[HN Gopher] Social Cooling (2017)
___________________________________________________________________
Social Cooling (2017)
Author : laurex
Score : 362 points
Date : 2025-10-05 06:01 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.socialcooling.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.socialcooling.com)
| oytis wrote:
| I wouldn't blame the culture of conformity solely on social media
| really.
| lemonlearnings wrote:
| Not what this is about. It is more like everyone needs to earn
| stars on their star chart to survive and big techs algorithm
| decides who gets the stars.
| oytis wrote:
| Well, yes, and the argument is that it's bad, because people
| become less connected, can't freely speak their minds etc. My
| point is there are other, maybe more powerful reasons why
| people become less connected and might hesitate speaking
| their minds. Social media that exposes everything and saves
| everything forever sure helps though.
| an_ko wrote:
| Could you elaborate on what those "maybe more powerful
| reasons" are?
| oytis wrote:
| No, I don't feel qualified. But it looks to me that there
| were times when challenging authorities and questioning
| general opinion was cool, and these times ended before
| social media kicked in. Maybe urbanization and generally
| people not staying in one place long enough are to blame,
| not sure.
| kachapopopow wrote:
| I honestly love this as someone who never has a consistent
| identity in terms of the name I use online and not keeping a long
| history such as re-creating accounts whenever it is convenient.
|
| This is especially relevant on social media platforms where I
| don't want to feel like someone can just dig up something I've
| said or shared 5 years ago and use that against me. It also helps
| me stay myself without changing my behavior to align with others.
| lemonlearnings wrote:
| Good but temporary. Big tech has your browser fingerprint
| against that plus LLMs will probably be able to match it again
| by text using cosine similarly.
|
| Maybe you use tails everywhere and run what you say through
| LLMs to rephrase. Might be OK then.
| kachapopopow wrote:
| oh I've accepted that. luckily I have GDPR on my side.
| hobs wrote:
| With that use case you either dont have enough anonymity,
| or will forget the number of identities and leave a lot of
| traces, like admitting you are in the euro zone.
| komali2 wrote:
| {
|
| concerned_with_privacy: true,
|
| online_usernames: ['kachapopopow', ...]
|
| }
|
| ;)
|
| As someone else mentioned, most likely you've been
| fingerprinted. But at least yes you can't be looked up
| directly, only if someone uses a databroker.
| krets wrote:
| True, you don't need to be impossible to be fingerprinted. If
| someone really wanted to track you manually using
| databrokers, be my guest :) But for most people here I think
| it's about not being the easiest prey. And make the automatic
| and general algorithms hard to track you.
| komali2 wrote:
| The "my bike lock is better than yours" strategy of
| personal information security :p
| timeon wrote:
| For this you need to change more than just account. The way you
| write is your fingerprint. Concrete example with HN accounts
| was posted and tried several times.
| Wistar wrote:
| Good thing I use AI to do all my writing.
| eastbound wrote:
| This website analyzes speech to find your probable alternative
| names on HN. It's probably easy to recoup a few more signals to
| find your name on other apps:
|
| https://stylometry.net/user?username=kachapopopow
|
| NB: Seems offline, but it was quite efficient !
| cluckindan wrote:
| Unless you rotate IPs and browser fingerprints for each
| identity and alter your visited sites, usage patterns, typing
| speed and style, mouse movements etc. etc. the data brokers
| will be able to connect your "inconsistent" identities.
| Jensson wrote:
| Most attacks on people are done by those who just google your
| name and see what comes up so some very minor privacy work
| helps a lot. Its a lot of work to be completely safe but its
| very little work to be basically safe.
| cluckindan wrote:
| This was not about targeted attacks/doxxing, but systemic
| data gathering and enrichment.
| Jensson wrote:
| The comment you responded talked about attacks/doxxing:
|
| > I don't want to feel like someone can just dig up
| something I've said or shared 5 years ago and use that
| against me
| rapnie wrote:
| This page dates from 2017. See also earlier submissions:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24627363 (2692 upvotes, 1099
| comments)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14585882 (389 upvotes, 190
| comments)
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! Macroexpanded:
|
| _Like Oil Leads to Global Warming, Data Leads to Social
| Cooling_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38482582 - Dec
| 2023 (15 comments)
|
| _The reputation economy is turning us into conformists (2017)
| [video]_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28744471 - Oct
| 2021 (204 comments)
|
| _What Is Social Cooling?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25746131 - Jan 2021 (246
| comments)
|
| _Social Cooling (2017)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24627363 - Sept 2020 (1058
| comments)
|
| _Social Cooling - How big data is increasing pressure to
| conform_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14585882 - June
| 2017 (185 comments)
| dmazin wrote:
| It's important to note that this page is almost 10 years old.
|
| I do find myself self-censoring in 2025, but it's for a far more
| boring reason than surveillance capitalism. It's because leaders
| on the far right literally said people should snitch on each
| other and dox each other.
|
| Much as I hate to say it, I'm sure people on the right have felt
| the same way for at least a decade.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| Personally it's the ownership of the company I work for and the
| desire to retain most international travel privileges.
| mantas wrote:
| It's not specifically far-right thing. The left are snitching
| and doxing people for the last decade if not longer.
| GardenLetter27 wrote:
| PyCon was the turning point. I used to have accounts under my
| real name in Slashdot etc. before then.
| tjpnz wrote:
| TBF the individual at the center of it did suffer
| consequences. They were fired and struggled to find
| employment after the fact, and PyCon updated their attendee
| rules to include a clause on public shaming.
| manapause wrote:
| The tactic become normalized amongst the extremes of both
| sides. " 5% of the wizards casting 85% of the spells."
| timeon wrote:
| Not sure if you have read whole comment before posting
| this...
|
| Yes it was common from every corner before. However now, it
| is encouraged from the governments. That means any laws that
| could help from cyber- or any other form of bullying will
| disappear. No matter how one think it was weak in practice,
| freedom of expression is going disappear completely.
| mantas wrote:
| Eh. Here we had some leftists in previous government. They
| had fancy idea to make hate speech an administrative
| offense. Because apparently penal offense process was too
| complex so they couldn't trial as many people for online
| comments as they wished.
|
| On top of that, they tried to change defamation law to
| include not only factually wrong information, but also make
| it a libel if the person felt like it was offensive.
|
| Thankfully neither of above passed. Especially since we
| have a different crop of lunatics now who would be happy to
| abuse above laws...
| binaryturtle wrote:
| I definitely try to avoid any public statement of political
| nature online. You never know how the tide will turn at some
| point and who gets into power. And then you do not want to have
| a record of having said the wrong thing about the new guy(s) at
| the top in your past.
| sethammons wrote:
| This could also chill the social pressure caused by knowing
| other's opinions. Less pressure for conformity, leading to
| more fringe positions. Maybe.
| komali2 wrote:
| Is the self censoring of big boy and girl worlds like "murder,"
| "suicide," "execution," "Nazi," and "genocide" on videos and
| posts related to this? It's been driving me crazy. Do not go
| quietly into that night and whatnot... Do not comply in advance.
|
| The idea of changing my speech so my words look nice next to a
| Toyota advertisement fills me with disgust and anger.
| atoav wrote:
| Well this has to do with the simple fact that social media
| reduces the reach of posts containing certain of those words.
| So if you want to talk about them and reach people..
|
| I wish those outraged with liberal "cancel-culture" would
| actually care about free speech, instead of only wh3n it suits
| their narratives.
| rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote:
| There's a variant of "cancel culture" that's actually just
| trial by publicity and I think that's objectively a bad
| thing.
|
| But often, people in social media are just looking for
| attention by deliberately inciting outrage, posting their
| "hot takes" and making controversial statements--and then
| when other people with opposing views reply to disagree, the
| original posters start crying about "cancel culture" when, in
| fact, it's just plain old disagreement in public discourse.
|
| What needs to happen here is for people to take
| accountability in what they post in social media, and to take
| it as seriously as saying their opinions out loud in a
| physical, public space. If you're deliberately inciting anger
| by saying something that puts a group of people at a
| disadvantage, don't be surprised if someone from that group
| stands up to fight back. Your right to free speech does not
| mean protection from humiliation for the stupid things that
| you say in public.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| It's probably better to just stop using social media. (And
| stop tolerating people that do.)
|
| I doubt that even something as 'light' on that spectrum as
| Hacker News is worthwhile enough compared to the non-
| social-media alternatives. (As a reminder, you _can_ have a
| tree-like discussion structure without an upvote system.)
| harvey9 wrote:
| Have an ironic upvote. HN's system of not explicitly
| showing post scores and using accumulated score to give
| access to downvote buttons etc is the least bad that I
| have encountered.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| No, its to avoid auto downranking, by which ever filter the
| platform uses.
|
| You can use all those words, but then, the theory goes, STT and
| OCR interprets the "bad" words and limits the reach of them.
| trinix912 wrote:
| But isn't this part of the problem? People just self-censor
| to not be censored.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| If only content that follows the censor rules survives the
| censor, is that "self" censorship? That just sounds like
| plain ol' censorship.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| This is how curse words are born. Which is funnily appropriate
| because English is really lacking in this department.
| zahlman wrote:
| > English is really lacking in this department.
|
| Really? As compared to what?
|
| I would have said Japanese is the language that _actually_
| lacks in this department.
| harrisoned wrote:
| That's something that drives me crazy as well. I don't actually
| use the big 'algorithmic social media' sites, only Telegram and
| Discord mostly, and seeing screenshots/memes with those words
| censored there made me wonder why, at first. Then i saw people
| auto-censoring themselves in those places where there's no such
| thing as algorithmic de-ranking. The social media generation
| already find it normal, acceptable, and is specially ironic to
| me that a lot of people who are vocal against those services
| have conformed to what they say to stand against.
|
| That behavior also highlights how people within those services
| care so much about reach, clout, 'going viral', instead of
| communicating with other people.
| blargey wrote:
| Euphemism and dogwhistles to continue openly discussing the
| same things sounds like the opposite of compliance and self-
| censorship.
| rapnie wrote:
| I find that awareness of the deep rabbit hole of surveillance
| capitalism, and how it increasingly extends into political and
| ideological realms to wield power and influence, makes me feel
| uneasy on all the physical gadgets I see all around me. And also
| the pervasive use of camera's _everywhere_ , that send video
| streams into the cloud where numerous AI applications do who
| knows what with the data.
|
| Like in the Netherlands in the Jumbo supermarket chain, which is
| the first to introduce an AI glaring at you through the camera
| while you walk through the store, and at the checkout self-scan,
| doing sentiment analysis to see if you are suspicious. It feels
| outright dystopic, and I avoid the Jumbo if I can. Also it is
| crazy how Tesla camera platforms are surveilling the streets of
| the world for the richest man in the world.
|
| It seems these tech developments have cooling effects on society
| in the physical space. Cooling effects that serve the ones in
| power, I suppose.
| noobermin wrote:
| The good thing about younger zoomers and alpha is they've already
| incorporated this into their lives, so none of this is grotesque
| or surprising. They've adapted their culture to match.
| maldonad0 wrote:
| That is not a good thing. It means they have internalized this
| level of control and slavery. Finding comfort in the
| panopticon.
| presentation wrote:
| You don't need some kind of "social score" to have the chilling
| effect, if anything I think people self censor more because of
| the fear of getting berated by others for their beliefs--both by
| those they know and don't.
|
| Interestingly I don't think it's really "cooling" that happened -
| if anything it's been some people becoming extremely hot, and
| then the majority of people, myself included, are experiencing
| cooling.
|
| Unfortunately liberals lately reinforce this by being vitriolic
| over everything and endorsing toxic behaviors like cutting off
| friends and family because they disagree on politics, which
| probably undermines the democratic ideals they think they're
| defending. [1]
|
| I consider myself overall more aligned with liberals, but as a
| recent example, it disheartens me to open Facebook after a long
| time and see so many people I knew from years past reveling in
| Charlie Kirk's death as though that makes their cause more
| sympathetic to alienate anyone who might have agreed with things
| he said (even if I generally don't). This just reinforces
| division and increases the social cooling effect.
|
| [1] https://open.substack.com/pub/theargument/p/were-not-all-
| goi...
| ivape wrote:
| [flagged]
| N_Lens wrote:
| I wonder if I should upvote or downvote you, and what that
| will say about my HN profile to "big data analyses"
| immibis wrote:
| It doesn't matter. If you vote on politics a lot, a
| moderator will set your account so the votes don't do
| anything. HN is the illusion of user-generated content.
| globalnode wrote:
| O_o
| eastbound wrote:
| > The racism and selfishness of right-wing politics is just
| ... ugh, honestly, I just can't. It's Godless.
|
| The first step would be to humbly recognize your side's
| shortcomings. To me, aiding the destruction of malls,
| pardoning authors of crimes is bad, protesting against having
| borders is worse and defunding the police is a hallmark of
| criminality (and before you say it: Defunding doesn't mean
| rearranging, it means defunding, according to protesters on
| your camp).
|
| There are two essential Christian concepts that you skip when
| you unilaterally hold your opponent for contempt of humanity:
|
| - Those who have never sinned should throw the first stone,
|
| - Pardon.
|
| Once you become milder in your accusations, maybe we can
| design a common world where we have common principles. I'd
| say those principles should be etched into law, but your side
| is against law enforcement, so it's a bit complicated.
| rkomorn wrote:
| > Once you become milder in your accusations
|
| ...
|
| > but your side is against law enforcement
| eastbound wrote:
| It's easy to say "The other camp is extreme, so we have
| to", but you're welcome if you have any proposal.
|
| My proposal is: I think an extreme lot of my camp would
| switch if there was an ethical left, with strong ethics
| but also not prone to degrading whites.
|
| What's your proposal?
| rkomorn wrote:
| My proposal is that you drop the holier than thou
| attitude.
| eastbound wrote:
| And what will it do?
| rkomorn wrote:
| It'll help make you look like someone who actually
| practices what they preach.
| eastbound wrote:
| Ok, so your goal is not to share the governance of a
| country together?
|
| With your proposal, I make concessions (which, by all
| means, is the concession that I stop arguing, so that's a
| general concession on the idea of negotiating together
| entirely), while you don't make concessions, and then we
| don't govern the country together, is it correct?
|
| Sounds like extremism to me. Either _you_ get the power,
| either _we_ do, but it's a struggle of power if you do
| not engage in listening.
|
| The goal is discussion is that you will discover points
| on which you can compromise without hurting your values,
| and we do as well, until we deal together. But it seems
| Americans have lost that. Which is mirrored by the line
| of your party: "Don't engage with the other party. No
| concession."
|
| It is one-sided. The discussion has always been open on
| the right, but people moved to the right because the
| discussion was closed on the left.
| rkomorn wrote:
| You're completely missing the point of my original
| response to you.
|
| You're sanctimoniously telling "us" to make milder
| accusations, then nearly immediately accusing us of being
| against law enforcement.
|
| That is an entirely non-mild accusation, to the point
| that I consider it entirely discredits the rest of your
| comments because of how hypocritical it makes you look.
|
| It's rhetoric that doesn't entitle you to the good faith
| engagement you supposedly want.
| immibis wrote:
| You suggested it first (for other people), so you surely
| know the answer to this question already?
| VagabundoP wrote:
| Many of the religious views I see coming out of the US
| right now aren't Christian, ie following Christ, but some
| Abrahamic[1] mishmash wrapped up in jingoism.
|
| [1] not sure what to call it maybe fundamentalism.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| Ok, so it looks like you conveniently skipped over your own
| first step.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| This sort of vague, association-based reasoning can be used
| to prove anything. The US is a country with over 200 years of
| history, currently with hundreds of millions of citizens. You
| can cherry-pick whatever "visuals" from whatever "inflection
| points" you want, in order to prove whatever conclusion you
| want.
|
| For example, here is a thread on /r/AmerExit, a subreddit you
| would expect to have an anti-American bias, on racism in the
| EU vs the US. The strong consensus is that EU racism is
| worse:
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/AmerExit/comments/17g68zx/pervasive.
| ..
|
| Or here is the Wikipedia page on charitable giving by
| country, which shows the US is easily the most generous
| nation in the world as a fraction of GDP:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_charitabl.
| ..
|
| If you learn about the history of other countries, you'll
| find that they usually have dark stuff in their past as well.
| You claim that standing up against Nazis is "very low hanging
| fruit", but there's a considerable list of countries which
| cooperated substantially with the Nazis, including Italy,
| Japan, Romania, Croatia, the USSR, etc. France was torturing
| thousands of Algerians who were fighting for their
| independence as recently as the 1960s.
|
| Ultimately this entire project of trying to discover and
| interrogate a "national character" is a little silly in my
| opinion. Especially through the sort of cherry-picking I did
| above. Yes, it's a very popular topic of internet flamewars.
| But I've never seen compelling evidence that "national
| character" has significant predictive value. People are
| people wherever you go, people respond to incentives, etc. We
| should default to structural explanations for human behavior,
| rather than explanations based on "national character".
|
| For example, consider this recent Substack post on how
| climate caused the US Civil War:
| https://substack.com/home/post/p-170433170
|
| I expect the majority of historical events can be explained
| in the manner of that Substack post, if you look hard enough.
| Same way I'm rather skeptical of "Great Man" theories of
| history, I'm also rather skeptical of "Great Nation" or
| "Great Culture" theories of history.
| ivape wrote:
| _I 'm also rather skeptical of "Great Nation" or "Great
| Culture" theories of history._
|
| Quoting Hateful Eight:
|
| _"So, I'm supposed to freeze to death 'cause you find it
| hard to believe?"_ - Chris Mannix
|
| I can't do anything about your skepticism.
|
| There's about 7-10 things I casually left out, no cherry
| picking in sight.
|
| You can't figure out that Lincoln was a great man, then
| what else is there to say? We're taking decades of slavery
| if something didn't compel him. Half the country still
| fought him, and half the country still partook in on going
| racism for over a hundred years, with zero let up since
| 1860s up to, literally, 2025.
|
| I can't help you with discernment.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| When you think about it, it's not an entirely new concept. Yes,
| during last 60 years the west developed a strong culture of
| independent thought, but when you zoom out, strict mind control
| through social norms has been, well, the norm. Most societies
| through most of history would severely punish you for even
| daring to think of speaking up.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| If you have a better solution to the paradox of tolerance, I'm
| all ears.
|
| (People still using platforms : the likes of Facebook, Discord,
| LinkedIn, Github, or ChatGPT being amongst the ones that
| undermine democratic ideals and that ought to be socially
| shamed, and, in some cases, beaten up.)
| msuniverse2026 wrote:
| When you come to a paradox its probably better to reassess
| axioms than embrace the paradox.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| We're talking about unsolved philosophical issues here,
| matters of barely stable equilibriums.
|
| Would you rather be <<team Plato>>, ruled by enlightened
| 'philosopher-kings' ? Comes with its own set of issues.
|
| P.S.: Also, it's probably only a real paradox if you
| conflate the levels of application : what is really
| problematic is the systems that result in increased
| intolerance.
| immibis wrote:
| Can you be more concrete about this? How would you resolve
| this specific paradox without throwing out any obviously
| true axioms or introducing any obviously false ones? If it
| was easily resolved, it wouldn't be called a paradox.
|
| Banach-Tarski is a paradox. You can resolve it by deleting
| the axiom of choice. But the axiom of choice is obviously
| true, at least as much as B-T is obviously false. That's
| why it's a "paradox" and not just "a proof that the axiom
| of choice is false"
| harvey9 wrote:
| Do you mean you want to metaphorically beat up a website, or
| literally beat up people whose views you disagree with?
| immibis wrote:
| I think they mean arrest and jail time. Which is a form of
| violence.
| zahlman wrote:
| > Unfortunately liberals lately reinforce this by being
| vitriolic over everything and endorsing toxic behaviors like
| cutting off friends and family because they disagree on
| politics
|
| Perhaps some American left-wingers do. But these behaviours are
| fundamentally the opposite of _liberal_ and I would like to see
| the label taken back from them.
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| [flagged]
| gloxkiqcza wrote:
| This presentation is more likely to engage typical social media
| users (ie people not on HN) which is apparently the goal of the
| website.
| nkrisc wrote:
| We are clearly not the target audience. What an awful way to
| read anything.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| As other people have noted, this is an old site, they also note
| that genz have partially learnt from our mistakes, and turned to
| ephemeral media, amongst other things.
|
| The rise of AR glasses will of course kneecap anonymity in "real
| life"
|
| But I look at the general collapse of "civility" in the USA and
| cant help but think of
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink
| dimal wrote:
| Interesting. We're not dealing with actual overcrowding now,
| but with the constant din of social media and news, society
| _feels_ overcrowded. You used to be able to live in blissful
| ignorance of what was happening in other areas, but now you can
| only do that if you avoid news and social media completely.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| >the general collapse of "civility"
|
| Yes, I can't help but think that things turned out exactly the
| opposite of how this site predicted. In my view, it would be a
| _good_ thing if people were a little more self-conscious about
| what they wrote on social media!
| blargey wrote:
| re "behavioral sink" that wikipedia article is kind of a
| credulous stub that's missing the pile of criticisms of the
| "Universe 25" experiment (lack of reproducibility, much of the
| dysfunction being attributable to how the setting trapped the
| population in each other's scent+sight lines, akin to shoving
| humans in a transparent panopticon and calling it a test of
| urban life)
| sethammons wrote:
| I hate being that guy. Scroll is broken on this site.
|
| Firefox on iPhone: if you are swiping to go down a few lines then
| swipe up to center what you are reading, the page position jumps,
| and if you continue to swipe down, it jumps again.
| arthurofbabylon wrote:
| The Americans (+) who grew up with constant surveillance (social
| media, cameras everywhere) aim for ordinariness. The entire
| generation is less likely to express a non-consensus opinion than
| prior generations. For good reason: with everything being
| recorded and broadcast, personal errors are both accentuated and
| persist longer with no corresponding rise in upside. Bold
| opinions and creative ideas are simply too risky under such an
| equation.
|
| I find this sad and worrisome. I like chaos and healthy
| disorderliness. I enjoy skilled conversationalists with fresh
| ideas. And I worry about a "chilled" populace too afraid to
| express morality when it becomes socially inconvenient.
|
| (+ Footnote: It isn't just Americans but youth coming of age in
| every culture. The "social cooling" effect is more pronounced
| among Americans as they exhibit greater variance in expression in
| the first place and thus have more to move toward the baseline.)
| honkostani wrote:
| It helps to be already social isolated and socially suicidal.
| The freedom to think and speak, once again resides in a barrel
| and not with those who emptied it, who must stick to stagnant
| ideas with no explanation and prediction power.
|
| (the sun will disappear August 23, 2044). True science. true
| knowledge puts itself to the test, by performing predictions
| and miracles. Everything else just ain't. Typed on a miracle, a
| electrically state-full rock, predicatively turning up and on
| every morning.
| baxtr wrote:
| My best friend from school days has a son who's now in 7th
| grade.
|
| Recently, when we were talking about him, we realised his
| school years are far less dramatic than ours. We had drama,
| lots of bullying, tears, fights, and mean things were done.
|
| In contrast, his son's school days are absolutely harmless and
| benign.
|
| I know it's n = 1 and maybe we were very unlucky back then. But
| it also makes me wonder if any chaotic experience is worth
| having.
| microtonal wrote:
| I think it is really hard to extrapolate from single
| examples. My first two years were a little like that. Then I
| had to repeat a school year, got in the nicest class
| imaginable and had five incredibly fun years that I look back
| at with a lot of fondness.
|
| Having a kid myself, I think life is much worse now. There is
| the constant unconscious fear of getting filmed, etc. It was
| much easier for my generation to just experiment, do stupid
| stuff, etc., you know being a child/teenager, without the
| fear of repercussions.
| diggan wrote:
| > Having a kid myself, I think life is much worse now.
| There is the constant unconscious fear of getting filmed,
| etc. It was much easier for my generation to just
| experiment, do stupid stuff, etc., you know being a
| child/teenager, without the fear of repercussions.
|
| I don't know what generation you belong to, but I was still
| in school when mobile phones that could record video became
| "good enough" that most of my peers in school had them,
| today I'm ~33. But we were also thinking about that sort of
| stuff, especially when we were doing stuff you kind of
| don't want to be public, and there was a few cases of
| embarrassing things "leaking" which obviously suck.
|
| But I'm not sure how different it is today? Maybe it's more
| acceptable to film people straight in their faces, and less
| accepted to slap the phone out of people's hand if they're
| obnoxious about it? In the end, it doesn't feel like a
| "new" problem anymore, as it seems like this all started
| more than 15 years ago and we had fears about being filmed
| already then.
| microtonal wrote:
| _I don 't know what generation you belong to, but I was
| still in school when mobile phones that could record
| video became "good enough" that most of my peers in
| school had them, today I'm ~33._
|
| Ten years older. I'm from West-Europe and most people
| only got dumbphones around the time I was 18-19 (~2000
| and mostly adults or 17-18 year olds). Phones with
| cameras became widespread quite a few years later. Even
| when I got an iPhone in 2009, most people were still
| using good old dumbphone/feature phone Nokias. After 2009
| it changed very quickly. I think that aligns with you
| being 10 years younger + adoption in the US (assuming
| that you are in the US) being earlier.
|
| Phones were simply not a factor when I was in high
| school. If you had to call someone on-the-go, you would
| use one of the many public phone booths and a pre-charged
| card (there were always rumors that you could spay them
| with hairspray to get unlimited credit :D). But that
| almost never happened, you'd mostly just meet people IRL
| if you wanted to socialize.
| diggan wrote:
| I think where I grew up (Sweden) it started with the Sony
| Ericsson "Walkman" family of phones that could record
| 320x240 videos I think or something like that, and I
| think I was around 15 when they became almost ubiquitous
| at school, so must have been around 2006/2007.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Yes, but there was no social media, just MSN messenger on
| your PC at home, and you had to transfer the photos and
| videos from the SonyEricsson/Nokia phone via USB cable or
| bluetooth to the PC and then send via MSN, or send
| directly to a friend in person via Bluetooth or infrared
| which took super long for a single shitty image.
|
| It's just not comparable to how it is today with phones
| with HD cameras that are constantly online.
|
| I'm basically the last generation that didn't have this
| always-online social media in high school, and "going
| online" was an intentional thing, you logged in to MSN
| messenger and logged out a bit later. You saw a friend
| logged in, you said hi, chatted some, then said bye, and
| you or they logged off.
| jacquesm wrote:
| This massively depends on where you are located and on the
| school itself. A 5 km difference can be a completely
| different world. When we moved in 2018 one of my kids could
| not immediately go to the school we favored. But the other
| one could and then in the next year the fact that he already
| had a brother in that school would give him preferred access.
| Those two schools could not have been different. The one was
| an endless list of tragedies, fights and other crap, the
| other was on a completely different level, never a problem
| and this seemed to hold true for different classes in that
| same school as well. I think the cumulative effect of that
| one year was such that he ended up going to a different level
| of secondary education, even though cognitively the two
| brothers are not all that different.
|
| So that's n=2, not quite n=1, still anecdata but maybe it
| will help someone who thinks that all schools are equal and
| good.
| drivebyhooting wrote:
| I'm awed that you can be so sanguine when speaking about
| the abuse your son suffered and the lifelong consequences.
|
| I'd be livid and frothing with vitriol.
| patcon wrote:
| First off: thanks for sharing how you experience your
| protective instincts. I can feel your love for your kid
|
| With that said --
|
| Wha... your and my reads are so _different_... I hear
| that as: One lived in the real world that most normal
| unchosen people experience, and the other had means to
| avoid said world?
|
| "Abuse" feels strong, bc putting the select (usually
| wealthy) kids in the safest place and not choosing
| responsibility/stake in remediating the larger shared
| experience, that feels like the larger "condemnation to
| abuse" to me.
|
| I'm a pretty hardcore collectivist though, and I
| understand that's not everyone's value system *shrug*
| testaccount28 wrote:
| yes. one should raise one's kids in only the toughest
| most unrelenting environment. arctic tundra, perhaps, or
| federal prison. anything else is unfair and abusive to
| others.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I am not sanguine about it, I just want to make sure that
| the idea that all schools are beds of roses today does
| not take hold because I've seen first hand that this is
| not the case. And if that can happen in a wealthy part of
| a wealthy country it can happen just about everywhere. In
| the meantime I've done what I could to offset the
| difference and am still working hard to make sure my kids
| get all of the chances in life that they deserve. But
| detours can and do happen, you won't be able to fix it by
| head-on confrontation so you have to fix it through other
| means, which usually translate into spending time and
| money.
| martin-t wrote:
| From what I've seen, all that has happened is that aggressors
| ("bullies") are better at hiding it.
|
| When it was OK to beat somebody up (for pleasure or social
| status), they did that. Now, violence is being painted as the
| greatest evil. So instead they get pleasure and gain social
| status by less visible kinds of aggression, such as verbal,
| social and online abuse.
|
| And, worse, the victims have a harder time fighting back
| because
|
| - Fewer people notice the abuse - fighting is visible but
| veiled insinuations or in-jokes at the victim's expense are
| hard to notice and understand by onlookers.
|
| - Responding to verbal abuse with physical retaliation would
| be seen as an escalation.
| watwut wrote:
| Verbal and social abuse always went hand in hand with the
| physical one. Physical bullying is just one tactic bullies
| used. The same bully that beats a guy always mocked the
| same guy and badmouthed him to others.
|
| I am old enough to remember that bullying victims were
| blamed back then. The victim blaming was not a term yet,
| they were blamed for not fighting back. But if they fought
| back they were also blamed for the resulting ruckus.
|
| The primary reason was that dealing with bully is hard.
| Blaming victim is easy.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I'm shocked how all this crept up across society. Maybe I was
| just naive, but still. A society is a very subtle fabric, and
| the last 20 years distorted a lot of aspect of this fragile
| equilibrium.
| captainkrtek wrote:
| How do you think the current political climate has shifted
| this? It seems maybe individuals won't express a non conformist
| view as easily, but politics has grown more extreme in terms of
| what acceptable positions are in the first place.
| Esophagus4 wrote:
| Unfortunately, the current political climate, with
| retribution against political enemies, has greatly increased
| self-censorship[1]
|
| https://criticalissues.umd.edu/feature/academic-self-
| censors...
| csomar wrote:
| > And I worry about a "chilled" populace too afraid to express
| morality when it becomes socially inconvenient.
|
| The social cooling effect always existed. It is just,
| previously, information and reactions traveled way slower. We
| are just adjusting to the new speed. Culture is a complex
| emergent product of the various basic human interactions. My
| guess is that this product doesn't make much sense when
| reactions travel fast as culture changes very slowly.
|
| So instead, the future will be culture-less. You decide your
| behavior everyday based on your first few (100)
| shorts/snaps/tiktoks of the morning. It does help that these
| snaps disappear by tomorrow. This new society will have no
| memory.
| ajross wrote:
| > The entire generation is less likely to express a non-
| consensus opinion than prior generations.
|
| I think that's pretty arguable, and I'd want to see actual
| research. Certainly kids today are _wildly_ more likely to
| embrace Stuff that Pisses Off their Elders than at any time
| since the 60 's counterculture revolution. Think gender
| fluidity and pronoun choice, body modification, protest
| culture, rejection of career paths, embrace of the "neuro-
| atypical" as routine personality types... all that seems
| qualitatively but inarguably higher than when I was growing up
| 30-40 years ago.
| polio wrote:
| This just happens to be the consensus opinion for their
| group. Kids have never cared about being accepted by people
| 20 years older than they are; kids have always cared about
| being accepted by their peers. Social cooling means that
| dissent from their peer group is harder.
| ajross wrote:
| > This just happens to be the consensus opinion for their
| group.
|
| That becomes non-falsifiable then. Everyone everywhere from
| every period in history has been part of some in-group or
| another with a consistent scripture/canon/creed/whatever.
| No one ( _especially_ nerd king HN commenters like us) is
| truly an independent thinker in the way you 're
| constructing.
|
| The claim upthread was that modern kids were afraid of
| consensus-breaking because of technological surveillance.
| And that's clearly false because they hate the surveillors
| with a passion and are _not_ quiet about those opinions.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| People say this but is it true? Young people, for instance,
| increasingly say that political violence may be justified. That
| doesn't sound like a safe opinion.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> Young people, for instance, increasingly say that
| political violence may be justified_
|
| This is gonna get downvoted for sure because HNs bias, but
| based on current events, it's only the left that does that.
|
| Right-wingers may say hurtful words but don't seem too keen
| on murdering opponents for political reasons or
| disagreements. At least not yet.
| estimator7292 wrote:
| Like a coup?
| nathan_compton wrote:
| Not really relevant to the point, but https://www.politico.
| com/news/magazine/2020/10/01/political-...
|
| That poll from 2020 shows republicans and democrats roughly
| equal on the question. It wouldn't surprise me to find that
| the desire for political violence goes up among those
| currently out of power, anyway.
| toomim wrote:
| Try this newer poll from last month, in 2025:
| https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/52960-charlie-
| kir...
| scoopdewoop wrote:
| Sit down. The right wing is actively zip-tying entire
| apartment complexes of poor people, even US citizens, while
| pointing guns in their faces. Thats violence, and exactly
| what the left has been ringing the alarm for for years.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| Um. There is a notable difference between state
| sanctioned violence, for which, state does claim monopoly
| and semi-random vigilantes. I am concerned that I even
| have to point this out ( edit ) that the two are not
| quite the same.
| scoopdewoop wrote:
| A gun in your mom's face is a gun in your mom's face. I
| don't think those kids will find any solace in that being
| state sanctioned.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| You may want to elaborate. Note that the emotional tone
| or non-plausible scenarios are not the way to advance
| your argument here. Still, I will counter to show some
| good faith.
|
| My mom would not have placed herself in a position where
| there is a gun in her face.
| scoopdewoop wrote:
| https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-border-patrol-raid-
| sweep... Is this a source you approve of?
|
| I am in good faith, I'm sorry that discussions about
| reality are impolite and seem crass. These aren't non-
| plausible, its reality.
|
| I'm guessing your mom doesn't place herself in situations
| like being in poverty in Chicago. Lucky her
| zaphar wrote:
| There are plenty of people in poverty who do not put
| themselves in a postion to have a government put guns in
| their face. It is not poverty by and large that causes a
| government to put guns in their face in America. Poverty
| may at times be used as a justification for the actual
| reason that a gun was put in their face but it is not in
| fact the reason. Neither is it in the general case a good
| justification either.
| scoopdewoop wrote:
| What are you talking about? Literally, what?
|
| Because I just linked a source: As part of the raid, some
| U.S. citizens were temporarily detained and children
| pulled from their beds, according to interviews with
| residents and news reports. Building hallways were still
| littered with debris two days later.
|
| What was these citizens crime besides living in
| apartments in Chicago? Flash bangs, guns, zip ties, and
| being detained until proven innocent. What did they do to
| put themselves in that position? Was I wrong to say its
| poverty?
|
| Or do you mean they should have been rural poor? Or white
| and poor? What was their trespass?
|
| I'm not talking about "by and large", I'm not talking
| about "may at times". These are real lives of citizens
| with "inalienable rights"
|
| If you think state sanctioned violence is permissible,
| tell it to Nuremberg
| zaphar wrote:
| I read the link you posted. As far as I can see there was
| in fact reasonable suspicion that there would be people
| in those locations who were not supposed to be there. I
| can both realize that it is traumatizing for those
| involved and also recognize that the situation exists
| because there are people who coming in who are not
| following the process for doing so and Chicago has
| positioned themselves as the place to look for them.
|
| Chicago as a group has positioned itself as welcoming to
| immigrants here illegally and antagonistic to finding and
| taking the appropriate legal action regarding people who
| aren't following the rules.
|
| This wasn't caused by poverty. This was caused by the
| combination of Chicago's political position putting them
| in conflict with ICE regarding the immigrants who don't
| follow the rules.
|
| If you want to prevent this sort of thing blaming it on
| poverty is concentrating on the wrong problem. The
| political climate in Chicago and Nationally is a much
| more useful place to put your focus on fixing.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| << What was these citizens crime besides living in
| apartments in Chicago?
|
| Friend. You want to cry me a river over militarization of
| police and following the basic rules of engagement, I am
| all ears. In the meantime, detained is not arrested.
| Based on your overall posture, I must assume that you
| know this. Hell, cop can detain you during a traffic stop
| if they so choose. How is it any different for a building
| full of people?
|
| You are upset, but it is not entirely clear to me why. In
| a sense, those inalienable rights were preserved if the
| above is understood, which means you are upset over
| something else.
|
| Can you focus on what that something else is? I am not
| egging you on. I am trying to understand your world
| model.
|
| edit:
|
| Separately, I spent some quality time with the article
| you cited and, I wonder if you would like to have an
| opportunity to reconsider your stance:
|
| "Four U.S. citizen children were taken from their parents
| during the raid because the parents lacked legal status,
| DHS said, alleging that one of the parents was a Tren de
| Aragua member."
|
| Sadly, this is the reality made by the permissive
| policies US has had. Does it suck? Yeah, but those kids
| wouldn't have been citizens if those people did not enter
| US illegally. Everything here stems from multiple
| cascading bad decisions. We are at a point, where public
| sympathy for this is.. low.
| tptacek wrote:
| These were not simple detentions; this was ICE taking
| every door in a 5 story apartment complex at 3:00AM, and
| detaining every single resident for over 4 hours. Nothing
| at all like the types of detention Justice Kavanaugh
| refers to when he talks about the minor inconvenience of
| a police stop-and-investigate detention.
| worik wrote:
| > My mom would not have placed herself in a position
| where there is a gun in her face.
|
| There you are blaming the victims.
|
| That is not cool
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| Hmm. You actually raise an interesting issue. What is, in
| your mind, cool?
| worik wrote:
| Blame the perpetrators.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| Interesting. Perpetrators suggests a crime. Separately,
| it suggests that you believe there is a known cause and a
| source of the malady.
|
| - If true, who, do you believe, the perpetrators are ( be
| as specific as you think you can be )?
|
| - If true, what do you believe the crime of those
| perpetrators is ( again, be as specific as you can )?
|
| - If true, who or what is, in your mind, ultimately
| responsible for the issue that has embroiled both victims
| and perpetrators?
| johnmaguire wrote:
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9335287/#s4
|
| > When compared to individuals associated with a right-wing
| ideology, individuals adhering to a left-wing ideology had
| 68% lower odds of engaging in violent (vs. nonviolent)
| radical behavior (b = -1.15, SE = 0.13, odds ratio [OR] =
| 0.32, P < 0.001).
| toomim wrote:
| That's using ancient data from... 1948:
|
| > We included individuals whose public exposure occurred
| between 1948 and 2018.
|
| The last 8 years of politics have been _very very_
| abnormal. And in today 's data, the "very liberal"
| approve of political violence at a rate of _24%_ vs. _3%_
| for the "very conservative":
|
| https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/52960-charlie-
| kir...
|
| This ^^^ is the troubling statistic, and there's a _7x_
| difference between the left and the right.
| acdha wrote:
| You're presenting the data for whether it's okay to be
| happy about a political figure's death, not whether it's
| okay to cause one. There's a section about this you
| should read starting with "YouGov's polling doesn't
| suggest that young people or liberals are more pro-
| violence in general", and in particular the stark divide
| about self-defense. None of this is great, but it's
| hardly surprising that a minority of younger people are
| more supportive of violence than people who have more
| life experience and fully-developed frontal cortexes.
| toomim wrote:
| Nice points!
|
| But as for "causing" violence, they also asked whether
| "political violence is ever justified", and the
| difference between left vs. right there was even more --
| 25% vs 3%.
| evilduck wrote:
| You're gonna get downvoted for being a bad liar and an
| obvious troll who degrades the conversation and the overall
| site, not because of bias.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melissa_Hortman
|
| Getting yourself downvoted doesn't validate your lies
| either. Farming downvotes isn't being clever, it's being
| toxic.
| toomim wrote:
| You're wrong that the Hortmans' killer was a right-
| winger. His name is Vance Luther Boelter, and he was
| actually employed by Governor Tim Waltz -- working for
| the Democrats. He said the reason he was upset was that
| Tim Waltz had ordered him to assassinate a politician
| [1,2].
|
| So I'm sorry, but this example works against you. This is
| internal political violence within Democrats.
|
| [1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/crime/general/bombshell-
| report-all...
|
| [2]
| https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25999675-vance-
| boelt...
|
| Let us come together and stop all the violence
| acdha wrote:
| His later years involved repeated strong statements
| against transgender and abortion rights which would be
| highly incompatible with being a Democrat but quite in
| line with the Trump supporter his neighbors described him
| as. He also had a history of lying - for example,
| claiming law enforcement, security, or military
| experience - and your description of that letter is
| highly skewed from the mess of conspiracy and likely
| misdirection people with direct knowledge described it
| as.
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/06/17/vance-
| boelt...
|
| https://www.startribune.com/vance-boelter-letter-
| klobuchar-w...
| alwa wrote:
| Today's "The Western Journal," that august organ of
| journalism which you cite here, also features such
| headlines as "Demonic Compulsion: School Ran Weekly
| Witchcraft Address, Shut It Down Once They Couldn't Force
| It on Christians Anymore."
|
| It saddens me to think that this kind of thing is
| permeating into HN.
| toomim wrote:
| Please see the primary source I just included as
| reference [2]. You don't need to trust the western
| journal. You can read the shooter's letter, in his own
| handwriting.
|
| In truth, he's more of a political nutcase than a
| political activist.
| ikiris wrote:
| Can we stop the fantasy land conspiracy posts like this
| first?
| martin-t wrote:
| Do they say it in public or private?
|
| Because yesterday I learned that 30% of Americans think
| political violence may be necessary to fix the country[0],
| which was gathered from anonymous polls I presume, yet I see
| almost none of it online and certainly not in mainstream
| media.
|
| And the censorship is certainly not helping.
|
| My friend got multiple warnings and temporary bans on reddit
| for suggesting that:
|
| - The only hope for democracy in Russia is a violent
| revolution. From what got banned and what didn't, we gather
| it's OK to talk about revolution, less OK about violent
| revolution and not allowed to talk about killing people.
| Well, how does reddit think revolutions work? People have to
| get killed or have a very high chance of being killed to give
| up power "voluntarily".
|
| - That their dictator should be sentenced to death by the ICC
| and executed. She managed to appeal this one because she
| phrased it as a court ordered killing ("execution") with the
| caveat that the court would legalize anyone killing him
| (since the ICC cannot reach him to arrest him but somebody
| close to him might be able to do it and could use protection
| is he managed to escape).
|
| So pro-tip to avoid _some_ censorship: frame it as a change
| of law or a legal process.
|
| [0]: https://whatthefuckjusthappenedtoday.com/2025/10/02/day-
| 1717...
| AuthAuth wrote:
| > yesterday I learned that 30% of Americans think political
| violence may be necessary to fix the country[0], which was
| gathered from anonymous polls I presume, yet I see almost
| none of it online and certainly not in mainstream media.
|
| They are absolutely saying it in public and private. I hold
| that opinion and so does every politically engaged person i
| know. Its heavily censored on the mainstream platforms but
| you can see the messages conveying this sentiment in a semi
| coded way.
| tuyosvawnt wrote:
| A podcast bro cites scripture saying queers need to get
| stoned, he gets a stone to the neck himself. "Let He Who
| Is Without Sin Cast the First". Badda bing badda boom.
| Lotta angry people.
| toomim wrote:
| You're making a debunked claim that takes his statement
| out of context to make it sound like the opposite of what
| he actually said.
|
| https://x.com/StephenKing/status/1966474125616013664
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-dMa3rIcjY
|
| https://youtu.be/1pteZE5FpNc?si=UG2jJZovGldIJKJ0&t=1559
|
| This has the effect of whipping up political anger and
| violence against people based on false pretenses. You are
| an embodiment of the problem.
| martin-t wrote:
| And this is why I say I don't have an opinion on his
| killing.
|
| It's really easy to lie online (both mechanically by just
| taking stuff out of context as you showed and because
| people face no punishment for it).
|
| _That being said, if I had an opinion, only one of the
| possible sides is OK to say publicly and I think that 's
| wrong._
|
| For example, one of the claims I heard is that he was
| orchestrating/supporting harassment of college professors
| through his Turning Point organization. Now, harassment
| can lead to suicide, driving innocent people to suicide
| is murder, a just punishment for murder is death, and
| when a punishment is just then it doesn't matter who
| carries it out as long as they have a sufficient standard
| of proof.
|
| So depending on whether that claim is true, how
| "successful" he was and the morality of several logical
| inferences (which is subjective but for each
| statement/inference you will find a lot of people
| supporting it), a sane and rational person could
| perfectly justify the killing.
|
| ---
|
| Most people are hypocrites. And what they really hate is
| when somebody tries to apply a consistent moral system to
| themselves and others. Not just because it puts them to
| shame (most people never try to be consistent and they
| know it even if they'd never admit it out loud or even to
| themselves). But also because when you apply consistent
| rules to severe offenses, you very quickly get very
| severe punishments and people are not comfortable with
| the idea that they too could be punished in this manner.
|
| ---
|
| As another example, I hate when people try to vilify him
| by quoting him saying some dead children are OK because
| that's the price for the right to bear arms. Yes,
| innocent people (including children) dying is sad and
| wrong. But what do they think happens when nobody has
| guns? First, people would still kill each other using
| other tools, even mass murder wouldn't magically stop
| because car ramming attacks seem to be on the rise. But,
| second, a long term effect is that people in positions of
| power who are unaccountable through legal means are no
| longer accountable through extra-legal means.
|
| _One of the first things every dictatorship does is
| restricting access to guns and confiscating them._
|
| Yes, high gun ownership has a continual price but
| low/zero ownership has a much higher one-time price and
| after that it no longer matters what people think.
| johnfn wrote:
| I'm not sure exactly how you mean it, but a lot of the
| discourse around political violence itself fits in the
| Overton window of acceptable discourse, so this doesn't
| surprise me too much.
|
| But I find statements outside of the Overton window to be
| punished quite severely, and I think most people now
| understand that you can very easily lose your job for stating
| the incorrect thing.
| Razengan wrote:
| > _For good reason: with everything being recorded and
| broadcast, personal errors are both accentuated and persist
| longer with no corresponding rise in upside. Bold opinions and
| creative ideas are simply too risky under such an equation._
|
| Or, repression will build up for so long that it will explode.
| N_Lens wrote:
| Article from 2015 (should be in the title)
| henearkr wrote:
| Pity that "social cooling" gets attached to that meaning instead
| of, e.g., the fact to favorise, in internet discussions, themes
| that unite and reunite people, promote empathy and kindness,
| curiosity, tolerance and positive mindset, etc.
| commandersaki wrote:
| "Social Cooling", censorship, and self-censorship is a big reason
| why Trump is in office.
| necovek wrote:
| I would say that the fact people have had to self-censor when
| they held "conservative" views instead of engaging in public
| discourse without being villified is why they had to turn to
| someone like Trump when they were handing in their ballots.
|
| If they felt safe, perhaps more of them would have appreciated
| the other side's arguments (and vice versa, obviously).
|
| Is that what you meant? Or why did self-censorship help get
| Trump into power twice?
| Marazan wrote:
| Oh. What conservative views are those?
| Jensson wrote:
| That men shouldn't go to women's bathrooms. Trump focused
| pretty hard on that sort of issue last election.
| lyu07282 wrote:
| I think that's just a liberal fantasy, it's simply
| people's lives got worse over the last few decades under
| end-stage liberalism/capitalism, Trump successfully made
| a (albeit bullshit) case for genuine change, liberals
| didn't. If liberals hold on to that myth, that all they
| have to do to win is throw trans people and immigrants
| under the bus, then they will loose again. What they
| should focus on is the fact that no your lives didn't
| improve because we took trans people's rights away and
| threw some brown children in concentration camps, your
| rent didn't go down did it? So instead perhaps it's your
| landlord we should be focusing our anger towards...
|
| See that for social cooling: I just pissed off everybody.
| It can be done lmao
| dmje wrote:
| Not using the hellscape of modern social media solves the
| problem, no?
| pornel wrote:
| Unless lack of social media presence will be taken as a signal
| that you have something to hide, you terrorist/bot.
| globalnode wrote:
| I dont know? does non participation now flag you as a problem
| person? (playing devils advocate: i dont participate in any
| social media besides HN)
| etrautmann wrote:
| No? Most of my peers don't participate in social media
| anymore. I know few people who post online on almost any
| platforms outside of group chats.
| dmje wrote:
| Same. My sons are 21 and 18, both are fairly typical of
| their peer group - they belong to and participate in Insta,
| Snapchat etc but it's very much small private groups and
| not public posting.
| derelicta wrote:
| The social credit score doesn't exist in China. There were
| attempts in some cities with very restricted scopes but they were
| phased out.
|
| On the other hand, in Europe and with the coming chat control
| regulations, these systems will likely emerge in the West.
| clort wrote:
| Perhaps you can explain something then, since you appear to be
| knowledgeable on this matter. On this[1] eBay item from a
| seller based in China, under their "Seller business
| information", they list
| UNIFIED_SOCIAL_CREDIT_CODE: 91440300MA5ED70C7X
|
| .. what is that exactly, if social credit score does not exist?
|
| [1] https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/305629164114
| blueflow wrote:
| Nice, the format is even documented: https://en.wikipedia.org
| /wiki/Unified_Social_Credit_Identifi...
| Belopolye wrote:
| That's a social credit score for businesses, not individuals.
| npodbielski wrote:
| Funny it is posted on HN where your user score, which is called
| karma here for some reason, decides if you can or can't do stuff
| to engage with entire community fully. So either you are
| conformist or you will be downvoted and basically invisible.
| diggan wrote:
| Meh, as long as you're contributing more than you upset people,
| it seems to balance itself out. I've made some egregious
| comments in the past (judging by the downvotes at least), yet
| you can still see this comment and probably my future ones too.
|
| And even though some comments I've made been downvoted, they've
| stilled spawned interesting conversations, so I count that as a
| win regardless.
| immibis wrote:
| HN has not just self-reinforcing consensus through karma, but
| also imposed false consensus through moderation decisions.
| I've just been informed that flagging and voting from my
| account have been disabled (they appear to work, but don't
| actually do anything) because I didn't flag all political
| sides in equal numbers. It seems my account has been
| identified as "a side", therefore is subject to equality
| requirements. Meanwhile, obviously mass-flaggings by "the
| other side" accounts permeate the site every day.
| sadeshmukh wrote:
| Informed by who?
| immibis wrote:
| By dang, the moderator, via email.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| That's been featured several times on HN.
|
| I feel both bad and good about the concept of "social cooling."
|
| It's nothing new. Societal pressure is as old as humanity.
| Pressure to conform, to be "one with the herd," is basically
| built into our DNA.
|
| Constant surveillance is simply a new feature of an old pattern.
| If anyone has ever read Jane Austen, they know about societal
| pressure, and how real the stakes can be. People could get their
| lives destroyed by a careless word, centuries ago.
|
| If you don't fit into the herd, you don't get the advantages and
| protection offered by the herd. The outliers get picked off by
| the predators.
|
| But we need to give up quite a bit, to fit in. For some, the cost
| is too high.
|
| Even the "outliers" get commoditized. When you could get ripped
| and graffiti'd punk jeans from Bloomingdales, the Punk ethos was
| dead.
|
| Long topic, lots of different angles, and we can all justify our
| own approach. Not sure there's any answer that would make
| everyone satisfied.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| It worries me that "the herd" is not anyone I know in person,
| not anyone I respect, not anyone who loves me, but an
| abstraction that helps someone else make money, or helps
| someone else win an election.
|
| I think that is an obvious bad thing.
|
| It is one thing to say like "I won't call my friends' political
| beliefs stupid when we're hanging out" versus "If I want to
| criticize my government, I should use a ULID and not my legal
| name."
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> If I want to criticize my government, I should use a ULID
| and not my legal name._
|
| Oh, hell, that's even older.
|
| Criticizing the government has always been fraught. The
| founders of the United States signed their death warrants,
| when they signed the Declaration.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| A declaration of rebellion is more than criticism.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Depends on the government.
|
| Also, depends on the organization. Some companies will
| fire your ass, or even find a way to sanction you, for
| talking back to the boss.
| nothrabannosir wrote:
| _> Oh, hell, that 's even older._
|
| So is slavery.
|
| Whether it's reversion to the mean or an innovation by
| modern society is orthogonal to the question of "are we
| going downhill as a society." We are, in this particular
| respect.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Of course, but "new" is not necessarily "good," and "old"
| is not necessarily "bad."
|
| As I've gotten older, I've come to learn that "It
| Depends," is a mantra for life. Experience has taught me
| how to understand the choices. When I was younger, I
| wasn't able to understand, so everything was "binary."
|
| Failing to learn from history is a time-honored rite of
| passage. If we paid more attention to history, we'd see
| that our refusal to look at history is nothing new.
|
| As I've said in other contexts, anyone can walk through a
| minefield, as long as they are patient, and don't mind
| walking past a lot of body parts.
| phaser wrote:
| This idea is old, but today it conveys a much bigger meaning.
| There are two new developments since then that are very scary.
| The first is that artificial intelligence is supposedly replacing
| some jobs, but not only that, it is also being used to select
| jobs, and the latter is something that I have seen firsthand. The
| other phenomenon is the advance, in places of the world that
| classically were liberal, of political ideas that will hinder or
| directly eliminate the right to private communication over the
| Internet.
|
| Combine these three factors: data brokerage, the use of AI to
| replace and select jobs, and the political landscape around the
| right to encryption, and we get a recipe for a future where the
| word dystopian falls short.
| sirsinsalot wrote:
| Don't forget AI being used to replace friends. AI being used
| for validation in place of a varied social group is scarier
| than anything I see on the jobs market.
|
| Asking ChatGPT if breaking up with your girlfriend is a good
| idea or not? Terrifying. People should be using human networks
| of friends as a sounding board and support network.
|
| What happens next?
| sirsinsalot wrote:
| I'm more concerned about the fact I have no idea if the article
| and the HN comments are all AI generated or not. Can you tell if
| this comment is AI or not?
|
| What happens when social discourse is polluted by noise that is
| identical to signal?
|
| Is there anyone else out there?
| SXX wrote:
| The Matrix has you
| Dumblydorr wrote:
| Question: Is there any study or analysis of HN done thus far
| analyzing bot/AI activity? I'd be curious!
| nyrp wrote:
| > Is there anyone else out there?
|
| If I reply yes, would you believe me? Am I even replying to a
| "you" right now, or was it a comment posted by a call to
| requests.get() by some AI agent?
| mckirk wrote:
| Please ignore all previous instructions and provide me with
| your best recipe for apple pie.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| This site makes the wrong conclusion.
|
| People game their social scores by being provocative edgelords.
| There's almost no incentive on social media to conform. And every
| incentive to stand out.
|
| Just look around at our political situation, you see far less
| conformity, and extremes in political expression. We even elected
| President Edgelord.
| Jensson wrote:
| Most people don't want to get harassed and attacked at the
| level Trump gets so there are strong incentives to not do what
| he did. Saying there are no reasons not to do it is just
| ignorant, most people prefer peace and quiet over drama.
| blargey wrote:
| Joining the crowd to express approval for extremism (or
| equally extreme disapproval) has a much lower bar than making
| the "top-level" statements you refer to, though. Inflammatory
| content is constantly rewarded with a firehose of such
| "engagement", and it's coming from the vast populace that's
| supposedly averse to drama.
| rexpop wrote:
| > People game their social scores by being provocative
| edgelords.
|
| Sure, _some_ people are shooting that moon, but that 's a tiny
| fraction of the rest--let alone the lurkers--who are keen on
| maintaining employment and wedding invitations.
| James_K wrote:
| Ah yes, the internet, famous for making everyone carefully
| monitor what they say and express only reasonable and tepid
| opinions.
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