There was a time when making jokes at the expense of women was ok, there was a time when making fun of gays was ok, there was a time when mocking trans people was ok... now it's not.

> The only way someone who is not terminally online could be sure to avoid offending someone would be to become a mind reader, or to not say anything at all

It's just society developing empathy. Think most people understand that how we see other groups of people is not a fixed thing.

> There is also the fact that in this modern social climate, victimhood has become a valuable currency. There is incentive for people take offense where none could reasonably be presumed to have been given, and to blow minor transgressions out of proportion.

People are getting "called out" and "cancelled" more than ever, for sure. But I don't think it's necessarily victimhood. Given the original topic, it's interesting that this is how you're attributing intent. Do you feel that there might be genuine reasons for acting the way they do? Could the grievances be genuine?

But just because these issues are messy doesn't give us a license paper over their complexity with reductive founding-father-esque ideology. It's pretty clear to me that in aggregate freedom of speech on the internet is not suffering—people have unprecedented access to spread whatever thoughts they happen to have. Meanwhile an increasing number of people being hurt by internet bullying, harassment, and other anti-social behavior is growing by leaps and bounds in a way that society is not yet equipped to deal with.

As for social justice being a recent phenomenon, it isn’t. It being on the web is, but the web is still relatively young and it finally became intertwined with our offline selves that your online behavior is just your behavior. And social consequences for that behavior can be executed online.

On the other hand, the internet offers a layer of perceived anonymity that causes people to say things they never would, or should, in person. Things that they would be ashamed if that had to repeat to peers, in person.

It's a strange time to be alive.

All that aside and not trying to go really in depth into that whole pocket theory of mine, it's the same as in real life, it's just amplified. You can't do a whole lot about other's opinions about you, or what they say to you and if you're online and you become a target for any reason it just becomes something you have to deal with on your own terms.

It's nasty, it's petty and it's a hurtful thing to continually attack someone else, but it's the internet. All celebrities deal with the way they are talked about online in their own terms. You do understand all the mainstream Brad Pitts, Britney Spears and whoever get death/sexist/racial harassment all the time as well I assume. It's being a public persona that now becomes the problem. You are willingly putting yourself out there where essentially millions of people can online swarm you. It's a responsibility to have all your personal information online, and to talk about what you like, who you are, hobbies and passions and associate these things to your identity on platforms in which millions can hate/obsess/harass.

I think it's a very serious mental and social problem, a load that is taxing the entire human psyche right now. It's obvious to me what this is doing to humans, with everyone trying to be a public celebrity for likes and fans. I don't think it's good.

I mean, you get toxic behavior even on something like Nextdoor, where you pretty much know it's the neighbors across the street. Technology has just made things more convenient -- social media removes any curation, and technology also has made some means of harassment much easier to execute.

Myself, personally, I avoid social media that encourages toxic behavior (which usually means, smaller, special interest type sites; social circles that you know; etc.). This involves some degree of moderation or self-selection.

I don't see a good way around limited moderation for Reddit either, which is unfortunate in that it is hard to moderate something that size well (it's usually inconsistent and often arbitrary-ish).

In the past you had to have half a brain to even be online. I don't mean internet connection wise, I mean to set it up and find stuff.

What scares me the most is "justice by social media". People felt wrong doing against them burning torches and calling for pitchforks online, instead of getting a lawyer and getting justice. It's a lot easier, but it then snowballs into a raging fury of everyone strongly or mildly related to the issue chiming in, demanding justice. Then is justice served? no.

In such a community, sure... people could say anything they wanted. People can do so now! That is, you go for a walk, and people can approach you, say whatever, there is a wide range of what you can say in public.

But... if you act too aggressively, you get a punch in the head. If you yell and scream obscenities, people ignore you, if you do it too much, you again get a punch in the head. If you say 'crazy things' but are polite, people make excuses "Sorry, have to go look at this bush over here... talk to you later, have a nice day!". If you stand in the middle of a park and start screaming, again ... if you don't stop ... punch to the head.

(In more modern times, 'punch to the head' may be replaced by 'officials that come and make you stop via force if necessary', but the result is the same)

And to this, if you have people sitting in a park at a picnic table, enjoying a conversation, there is a limit to what people will tolerate.. if you just amble on over, start talking, and at the same time don't "fit". If you join a church, same thing. If you join a club, same thing.

Imagine if people got together, a group of 5 friends a picnic table at a park weekly, to talk about hockey, and some guy came over every day and started talking about how hockey is really fascist, and you're all asshoes, and blah blah.

Would that go over well? HELL NO!

In short, there is no moderation in traditional society, but there is also no tolerance for people shoving their face in your business. People that do not fit are not tolerated.

People confuse "how people interact in real life" with "people can say anything they want in real life".

Taking a step back, people have never had limitless ability to force others to hear their crap. You could take out ads in a periodical / newspaper... IF the newspaper thought it was not going to get many people mad at them! You could print your own "stuff", and pay to have it delivered, or hand deliver it to people on the street. You could print stuff and try to get people to buy it. There are loads of delivery methods, but even this is all new, 200 years ago no average person could do this.

So some online forum where you're talking about turtle eggs, and endless people liken it to "MY GUY!" or "POLITICAL THING" or "BUY MY APPLES" is absolutely non-real in terms of how humans have ever acted before!

Something like /., with its moderation system, and its meta-moderation system was a good start. "No! Go away from my picnic table!" with the comment still there but gone, is much like real life. But even that is not completely real, for eventually people "punch you in the head" if you persist.

As this thread discusses, most moderation systems seem unable to handle this. The truly sad thing is, I think that:

* until sock puppeting is impossible

* until identity is linked to your actions immutably

We won't ever get past this.

And this means that anonymity needs to end, and a person's actions need to count, because in the real world everyone can see "Oh crap, Bob's coming over here again", and "eventually you go to jail" is how we deal with human interaction in real life.

NOTE: none of this detracts from people wanting to, in real life, have a club of "completely open ideas". Yet that is quite rare!

There's permanence to what we say on the internet, but there's not permanence to what the culture says you are allowed to say. People are getting retroactively canceled for things that were fine at the time, which I think can be an issue. Remember how people behaved in video games as little as 5 or 10 years ago?

It's stifling, and frustrating. It makes you afraid to have a personality, but at the same time it makes having the courage to have a personality more meaningful.

I’ve always believed that much of emergent online behavior can be explained by innate human social processes seeking a path to goal when the more likely paths aren’t present. Absent the normal cues of physical aggression or dominance/submission signaling, emergent processes bubble up and get adopted by the group based on utility. Our brains are constantly engaged in ways to determine our place in the hierarchy. For better or worse, most non-topical subtext in forums falls into “I’m better than you” or “we’re better than them”.

As far as the internet being nicer now than it used to be, I’m not so sure. As someone active on BBSs in the 1980 onward to the internet, there is a lot more passive aggression these days, most of it via leveraging of unspoken community norms. The notion of an “online community” couldn’t predate the concept of “online”, and the early BBS/networking felt more like operating a radio in isolation. The fact that you were interacting with someone far away was still a novelty. e.g., “someone from Singapore called my CatFUR line!”.

The way I see it, the internet has enabled entirely new categories of negative behavior, using that term as a wide umbrella.

Half the things people say on Twitter, if you'd say them to someone's face in a bar, would make you wake up in the hospital. On the internet though, you can get away with it. Worse, you can organize a large amount of people to target an individual, organization, group of people, etc. This capability is near-impossible in the physical world.

These new ways are seized by hysterical activists on both extreme ends of the political spectrum and over time further normalized into the mainstream. These people feed on polarization and absolutely cannot be trusted to have the power to shut down infrastructure.

I argue this is not a trivial aspect to the matter :) Sure; if real world had a social structure similar to the internet people would interact very differently.

But we don't.

It doesn't necessarily mean that someone who acts the idiot online is simply an idiot in real life, but hides it well :) It just means people are reacting to two different social environments.

HN is a classic case in point; people here are friendly and polite in interactions. We all try to be a bit more intellectually stimulating, because that is the social structure.

I agree that online mobs have changed the game as far as speech consequences go, and I agree that most of those changes are for the worse. I do not see a way out, however, except to delete your social media and do not post things to the Internet that could possibly be linked back to you.

I don't really like the Web anymore.

The only venues where I've witnessed someone being attacked for apologizing or admitting an error have been online.