2 cents. Discourse on the web has declined markedly over the past 2 years or so, imho, whereas things were pleasant from pre-2021, (yes even during 2016 with trump and 2020 and Covid) . Everyone is on a hair-trigger, on either side of aisle (not just the woke, who are often stereotyped as being intolerant). Maybe the Elon buyout of twitter had something to do with it. Or an increased pessimism about society that is hard to nail down precisely.
I don't think it's just the internet. Covid was a very (ahem) masks-off moment for people realizing just how shitty things are and deciding they don't want to put up with /anything/. I think culturally, we're experiencing burnout, and at least in the US, stuff has gotten a lot rougher economically. People have less emotional bandwidth, and that translates to less self-filtering. Over that same span of time, it's gotten more dangerous to drive where I am, more drive-by shootings, more robberies...
Individuals are /angry/. Societies are /angry/. Our entire species is pissed right now.
To me it seems people have gradually become more angry and hostile over the past 10 years.
I remember in 2014 I genuinely felt like most people I met were kind and friendly. Nowadays there seems to be this sense of mean spiritedness to many people.
Good news though is that there are still lots of friendly people out there. It seems the friendly happy people are the ones who don’t spend too much time online. The terminally online people seem to be the most nasty when you talk to them in real life.
Somehow it seems easy to tell when someone spends a lot of time on the internet or when someone doesn’t. Just instinctively you can tell who is who. Interesting phenomena I guess….
the discussions here can at times get pretty and mean. I would not say twitter is that much worse. Anywhere where you have people with strongly held opinions about things, there exists the potential for problems.
I remember the "don't feed the trolls!" rule on usenet forums.
A "troll" was someone posting something to deliberately annoy people and get a reaction. If you added to the noise by replying to a troll, the troll won and you were seen as just as bad.
Now "troll" is just used to say mean/annoying person. News sites will add to and amplify the noise with headlines like "People are annoyed at troll who said X", going against the original meaning and rule.
So we now have this awful cycle of someone trolling, people discuss it, news sites get clicks from reporting it, people discuss it more, the troll is encouraged to troll more, and the news sites are encouraged to keep posting clickbait about it.
I'd love if there was a way to bring the "don't feed the trolls" rule back. Like major downvoting if you're found replying to a comment or story that gets flagged as "troll".
This is a nicer way to approach something I've seen lately, but haven't had a good area to mention - for fear of being part of the problem.
We like to think of HN as a place for wonder and decent conversation. Yet, I see a lot of policing of comments.
Someone posts something trolling, someone replies 'you should post something useful'... while contributing to the noise. Perhaps I'm pessimistic seeing it as for nothing. Maybe the 1/N times this works is worth it.
Long way to say: if you see something like this, just vote/move along
For what it's worth, I do tend to downvote responses to trolls -- especially when I see somebody pouring a ton of effort into somebody who's just taking the piss.
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[ 6.2 ms ] story [ 58.4 ms ] threadIndividuals are /angry/. Societies are /angry/. Our entire species is pissed right now.
I remember in 2014 I genuinely felt like most people I met were kind and friendly. Nowadays there seems to be this sense of mean spiritedness to many people.
Good news though is that there are still lots of friendly people out there. It seems the friendly happy people are the ones who don’t spend too much time online. The terminally online people seem to be the most nasty when you talk to them in real life.
Somehow it seems easy to tell when someone spends a lot of time on the internet or when someone doesn’t. Just instinctively you can tell who is who. Interesting phenomena I guess….
A "troll" was someone posting something to deliberately annoy people and get a reaction. If you added to the noise by replying to a troll, the troll won and you were seen as just as bad.
Now "troll" is just used to say mean/annoying person. News sites will add to and amplify the noise with headlines like "People are annoyed at troll who said X", going against the original meaning and rule.
So we now have this awful cycle of someone trolling, people discuss it, news sites get clicks from reporting it, people discuss it more, the troll is encouraged to troll more, and the news sites are encouraged to keep posting clickbait about it.
I'd love if there was a way to bring the "don't feed the trolls" rule back. Like major downvoting if you're found replying to a comment or story that gets flagged as "troll".
We like to think of HN as a place for wonder and decent conversation. Yet, I see a lot of policing of comments.
Someone posts something trolling, someone replies 'you should post something useful'... while contributing to the noise. Perhaps I'm pessimistic seeing it as for nothing. Maybe the 1/N times this works is worth it.
Long way to say: if you see something like this, just vote/move along
I acknowledge there's a bit of... irony (or something) in my critique. In a way it's yet another way to police comments - but hey! Democracy, I guess.