I don’t think it’s ironic and my point was not the act of labeling itself but more of how America has become a brigading culture. Free speech should be protected, even for things that we know are wrong but we have this decay of the internet and culture where you are either with someone or against them.

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pjc50 7 hours ago | parent [-]

But that's my point: what you call "brigading" is other people using their free speech in a way you don't like.

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infecto 7 hours ago | parent [-]

I think we are talking past each other a bit.

I am not objecting to people expressing disagreement or labeling as an abstract exercise of free speech. I am pointing to a pattern that has become common online where disagreement quickly turns into coordinated pile-ons, identity assignment, and social signaling rather than substantive engagement with the argument itself.

Free speech protects the right to do that, but it does not mean the behavior is healthy or productive. When discourse collapses into binary alignment where nuance is treated as hostility, it discourages honest participation and pushes people toward silence or extremes.

So yes, others are exercising free speech. My concern is about the cultural outcome of how that speech is increasingly used, not whether it is permitted.

Increasingly society in America is either you are with us or not and at least for me my view of the world is more nuanced and day to day.

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ImPostingOnHN 6 hours ago | parent [-]

> I am pointing to a pattern that has become common online where disagreement quickly turns into coordinated pile-ons, identity assignment, and social signaling rather than substantive engagement with the argument itself.

It's easy to fall prey to the fallacy that disagreement with you means the disagreers are failing to engage substantively to the topic, and are simply "social signaling".

It's easy to dismiss many people disagreeing with you as a "coordinated pile on".

In my experience, these accusations are usually a result of the "piled on"'s failure to understand and consider the others' perspective, and their unwillingness to change their mind.

Not to say that they must understand and consider others' perspectives, or that they must be willing to change their mind either! But engaging with a society means facing social pressure to conform with social norms. There's always not engaging with society in any meaningful way, as an option.

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infecto 6 hours ago | parent [-]

I agree those are real failure modes, and I am not denying they happen. People absolutely misread disagreement as bad faith, or assume coordination where there is none, especially when emotions are involved.

Where I differ is that I do not think this is only an individual perception problem. There are structural incentives online that reward signaling, amplification, and rapid norm enforcement over slower, substantive engagement. That does not require explicit coordination to function like a pile on, and it does not require bad intent from participants.

Social pressure and norm enforcement are inevitable in any society, as you note. My concern is about degree and speed. When the dominant response to a nonconforming view is immediate identity assignment or moral framing rather than argument, the space for persuasion narrows quickly. At that point, engagement becomes less about exchanging ideas and more about sorting people.

Opting out is always an option, but that feels like conceding that meaningful public discourse online is no longer worth defending. I am not convinced that is a good outcome either.

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ImPostingOnHN 6 hours ago | parent [-]

> There are structural incentives online that reward signaling, amplification

Those same structural incentives reward people organizing around a topic about which they're genuinely both passionate and informed. So how are you determining the difference?

> and rapid norm enforcement over slower, substantive engagement

Different people have different opinions over whether violation of norms should be tolerated, and how quickly. Note that this is different from tolerating disagreement, but some disagreement is so heinous as to violate norms in and of itself (e.g. a nazi salute).

> That does not require explicit coordination to function like a pile on, and it does not require bad intent from participants.

Sure, but a "pile on", which I'll refer to by the more impartial term "many people disagreeing with a person or their take" or "many people validly expressing that a person has violated norms" is totally okay and valid in a society. The speed and degree of that enforcement is itself a social norm, and if it seems people prefer a high speed and high degree, then that is the norm.

I could speculate why that has become the norm, but I'll just generalize that there is a lot of hurt going around, and a lot of callousness to it, and a lot of failures of the traditional ways of addressing it, like shame.

	▲	infecto 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I do not think there is a clean, mechanical way to distinguish passion and expertise from signaling in the moment, and I am not claiming omniscience there. My point is about aggregate behavior and incentives, not adjudicating individual intent. Systems that reward visibility, speed, and alignment will naturally select for responses that optimize for those traits, regardless of whether participants are sincere, informed, or acting in good faith. On norms, I agree there are cases where the content itself is the violation, not merely a disagreement. Extreme examples make that clear. Where it becomes tricky is that the boundary of what counts as norm violating has expanded and become more fluid, while the enforcement mechanisms have become faster and more punitive. That combination raises the risk of false positives and discourages exploratory or imperfect reasoning, even when the underlying intent is not malicious. I also agree that many people disagreeing is not inherently a problem. What I am pushing back on is the framing that this is always just neutral preference aggregation. When enforcement becomes immediate, public, and identity focused, it changes the cost structure of participation. The fact that a norm exists does not automatically mean it is optimal for discourse, only that it is currently dominant. Your last point about hurt and callousness is important. I suspect that is part of the explanation. But if widespread hurt leads us to default to faster and harsher sorting rather than engagement, it seems reasonable to ask whether that tradeoff is actually helping us understand each other better, or just making the lines more rigid.