I think the actual biggest problem with "Redditization" is not hostility, but instead the fact that there is really no dialogue. There's no back and forth discussion, at least not with the same actual individual. You post a comment and (maybe but usually not) get a reply, then if you reply to that reply, the next reply in thread will be from someone else. Very very rarely do you go back and forth with one person. And regardless, you'll never ever interact with that person again (except maybe if you're on a tiny sub).

It's such a odd and distorted version of conversation. I'm not talking to any specific "you" -- I'm submitting thoughts to a "mass-you" and hoping with fingers crossed that the mass-you will reply or at least nod in approval with a single upvote.

For hn, it's even more interesting because the "wrongthink shutout" is packaged in intellectualism. But you see it more pronounced on the edges. Good examples are posts that discuss climate breakdown.

Those on Mastondon are a self-selected group who have opted out of Xitter and Reddit.

Any new social media platform is always better than the previous by self-selection. And then it gets popular and becomes just as bad as the previoius. Lather, rinse, repeat.

* Does Anyone Else foo?

* Pretty sure I'm gonna get downvoted for this, but foo.

* Unpopular Opinion: foo.

...and many more such patterns.

This is something it's taken me a while to come to terms with. I used to want to fully engage with everybody and everything. It was anathema to me to just "broadcast something into the void" and ignore replies. But over time I came to realize that a. I don't scale to engaging with every single person who replies to something I say online, and b. I don't owe those people a response or any of my time/attention; especially the trolls and bots and other lamers that are so prevalent these days.

So now I'm more comfortable (albeit maybe not 100% comfortable) with treating things in more of a "fire and forget" fashion. I say what I want to say, and people can do with it what they will. I just can't be arsed to engage with the trolls and other randos. But... if somebody has a mature, reasonable, professional response then I am willing, on a selective basis, to dig in deeper and have a longer discussion.

I don't think HN is immune from the "redditization" of the internet, though it's certainly a better community than most.

'Redditation' of the world. If it were only taking place on the internet it wouldn't be all that concerning.

That is no doubt one of life's mysteries, ultimately, but people writing down their thoughts seems to be a common practice amongst humans. One theory is that it helps the brain process information, but who knows? No matter the exact mechanism, though, the incentive is the same as why anyone writes something they are thinking about down.

> Educate people

Forum-going is a solitary activity. There are no people other than you. Just you and your thoughts, along with some software to prompt you with some ideas to think about (which is the value-add over a traditional journal).

And that is the problem with the 'Redditization' of the world being discussed. That solitary activity, which is fine when done in solitude – whatever floats your boat, is leaking out into the real world where other people are there to feel it and that has consequences. An increasing number of people are failing to recognize that software and people are not the same thing, thereby treating people in the real world as if they are software. But people are not software, so you find these social issues emerging.

It's a funny take, a forum is just you vs software. If I understand things correctly, me, the software is prompting you back! Or maybe it's the other way around? These days, one never can be sure.

And how wonderful it is that you, dear software, provided another prompt after my last journal entry. I wasn't sure of what to write next, so this prompting has proven quite helpful.

> If I understand things correctly, me, the software is prompting you back!

Prompting is two way street, indeed. Input into the software from the person may produce a result from the software, and the output from the software back to the person may produce a result that is fed back into the software. Lather, rinse, repeat. Again, this is the value that said software offers over a classic journal.

But, regardless, if that is how someone wants to spend their time in solitude, more power to them! But we do see a problem emerging where a growing number of people are not able to differentiate between people and software and are taking that solitary journaling with prompts out into the real world and are treating people as if they are software. But people aren't software, and this leads to social problems. Which isn't terribly surprising. If people treated other people as if they were dogs, you would find an emergence of social problems too. It turns out, for the best outcome of people, people need to be treated like people.

I reply to people all the time, especially on HN where the S/N ratio tends to be a bit higher.

That's why I don't speak my opinions to anyone other than people I'm close with.

Can you provide some examples?

1. Being colored 2. Doing recreational marijuana 3. Being a specific faith (like wearing Hijab for women) 4. Heck, just being a woman

Society seems to always have reasons to fire people or deny people a job that seem silly in retrospect, but enough people seem to think it's reasonable enough to do en masse.

Edit: I'm not saying any of those reasons, or being fired for holding "controversial" opinions are good, I'm just pointing out it's nothing new.

In what way are these opinions, controversial or otherwise?

Are you suggesting that people of colour, for example, were fired only if they were of the opinion that they were a person of colour? If they were visibly a person of colour, but adamant that they were caucasian, a promotion was in order instead? They just had to believe?

When has a society ever been accepting of different opinions, past a certain threshold? I can't think of any examples to be honest.

In the pre-internet past, it wasn't that much of a problem, because there wasn't much diversity, and highly differing opinions were isolated from each other because of geography. People only talked with other local people, who usually didn't travel much, and wider dissemination of ideas came from the press, which was controlled by a relatively small group of people and didn't just publish every person's opinion willy-nilly.

Now we're exposed to opinions from people all around the globe. We've never had to deal with this before.

On 4chan sure, on Reddit absolutely hecking no. On the main subs in French wrongthink comments get deleted super fast, and on one English-speaking about a hobby it's an immediate ban.

I don’t post anywhere but HN so my profiles are always bare. Starting something like 5 years ago I’d follow someone and within a day, flip a coin, on tails I was banned or blocked.

I eventually deleted the last of my social accounts. They turned into places where strangers were just there to torment each other or receive unconditional praise.

I'm just a few years from 40 and I can still vividly remember a time not too long ago where this was not at all how I thought.

Another game that is like this is our very own economic system, at least when it comes to aesthetics, money is yet another "upvote"/"like" game. The impact and similarities more clear and apparent.

One should hope. Disagreement is how you learn. It is why we talk to each other.

But that's not what we're talking about here. With 'Reddit' behaviour transcending beyond Internet forums, we're losing the disagreement. Now we see ostracization. There is no: "You are wrong because X." or "That is an interesting thought, but have you considered Y?" it has become "There is something wrong with you." and in the extreme "Say goodbye to your job/friends/family."

Don't you think it's worrisome that we can't agree on anything? And that includes things that are supposed to have objective answers. Why can't we find the truth? We now have instant global communication available almost 24/7, shouldn't it bring the period of unprecedented unity?

> The fact is, every person occupies unique physical space and thus has unique life experiences and a unique perspective of each “event”.

#000000 and #000001 are unique, but most would simply call both colors "black", and not lose any advantage whatsoever. The fact we can communicate using common words and obtain desired effects most of the time disproves that uniqueness created by differing perspectives makes truth an "illusion" or meaningless.

Now, I notice that I use "we all agree" and "vast majority," which is no way to explain an objective fact, but what we all agree on as a community or society _is_ reality. A society or community that has a different reality(s) than us is probably not a society or community that we would associate ourselves with.

This operates on several levels and dimensions; the common realities I share with my local Islamic community are different realities than I share with my tech community, or Toastmasters community, or even family.

Going back to the original point, yes, there are no realities that the entire global community can agree on, not even something as seemingly incontroversial as medicine (Christian Science for example https://rpl.hds.harvard.edu/religion-context/case-studies/mi... ), but no individual is part of the global community. We choose our communities based on the realities that we accept to be true.

This is literally schizophrenia, when two such communities meet, a massacre inevitably occurs.

You're confusing rationally concluding something with feeling morally righteous for believing it. It's not irrational to disbelieve something that people only believe because they'll feel like a bad person or be punished for doubting. See religion, for example.

The only reason most people believe the holocaust happened is because they heard about it from general society. Same way they believe God created the world. Almost no layman has actually studied it. It's just a kind of common faith where being a believer is what's important rather than the content of the belief.

I'm not saying it didn't happen, just that the vast majority of believers aren't believing out of rationality but out of indoctrination.

Same is true of all sorts of beliefs in things that don't directly affect us. We believe them because everyone assures us they're true, not because we sat down and worked out the conclusion for ourselves.

Sure, truth is in some senses unknowable (in particular in the 'The Map is not the Territory' sense), but we can have increasingly accurate and useful enough models that improve our lives. It's also the case that most human matters need specific answers, potentially extremely specific to their situation (and hard or impossible to know things, like what's going on in their minds), as well as some ethical and aesthetic frameworks that allows one thing to be good while other thing is bad. It's not obvious at first that ethics could be based on truth and science (and hence have somewhat-universal rights and wrongs), but I've come to believe that's the case indeed. Ethics really derives from fundamental truths about existence, like the reality and nature of suffering (and the nature of the workings of our minds), the nature of existence (for example, work is ethical insofar as it supports us existing at all), and so on.

If you think about it, the notion that anything goes, is really absurd: surely there are things you wouldn't accept essentially no matter what. It's much more absurd than the counterpart that there are true things, even about the nature of existence, that we can approach. The human mind (and minds in general!) can be studied using similar methods to the study of nature (with some necessary generalizations), and I believe that's what the 21st century is going to be all about :)

Edit: That's not to say 'vibes' are not important as well! From Goethe[1]:

"Art is long, life short, judgment difficult, opportunity transient. To act is easy, to think is hard; to act according to our thought is troublesome. Every beginning is cheerful: the threshold is the place of expectation. The boy stands astonished, his impressions guide him: he learns sportfully, seriousness comes on him by surprise. Imitation is born with us: what should be imitated is not easy to discover. The excellent is rarely found, more rarely valued. The height charms us, the steps to it do not: with the summit in our eye, we love to walk along the plain. It is but a part of art that can be taught: the artist needs it all. Who knows it half, speaks much, and is always wrong: who knows it wholly, inclines to act, and speaks seldom or late. The former have no secrets and no force : the instruction they can give is like baked bread, savory and satisfying for a single day; but flour cannot be sown, and seed-corn ought not to be ground. Words are good, but they are not the best. The best is not to be explained by words. The spirit in which we act is the highest matter. Action can be understood and again represented by the spirit alone. No one knows what he is doing while he acts aright, but of what is wrong we are always conscious. Whoever works with symbols only is a pedant, a hypocrite, or a bungler. There are many such, and they like to be together. Their babbling detains the scholar: their obstinate mediocrity vexes even the best. The instruction which the true artist gives us opens the mind; for, where words fail him, deeds speak. The true scholar learns from the known to unfold the unknown, and approaches more and more to being a master."

[1] Wilhelm Meister's Wanderjahre (Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship) Book VII Chapter IX

I think you nailed it on the head here, though. At a young age, we often don't carry the self confidence or self awareness to stand by our thoughts or opinions (and really, for good reason -- it's a good time to learn!). We have no sense of self or conviction at that age, despite the very unfair way popular media portrays teens (e.g. as mature adults with fully formed sense of self).

But the net result of what GP was mentioning is this lack of self confidence + an overly hostile online conversation definitely makes the resultant introversion/misplaced self worth make a lot of sense.

I regularly throw my opinions in discussions online, and often (not most the time, but often), get "downvoted" into oblivion. Part of that is that I like to play devil's advocate or I engage folks who don't agree with me, but part of it is also being a 41 year old person who honestly doesn't give a shit if they have a "popular" opinion, just a well-reasoned one. I chock that up to being roughed up by the world for a bit.

Very easy to say when you aren't going viral and 100,000+ people aren't trying to get you fired or hurling insults at you ranging from calling you an idiot to telling you to die. I'm not saying you're wrong but it's much easier said than done.

You can't mean someone physically disconnected their power cables?

How is that possible (aren't players in different cities, even countries, don't know each other's IRL identities?)

Real life details leak. And especially back then, players generally lived in certain population centers. Each guild had about 50 people. I lived in the same city as at least one person of a rival guild.

1) The disconnect between people that allows for such othering. Anecdotally, I can't imagine but a small handful of people I've met who would be willing to walk up to someone and verbally wish for the other person's death. I know we can point to many times in history where that attitude has resulted in the death of many people, but I view those as exceptions to everyday life. Not saying my view is correct, but only explaining my approach with this statement.

2) Scale. Imagine a group of 100,000 people showing up in the real world to yell, scream, and chant death threats at one person. That would be a massive event. Even gathering 1,000 people against a single person would be noteworthy in many locations.

So the The Internet, which is mostly comprised of Social Media at this point, has moved to be able to allow people to disconnect others from humanity and gather in vitriol spewing hordes, and a single individual would be hard pressed to deal with such force against them while still trying to engage with their reason for being there.

And that's what's happening right now, today. It's short circuiting any possible counter-reaction we could have to abuse. This is why everyone's sort of worried about cancellation, but we're also a little reluctant to talk about it too. I see no evidence that the problem is about to correct itself and end up being no big deal. I see alot of evidence that it's only just stumbling around and will become an even bigger problem... the people participating in this stuff, they're learning new tricks, learning to self-organize better. We'll have shit like anonymous tutorials about how to look someone up and ruin their lives perfectly efficiently ("Then, call and ask for the HR department between the hours of 10am and 11:20am local, because that's when they're most receptive. Please use this verbiage, in a slow and calm voice."). Even my example's bad, I can't keep up with the state-of-the-art.

Especially for people who run in youthful circles. Older people at least have the benefit of generally being around people who learned human compassion before the social internet became prevalent.

You can't have a discussion with someone who wants to "gotcha" you for clout

The fact that they cannot discern if I'm giving them agreement or the side eye is delicious.

(And yes, you succeeded!)

1) Your attention on social media is monetized by others, which means there is always something tugging on it like so many street peddlers, in addition to all the 'organic' content made by other users. When there's a shortness of attention, you're always going to be more snippy and inclined to the short pithy retort, instead of long conversational openings and explorations of topics. Those require a lot of social trust-building and responding to feedback when you do them IRL, which is difficult on social media because...

2) Other people on social media just feel less real than those you encounter in real life, because you can't feel that bad feeling in your gut as strongly when you upset them, or the good feeling when you make them laugh. That same social distancing means you have a much easier time either idealizing them in that parasocial influencer-guru follower style, or feeling comfortable with being very harsh and combative with them. AKA the toxic gamer lobby phenomena, where people say the most heinous things you've ever heard to eachother, all the while being mostly fairly ordinary kids and adults IRL.

Both of these are kind of inherently tied up in the way we are ordering more and more of our (para)social life, so it seems very difficult to escape.

To paraphrase a point somebody made about content generated by machines purely to tug on your attention - everything feels increasingly meaningless because you have a finite amount of attention, and more and more of the 'social' interactions that your brain deals with in a day ARE meaningless and intended solely to mine your attention and keep you scrolling on ads.

I don't know how to fix that.

One kind of obvious suggestion on how to fix it: We have to grow a culture of more deliberate attention. Just like how we chose to consume healthy food and avoid consuming too much alcohol we must be more deliberate in our choice of media. But this is not an easy solution. Every social media space is saturated with good content as well as bad. It might become easier if we grow such culture around us though.

Now that Discord is apparently opening up to ads, it remains to be seen whether that cultural shift will be able to hold or if people are going to be driven into even deeper hidey holes, like the freed humans in The Matrix who have to hide out deep in the earth from all the robots ;)

You can't leave everything up to individual decision making or the results are collectively irrational. Notably, dieting and alcoholism are major problems we haven't had much success in addressing on a cultural level. Smoking is probably a better guide given how much rates have dropped in the last century.

We can lay down the foundation for such a culture for the future but it might be too late for most of us to right the ship.

What if we removed the profit driven attention seeking behavior by not charging for any digital content, and not consuming profit driven content?

Everything would be free under some kind of UBI scenario, similar to FLOSS but with other things too, like all media.

(Sorry)

Take X, for example: its access to capital allows it to eclipse most other social media and build network effects that are difficult for other startups to disrupt; after the Musk acquisition, advertisers began withdrawing from the platform; and as the Twitter files have claimed, its collusion with the U.S. government in the promotion/demotion of certain viewpoints.

If you want to see genuine viewpoints, you'd best seek out media that are largely independent of these three "filters" over what messages are permissible on the medium.

With that a strongly regulated social media place can be just as hostile as the most vulgar forum you can find. By experience, it can often be even worse.

Nit picking is a form of communication as well, perhaps often chosen because users want to share something difficult to do on the medium. That said, nit picking often doesn't carry hostility. Especially on tech platforms it is just meant as a contribution. Maybe there are carry over effects and miscommunication.

Thanks for asking the question and spawning the conversation threads!

Part of the problem lies here, and I'm doing it right now too.

In online public spaces we never have a conversation with another person, and rarely even then within a small group like enthusiast forums of yesteryear, we comment to the lynch mob. We reply to someone's statement with our own thoughts but it is not judged by the original poster if it was a good or insightful reply to what was originally said, it's judged by the mob with upvotes and downvotes and being flagged, misconstrued and nitpicked in fifty different ways. It happens here, Reddit, Facebook, YT, and any popular venue where comments are allowed. Even Github issues and pull requests.

I think it's why Discord is a popular alternative choice for many people. If you're not actively present, you can't chime in with your two cents and derail the conversation into some energy draining defense against someone's insane straw man attack. Comments needing to be in real time and the conversation being locked away and lost are a virtue for some folks.

So as a matter of caution we tend to impute bad motives to people we can't 'feel' clearly which means any textual claims made are subject to unnaturally high levels of scrutiny and demands for evidence/documentation.

Also the internet is forever whilst IRL conversation is throwaway.

Older folks like myself (GenX) learned the "classic" way...face to face. There were checks and balances. If you said something that skewed hostile you found out it could have immediate direct negative consequences. It could literally leave a mark.

Similarly if you went too far some other way...you found out immediately and directly how that could work out (we were just as cringy...we just didn't have it preserved digitally for prosperity).

Kids today (even writing that makes me wince) have less accountability for what they write than what we had to have for what we said. Also due to scale the effects are amplified. And also you are in a digital bubble that allows you to ignore anything that isn't positive. If you piss someone off by what you said so what? You'll never interact with them directly and there will be 1000s who agree w/ and encourage you.

Also old man shouts at clouds.

I think that's slightly different to what was said in GP:

> That's where social media has been most damaging. You can't share your thoughts anymore. The 'Redditization' of the world means that sharing thoughts is met with hostility. No longer can you just throw something out there, no matter how stupid. These days you have carry an entire encyclopedia with you in order to back up every last thing you say and if you utter anything that isn't deemed 100% perfect by those listening, the social scorn will fall upon you.

IOW, `kids these days` are required full corporate PR level accountability whenever and whatever they express, (and zero when cancelling others following social codes). There absolutely won't be thousands at your side unless you're in a straight up proper conspiracy theory circle full of actually schizophrenic people until the entire circle is going to be cancelled dead.

You can't label your opponent as belonging in a category and encourage making harmful gases in a toilet and get 127 upvotes. At least not anymore. Your comment will be deleted, and one below yours that explains why you're automatically doubly stupid will. You can't even say, literally orally voice, the word "die" in some parts of YouTube without algorithmic penalties. Saying "died of injury" can be a soft violation.

That is what GP is explaining by "you have [to] carry an entire encyclopedia with you in order to back up every last thing you say", ironically the phenomenon I'm ending up being a contributing factor by typing this very comment, and part of what's making teens sick. I think it has to do with being correct being a cost and having huge unfortunate abuse potentials.

if there was some way to just start arguments about nothing in real life and then pause them at will to go and cherrypick stuff that supports your argument, then come back and act smug about it (or not come back at all if you don't find anything), people would incessantly do it in person too.

Why specifically social media? It's a function of communication efficiency. It's why church is associated with this sort of cattiness, everyone knows everyone and is brought together regularly to provide a venue to trade gossip. It also supplies the moral standard by which everyone is evaluated and one's social status is tied to how well one appears to meet this standard. The cattiness is just status games playing out given these constraints.

The advertising industry is fundamentally about intruding into your lives, and by that measure, the % of attention it can command.

The advertising industry (which is social media is that isn't colossally obvious) has relentlessly pursued increasing this percentage, and the smartphone was the physical means to achieve it, and newfound social addiction feedback loops the nitro turbo boost.

Even modern/new humans can't adapt to this. Older minds are crumbling into echo chambers, or withdrawing entirely. Paranoia takes hold.

Or is it paranoia? Or are your every move, thought, and action collected and categorized into a profile which is currently used simply for "advertising optimization", while in China it produces a worse-than-1984 dystopian system, and likely there are population profiling projects in US three letter agencies?

My internet profile is set in stone from my 20 years. Nothing I can do about it now. I'm purgeworthy whenever the totalitarianism grips the USA. Elections are becoming existential now, and that likely isn't paranoia.

While I've given a rational probability to all this, most people do not, they respond emotionally, especially to relentless stress and burden of processing unending perpetual advertising.

And as we all know, here comes the AI.

So I'd like to point out something I've not seen mentioned yet. That is what I call 'small down behavior', that is nit picking on those that don't fall into some small group that is acceptable.

It seems that social media has not caused any new behaviors, but instead given a new and expansive venue for the behavior to spread.

Just because you don't care about something doesn't mean it doesn't affect you.

For example with many websites, high karma posts/users show up at the top of the feed. This means those addicts messages are the ones you're getting subjected too every day.

Social media is a highlight reel of people’s lives. It’s the best part hand-picked out of our mostly mundane lives.

Until these teenagers understand this, they’ll never feel “good enough” to share their own situation. Instead, they’ll remain on the hamster wheel trying to live up to the ideals peddled by influencers.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/1c0nuy6/it_is_impos...

It's infinitely sad that there's no place to just connect with people on the internet anymore. My post got 6 comments and a DM within the first minute, before the post got taken down. These people could have been new friends.

I've been through this cycle so many times I have long given up on trying to post on the internet. Logging on to find people and share thoughts only to be met with this massive wall of context and janitorial standards. I gave up like five years ago.

This is to say that the whole debate between "social media causes anxiety" and our landscape of social media causes anxiety makes this debate way too coarse. Getting on the internet between 2005-2012 felt happy, free, and was just a wellspring of community and connection. Post-2013 it's been a nightmarish hellscape on every platform.

Once the child grows, why would it look to family to help? It has already been institutionalised - it believes that government agencies, psychiatrists etc will help - the 'brokenness' is normal. The grown child won't look to those that would normally step in (family) - they have their own issues. In all honesty, its hard to say whether looking to institutions for help that is a bad decision anyway - how much harm do families cause?

There’s an unspoken burden of past Child Traumatic Stress that, consciously and subconsciously, tints individuals’ resilience and the way the now-adults view the world.

I’ve been fortunate to have a happy, normal childhood. However, based on the number of people that I’ve spoken to, I’m starting to think I am in the minority. Friends have casually talked about facing suicide, complex family dynamics, neglect, and crazy religious experiences in early life like it was nothing, when it was/is a big deal.

It’s devastating to hear, and realize that the “silent majority” are likely maladapted individuals who are not even close to unpacking their traumatic past (i.e. things like “the friendly uncle” and “the cool youth group pastor”) that got swept under the rug or repressed.

It's worse than that. At the same time families were broken, the children also stopped having freedom to roam around and make friends on their own on the real world.

Thankfully there are corners of cyberculture with a distinct anti-Reddit bent where hostility is almost a norm that you get desensitized to and you can see all manner of profound and stupid ideas and react with hostility in kind.

After spending time there, returning to Reddit feels like staring at pablum, and you start seeing gross inaccuracies get updooted, and the inconvenient truths get buried.

(you should imagine this was written by gigachad, and anyone who disagrees is a badly drawn wojak in some state of emotional distress)

I understand this fear when posting on reddit (or other social media) itself, but I am absolutely confused where this idea that this applies to reality comes from.

The problem is that the real world is increasingly not understanding that the internet and the world are not the same place, and they are treating software and people the same way. It turns out that people are not software. This leads to problems. Those who confuse you with software don't apply the compassion that people would otherwise normally receive, and, as a result, will be quite happy to put you in a bad place.

You know, the 'Redditaization' of the world. Its funny that even here we see the internet and the world being seen as the same thing; emblematic of the exact same confusion that the comment is about.

I'm more worried about the Linkednization. Where people share terrible views and nobody criticizes it because they don't want to be seen as someone that criticizes things.

- “The climate is changing and the outcome of that is bad.”

- “The climate doesn’t have enums. Have you tried Rust?”

Back in real world, I could never do it. If you could, that just means you lived in a bubble of like minded people.

This is certainly not the only anti-intellectualism, anti-education movement we've ever experienced as humans, but we had progressed forward. This regression leaves a lot of people in bad places.

Obviously this is not the context you're talking about, but I find this issue with brainstorming type sessions these days as well these days. Not just work sessions either, as another example, I'm on the advisory board for a local club, and the first meeting was really barren for quite a while.

It's gotten to the point that I always make sure to voice my philosophy early on - "not all ideas are good, but many good ideas start out as bad ideas and become good through conversation" - and proceed to throw a few incredibly stupid ideas to the group to break the ice. It seems to help.

You just described HN perfectly. I can shrug it off because I remain anon here and don't care about my rating, but I see other people being traumatized by this dynamic in other social media platforms.

I'm not sure what switched but I remember being on Slashdot and having people go off on me or others, and it was just hilarious. These days it seems like people are genuinely being traumatized regularly by the engagements.

Actually for me it's quite difficult sometimes to write thoughts on topics here. I'm just being afraid not to be understanded

I would expect this to some extent when conversing with strangers IRL too. If it was a chat between friends, a rant here or there is OK because your friends know the real you and understand where you're coming from. Strangers won't be as charitable.

Imagine being out in public at a party and you say something slightly 'spicy' and someone walks up to you and puts duct tape across your mouth. You can move to another party (or comment thread in this example), but you already were basically told "your input is useless, now leave".

I should mention that I don't see it that way, but a lot of people don't know how to separate real life from the internet - Especially Gen Z. The internet is NOT real life.

Bonus: Moderators locking threads with a condescending comment like "Locking this comment thread since some of you refuse to behave".

Reddit is the new Twitter, only the censorship isn't thinly veiled. It's not veiled at all.

People have lost jobs, college admissions, and more based on their posts online. I understand the sentiment but what we do on the internet most certainly has an impact on real life.

Because people make the mistake of using their 'real life' identity online. Remove your real life attachments from the internet and you're untouchable.

Just because people willingly 'dox' themselves doesn't make the internet anything more than a collection of webpages sitting on a blade server somewhere.

That's all well and good if you never leave your mother's basement, but for everyone else going outside from time to time, hiding your identity is much more difficult.

Herein lies the problem: We used to be 'hard' on online accounts because they were anonymous – everyone understood the account did not represent a real person and that was just for fun. That's fine. We maintained compassion for real people with real identities with a desire to treat them as being human. But over time we stopped recognizing a difference between a real person and an internet account, now treating the people out in the real world like they are anonymous internet accounts.

This is uncalled for. People like me live an extremely healthy and social life without any traces of our identity online (excluding voter registration databases, people search websites, etc).

>But over time we stopped recognizing a difference between a real person and an internet account, now treating the people out in the real world like they are anonymous internet accounts.

I see where you're going with this, but I'll have to disagree. Most of the people being behaving like animals online are some of the most soft spoken and shy people in real life.

The article which sparked this discussion stands adjacent to my claim, as well. I've noticed a lot of people who are online a lot and using it as an escape are pretty socially awkward and neurotic in real life. Those people I just mentioned often use the internet as an escape, but don't realize it.

If there were no separation between the internet and real life, then those people would behave the same way online (shy, timid, avoiding confrontation). These people just don't realize the separation thanks to the "Please enter your first and last name" trend started by Zuck in the late 2000s.

With respect, I think you've failed to grasp what is being discussed here. 'Attacking' people who post ill-conceived content anonymously on the internet has most definitely grown tired (case in point), but is not really a problem. It's not a person, it's just an internet account. It doesn't matter.

The problem is that the same behaviour has started moving out into real life, where you find real people with real identities. There is no hiding from it beyond an anonymous username. Your face is out there for all to see when you step outside. Certainly you may run in circles of older people who established that compassion for real people while the lines were still clearly divided, thus not feeling it as much, but there is a generation coming up – you know, the one the article is about – that do not know the world before Reddit. They fail to grasp that there is a difference, treating real people like they are Reddit accounts.

If your internet account is a fictional identity it doesn't matter, but you're posting as you but just behind a pseudonym and someone attacks you it can be very upsetting.

Therein lies the challenge, though. Some people, especially people who didn't grow up before the likes of Reddit, fail to understand that people and software are not the same thing. The things that fly online don't fly the same way in person, but there is a prevailing shift, particularly with the younger generation, towards treating the in-person experience the same as the online experience; to see them as the same thing. That's where we see problems emerge.

The experience would change for the person pulling the lever. My "so-called internet account" absolutely is related to a real person, and that person is me. Attacks on the account are experienced by me as attacks on me

Right. This is the 'Redditization' of the world spoken of earlier, where an increasing number of people are unable to distinguish the difference between software and people, thereby treating them as if they are one and the same. Which, as it relates to the broader topic, is problematic as they are not the same and that introduces all kinds of social issues out in the real world.

Logically, you know that the LLM behind the arbitrary forum account that attacked you is little more than a fancy random number generator, which is no more significant than a squirrel giving you the side-eye, but as you have anthropomorphized it as being human then you start to see it differently and experience it as if it were a person.

But to anthropomorphize it is flawed. Like seeing Google Maps as being the world[1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39993030

That's exactly correct, and now we are one step closer to understanding the precession of simulacra of identity.

The crude maps of the 16th century cartographer were of such low fidelity and accuracy that it became impossible to confuse them with the territory, with all its contours and nuances elided from the scribbles of ink on parchment. Contrast with Google Maps, that has captured the earth in such exquisite detail, down to the meter, that we now regard it as a more or less one-to-one representation of the Earth in itself; a simulacrum of the "first order," which "is the reflection of a profound reality" (Baudrillard 1981).

But the representation does not stop there; now with things like listings of local businesses, we have progressed to a simulacrum of the "second order," which "masks and denatures a profound reality" - does your business even exist, if I can't find it on Google Maps? If your road has signage calling it one thing, while Google Maps calls it another [0], which name is correct? How will your GPS navigate such a world when the map and the territory have diverged this far from one another?

The end game of the precession is the creation of entire virtual worlds and maps (think, de_dust2) that represent no territories at all, but are a territory in their own virtual right - a simulacrum of the "fourth order," or "the hyperreal:" "it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum."

Alan Watts spoke of a similar phenomenon in one of his lectures on meditation [1]:

    The principal disadvantage of symbols is that we confuse them with reality, just as we confuse money with actual wealth,
    and our names about ourselves, our ideas of ourselves, with ourselves.

If it happened with God in the quarrels between the iconoclasts and the idol worshipping iconolaters, it can happen with mere mortals, too:

    This is precisely what was feared by Iconoclasts, whose
    millennial quarrel is still with us today. [...] that
    deep down God never existed, that only the simulacrum ever
    existed, even that God himself was never anything but his own
    simulacrum-from this came their urge to destroy the images.

    - Baudrillard, 1981.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJYp-mWqB1w

I’ll add that people addicted to social media become insufferable to share novel (often silly) thoughts around because the focus becomes dropping a zinger versus meaningfully engaging with what was said.

Well, sure, you're just dealing with software. What trouble could there be?

The problem with the 'Redditization' of the world is that people fail to recognize that software and people are not the same thing, and start treating people as if they are software. That leads to social issues, just as treating people as if they were dogs leads to social issues.

And here we have proof positive of this happening: You weren't even able to recognize that the world and the internet are not the same place.

Which, to be fair, isn't surprising. If so many people weren't confusing people with software the original comment would have not been posted in the first place. We are here because that confusion has become so commonplace.

> That's where social media has been most damaging. You can't share your thoughts anymore. The 'Redditization' of the world means that sharing thoughts is met with hostility. No longer can you just throw something out there, no matter how stupid. These days you have carry an entire encyclopedia with you in order to back up every last thing you say and if you utter anything that isn't deemed 100% perfect by those listening, the social scorn will fall upon you.

I think that's an important point, that I think is partly due to culture of the spaces. For example, I almost never downvote anyone, and in particular not for them being wrong, unless it's something particularly harmful whose visibility would be damaging, or just a troll (quite rare usually). The downvote button seems important for those rare situations (maybe just a mod button would be enough?), but in general it should rarely be used.

Not only I've come to believe asking questions is important for beginners to learn, but also it's an important medium for everyone else (and in particular experts or more advanced learners) to exercise their knowledge by teaching stuff and learning to fill gaps in their knowledge.

I actually think reddit is pretty good in this regard, specially w.r.t. what we had before and other media like StackExchange. In SE, you're expected to search the site and often questions are met with arrogance. In oldschool forums, which I do like, there was (in almost every case I remember) an even greater air of elitism; although, on the other hand, it created a healthy eagerness to learn the norms and participate in a careful way. I tend to prefer the lower-stakes communication of HN-style boards though.

I think as with everything massification is a significant problem. I encourage everyone to participate in communities whose size feels 'just right'. Also, at least some of your interactions should be highly participative, and not just mindless consumption.

I think a final problem is that any activity of too narrow scope can be dangerous. If people are confined into extremely narrow interests and spend all their time on that, as opposed to learning everything about life, that can (and probably will in most cases) paint a distorted picture of reality and be very unhealthy. Broaden your curiosity :)

This is an immense impediment to writing for the academically-inclined, or merely one who still has some shred of epistemic integrity left, and a huge boon to the dogmatic mob of believers eager to strike down anyone who dares question their orthodoxy. For one, it takes time and substantial research to compose a thought that is both "true" and unique, buttressed by citations to other works or accepted facts; for the other, it is much easier to reply with a five-second thought in 280 characters with thought-terminating cliches branding the "other" as a deplorable undesirable whose ideas aren't worthy of an audience or a platform. That is, if you even get that far - these days it's more likely you will simply be downvoted into oblivion, your thoughts swiftly evicted into the memory hole, never to be seen again.

> Once you've felt said social scorn enough you no longer see words as a way to make friends, so turning to beauty is the natural progression.

Issues of "Redditization" and scorn aside, we are progressing into a post-literate society where the written word and other literary media are being eclipsed by audiovisual media such as YouTube or Instagram. While much of the western world is "literate," in that they understand how to read and write (basic) words and phrases, much of our life - especially online - takes place in a highly visual world of filtered photos and staged videos. It becomes increasingly difficult for one to represent themselves in a written, literary form, when the culture demands "pictures, or it didn't happen."

McLuhan in "Understanding Media" has written on how the preference of one sense over another (e.g. sight over sound) in differing societies has profound cultural impacts over the ways we think, act, and what we find permissible:

    The printed form has quite different im-
    plications in Moscow from what it has in Washington. So with the
    telephone. The Russians' love of this instrument, so congenial to
    their oral traditions, is owing to the rich nonvisual involvement it
    affords. The Russian uses the telephone for the sort of effects we
    associate with the eager conversation of the lapel-gripper whose
    face is twelve inches away.
    
    Both telephone and teleprinter as amplifications of the un­-
    conscious cultural bias of Moscow, on one hand, and of Washing­-
    ton, on the other, are invitations to monstrous misunderstandings.
    The Russian bugs rooms and spies by ear, finding this quite natural.
    He is outraged by our visual spying, however, finding this quite
    unnatural.