Hacker News Reader

Comment by joneil | Hacker News Reader

The review systems on the app stores, and internet comments more generally do have a tenancy to bring out the hate, and the article does a great job of exploring the effects of this.

As people who designs user interfaces and interactions, I wonder what we can do to bring out more respectful reviews and comments, to remind users of the human on the other side of the app...

View on HN

That's a completely worthwhile cause, imo. One of my colleagues, Aaron Zinman, (hi, Aaron!) spent a lot of time thinking about that. You can find some of his work at [1] and [2].

The other day after meditating, I had in insight into why the hate comes out. It has to do with when we go online, we're trained to imitate characters, not ourselves. This thought will require additional unraveling. We also need to steel ourselves to inflammatory comments and inhibit ourselves from escalating them, too. But I can't believe people threatened the Flappy Birds guy.

[1] http://defuse.media.mit.edu/

[2] http://azinman.com/

Great point. Situations like this make it abundantly clear that folks out there are more than happy to bash away at some poor indie the other side of the world, as well as making demands, publicly vilifying and the like. I guess it's the Internet. It's trained us to be angry in public at anonymous faces, so when the faces are other people, it's a lot easier to treat them like they aren't.

"I guess it's the Internet." I don't think we should accept this though. I think most people would benefit from having "thicker skin", but at the same rate we should not rationalize boorish & hostile behavior. Anonymity does not have to lead to ass hattery.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com