when you have a group doing it, it can become existential. You may not have seen this type of violence before but it is unsettling. A group of people can do low effort violence that feels fun and harmless to them (each taking a lazy swing at someone), but the cumulative effect can be beating up or killing someone. Getting yelled at, or having someone write threatening things to you, is not as bad as being punched or having a stone thrown, but it is still damaging to humans.

Not all hurtful and harmful behavior is violence and we need to maintain the distinction.

Don’t want to be the semantics guy but hurtful and harmful behaviour is by definition violence.

By whose definition?

The World Health Organization includes not just actual but also threatened physical force or power that results in injury, death or psychological harm

Something that causes harm is harmful; something that causes hurt is hurtful. So something that is harmful or hurtful is violence?

Or what am I missing?

Evidently, you are in fact not "the semantics guy".

Eh, when I was a kid violence was physical by definition. That distinction seems to be getting lost such that the phrase "physical violence" is no longer redundant. But the new usage is figurative.

> I wasn't there but like were they really trying to be mean spirited with it?

Flip genders and most likely people say things like this. Somehow men are just expected to deal with this but if it’s directed at a woman it’s all bad.

Nowadays there's the risk that someone will record you, put it on social media, it'll go big, and suddenly you have a large amount of people weighing in on your personal life without having any context. If that happens, it's likely to trickle back to you directly from other people seeing it or whatever.

The answer to this is to simply not pay attention to social media. There could be a mob on Twitter/X right now flaming me, and I wouldn't know about it or care, because I simply don't go there.

But members of your social circle (family members, friends, coworkers/bosses etc.) do pay attention, and when they do, they can make it your problem. You can ignore an Internet mob, but you can't ignore getting fired by your employer because they want to preserve optics.

I don't know--I think these stories of real-world consequences stemming from online rage are few and far between. It happens but it's rare. IMO the Online World is kind of not-real, and it's really hard to get so much visibility there to actually affect the real world.

This is one reason I've heard why some people still mask. It's mainly to have some privacy.

covid made the wearing of masks publicly acceptable. in western culture it used to be unwelcome. like if you hide your face you must be a criminal. in austria has a contoversial law that made masking your face in public generally illegal.

This right here is why good leadership is fading. Who would want to be in the limelight?

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