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.

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.

Story also mentions SF Giants sports commentators making jokes about this

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.

> If it was the other way around they would be saying what a hero he is lol.

I’m not so sure, I’m convinced people would not bat an eye. Or at least I don’t expect any positive compliments, only neutral or negative.

Yeah, it is complicated because we do live in a very misogynistic civilization with patriarchal privileges. It’s just often difficult not to overcompensate to counterbalance and resist these circumstances. Treat people as individuals instead of the archetypes.

As author wrote: we need to practice the benefit of the doubt. Or I like the “trust but verify” pattern

And she spells it out really well. But yeah.

I started to notice a bit over a decade ago (about the same time as Cersei's walk of shame on GoT) that millennials as a generation were piling into naming and shaming people publicly as blindly appropriate punishment, without any consideration of what could go wrong and considering it their right and entitlement to do that. Any time a public figure gets into any kind of trouble, people demand to know all the details so they can satisfy their need to express outrage. It really is not healthy. Even if another person who was harmed comes out to express that they are satisfied with the outcome and the process that was followed, the crowd still wants to know all the details so they can feel angry.

TikTok threw up a big "login" popup that I couldn't skip, so here is a youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUwQmrEFf7E

Those comments are pure vitriol juice, my god, and they just keep coming from all angles as to why that dude is an absolutely piece of shit on very little data. Incredible stuff, and a good lesson right there.

I'm Danish, but how is this terrible? I should show these people a video of my twins sleeping in a snow covered trolley outside the bar I was having a beer and a board game by the window at.

I was thinking of this recently. I "dogsit" for many families and had one recently that wasn't great on leash. She would do this thing where she would lay down and try to eat something off the ground (sticks, garbage, animal/dog poop, dead mice, dead birds... whatever she could find). Much of it would likely make her sick and therefore I would have to quickly pull on the leash to prevent her from eating some random thing she found. Being an 80lbs dog, I had to tug quite hard to quickly get her away from whatever she had found. If someone saw me in that moment, they'd probably think I was a terrible dog owner. Without the context that I was actually trying to prevent harm, someone could take a video, post online with the caption "Identify this dog abuser!" and ruin my reputation.

The incredible thing is the husband came in for bashing not plausibly based on his actions in the video but based on mutating narrative.

Go from "X great, Y OK" to "X great, Y terrible".

Not really, the same people will have endless empathy for cold blooded killer, who murdered her three children!

It is just good old misandry!

The internet feels like one those shitty religious villages were everyone is gossiping.

Link to transcript and audio of the This Is Water commencement speech:

https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/

This is the main takeaway from all this.

normal people -- employed, in a relationship, with chores and hobbies to occupy their free time -- simply do not participate in the gender war on the Internet. most are blissfully unaware that it's even happening. the womanosphere is a mirror image of its critically panned counterpart -- a refuge for the unhappy and/or mentally ill, an obnoxiously loud minority.

Some of them would read this and still complain. There's no use in trying to please some very unhappy and likely single people online.

Wow, Reddit is horrible. Atrocious behavior. Leave your brains in the anteroom!

> Whoever sees this and it reminds them of their current relationship, DUMP HIM

> you can tell by the body language, lack of initiative, and lack of joy and welcome-ness for his woman and baby to be back, everything you need to know.

> There is a VERY good chance that when he realizes he went viral for being the *Poster Manchild* of taking your spouse for granted, of choosing to act like a parasitic blob

Modern Reddit provides a simulacrum of commentary. There are posts and people discusing these posts, but nobody understands or wants to know anything about the underlying topic. The lack of comprehension is crucial to the community.

If "she" refers to the LLM used by the author, sure. (The article is clearly mostly LLM-written/assisted)

That women could take over remodeling!

If only we truly knew how much divisive online content was generated from geopolitical adversaries…LLM or not.

Hopefully AI slop kills it