Comment by snovymgodym
6 hours ago
A really toxic part of online interactions is that it's very common for people to see a tiny snippet of another person's life and then project all of their own personal resentments onto them.
6 hours ago
A really toxic part of online interactions is that it's very common for people to see a tiny snippet of another person's life and then project all of their own personal resentments onto them.
Telling women they're being abused even when the woman herself disagrees is a very ironic pattern I see often. Somehow it's seen as anti-sexist and yet it puts the onus on the woman to justify herself like the case here where she wrote an entire article. What happened to letting women make their own choices? I'm sure some of them are legitimately concerned, but I think a lot of people just want to spread their preferred narratives about the world.
As a black man, I can't help but think of the whole Chris Brown thing here. Yes, I personally found what he did disgusting, and if everyone else obviously felt that way, I would keep that up.
But no -- I know too many Black women who have -- I suppose -- chosen forgiveness. Too many intelligent humans that I know or know of, are good with this for me to say "No, ladies, you are wrong."
That is a problem I've had with the whole "listen to women" thing. That became a popular phrase and I said okay that's reasonable I'll do so. Over time though I'll see women on both sides of just about every issue. Even women having the right to vote you'll somehow find women who disagree(probably for political reasons).
My only conclusion is the whole idea of "listen to women" is itself simplistic as it assumes women all think the same. Certainly I still listen to women, but im not willing to assume they all feel a certain way just because a few people insist they do. Otherwise Im just ignoring the women with the minority view
The father-mother-child-donkey conundrum. Its only solution is: to hell with anyone's thoughts, we'll act as we prefer.
I had to look this up [1]:
> C. T. Studd, (1860-1931) the famed English missionary who served God in China, India, and Africa, once remarked: "Remember the miller's donkey. The miller, son and donkey went to the market. The miller rode the donkey all the way and people exclaimed, 'Cruel man, riding himself and making his son walk.' So he got down and his son rode; then people slanged, 'What a lazy son for riding while poor old father walks.' Then both father and son rode, and people then said, 'Cruelty to animals, poor donkey.' So they got down and carried the donkey on a pole, but folks said, 'Here are two asses carrying another ass.' Then all three walked and people said, 'What fools to have a donkey and not ride it.' So let's go ahead with our work for God and not care what folks say."
Secular wisdom for the ages! 150 years ago we would have been taking a donkey to market wrong. Now with the advent of YouTube and Reddit and Twitter we've charted vast new swaths of incorrect behavior that we can leverage to make ourselves feel superior to others.
[1] https://www.actsweb.org/articles/article.php?i=295&d=2&c=6
Or speculation grows and a few hours later it's suddenly historical fact, like a modern version of telephone... just with a more harmful outcome.
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.
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.
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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 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.
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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.
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Story also mentions SF Giants sports commentators making jokes about this
I noticed how easy it is to frame something online when you’re viewing it out of context. I’ve seen myself getting it wrong from time to time, because a title was misleading, and I don’t know why after 30 years of internet I’m not way more skeptical.
Is there any benefit to social media? Just seems like a new form of cancer we have to deal with now along with everything else.
A place for those who would be marginalised by their own community, gay, religious apostates etc etc.
Communicating with relatives on the other side of the world.
Maintaining old friendships that would have died due to distance.
Somewhere to find like minded people.
Somewhere like hacker news (I count it as social media top) where I discovered great books, expanded my horizons and learnt that there were other ways at looking at the world.
Anyway, it's not all bad :)
There are social sharing functions and then there are algorithmic feedback loops that induce doomscrolling. Pretty sure it’s technically feasible to have one without the other.
The question to me is, with enough content and a powerful enough recommendation algorithm trained with enough eyeballs can short form videos be considered addictive in a clinical sense? If so what are the deleterious effects of the addiction? Should it be regulated?
I’m all for freedom, but we regulate drugs because we deem them bad for society.
You are describing old-school social-network designs that began to be marginalized already before Covid, not modern social media. The latter would prefer that you not forge or maintain authentic connections with other human beings, but rather doomscroll through endless-scroll content.
Keeping in touch with relatives or friends in much of the world has long since moved to chat apps like WhatsApp instead of an open social network.
You can do most of that with IRC. There's a distinction imo between static webpages / IRC / forums, and modern "social media".
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Homemade Dog videos. Not sure of anything else
I live alone, and have friends throughout the US.
Social media kept me from attempting suicide during COVID. It helps me feel loved and connected.
Yeah, there are faults, but condemning it wholeheartedly is like suggesting we should abolish ICE cars immediately.
And suggesting we abandon it as a comment on a social media platform is ironically self-unaware.
I always try to be specific and condemn addiction engineering.
Social media before algorithmic attention hacking wasn’t nearly as bad, might have been a net good.
The first thing the algorithm destroyed was the “social” part of social media. Then it set about destroying society and kids attention spans.
I think it's not even that there's a benefit to it, it's that a lot of traditional communities that had their own forums are now exclusively on Facebook groups. I'm in several groups for mountain biking, for cars, for 3D printing, and those communities just don't exist anywhere else online other than small pockets with very little activity. Discord is the other one that has captured a bunch, but it's mostly centered around gaming, memes and tech.
"A really toxic part of online interactions is that it's very common for people to see a tiny snippet of another person's life and then project all of their own personal resentments onto them."
While also erasing everything that is real about that person's life, too.
I cringe whenever I hear someone angrily yell something like "You don't/can't know how I feel!", because unless the person making the accusation knows the accused very, very well, they could well be really stepping it. Nobody makes it through this life unscathed. Everybody loses people they love. Everybody gets kicked in the gut multiple times in life. Yes, everyone's personal life story, if you get specific enough, isn't exactly like someone else's. I won't claim to know exactly what it's like to be sexually abused, for instance. Wouldn't dream of it. Very serious issue. But I've had kicks to the gut that the one screaming that they may not have an exact analog for either.
I may not know how your exact gut punch feels. Maybe you've had noticeably more gut punches than I have. But everybody has had some sort of experience with them.
If one day a genie's magic spell made you see text pop ups above everyone's head with their traumas and abuses in life, and the emotional and physical burdens they're carrying today, you'd probably have a very hard time walking down the street.
Similarly, I really have a distaste for any variation of the "everyone's sheep" meme, especially when it's because they're not being active in some particular political way that the person flinging the meme around thinks they should be. If you could see those popups, maybe you'd understand why not everyone has a bunch of spare time to do whatever it is you think they should do to not be "sheep". Looking out on to a crowd of people and presuming they are "sheeple" reveals a lack of imagination and sympathy with people rather that the possession of a wise eye and strong understanding of the world.
This is really toxic offline, too.
That seems to be a big part of it.
There's a widespread problem of anti-intellectualism and acting-out, including, in the US, by both right and left. Most of the learning feedback to that -- pointing out to people when they might be missing something or acting unfairly -- is ignored, except to attack those who point it out.
AFAICT, for various reasons, they're proud of being warriors for their beliefs, and anyone who sounds like they're saying anything differently is the enemy, and the only thing you do with an enemy is score points against them or hurt them, while trying not to concede anything that the enemy would claim as points or hurt you. It's a toxic recipe for society.
Coincidentally, recently I've decided even Fedi isn't safe from that (it's just different and fewer people doing ideological bully thinking), and have resigned myself that issues of substance can't be discussed there either. Maybe the only safe thing to post is cat pictures.
I think it's much less a problem with HN. Of course, over time you realize certain positions get downvotes that aren't flattering to the people doing it, and some annoying commenting behaviors, and not always all the integrity we'd like to see, which are relatively mild by social media standards. However, I'm also seeing occasional random individual actor extreme toxicity problems with HN. And I'm anticipating some related but different kind of problems from how AI-powered tools will be easily used with the corpus/firehose to play toxic games.
> There's a widespread problem of anti-intellectualism and acting-out, including, in the US, by both right and left.
As of 2026, it's disingenuous to both sides this issue, at least in the US