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Comment by zozbot123 | Hacker News Reader

The rule for how to deal with this sort of "shaming" is quite simple: no matter what you may have been 'accused' of, always double down and never issue anything that might even loosely resemble an apology or an admission of weakness, no matter what the costs might be. Then simply wait until the mob gets bored and moves on to the next easy target. There are very high profile examples of this working quite well, but mentioning them here would cause undue controversy, so it is best to abstain.

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It's hard to make heads or tails of this without a better definition of what constitutes "doubling down" or "working quite well".

The example that comes to mind is James Damore and he "doubled down" in the sense that he stood by his original statements (which made sense because his original memo was clearly and explicitly not endorsing the things he was accused of endorsing). It "worked out quite well" in that he _only_ lost his job and endured a lot of harassment, abuse, and slander (although who knows what kinds of psychological scars this treatment could have left him with), but probably didn't have a hard time finding another job and the mob did eventually (mostly) move on.

So either the Damore example satisfies your definition of "working quite well" but not mine (or probably most people) or this example illustrates that your prescription doesn't always work. Perhaps it is exceptional, in that most mobs aren't marshalled by major publications nor do they conspire with the CEO of one of the most prominent companies in the world.

Do you think that James Damore would have been better off had he apologized and groveled to the mob of shamers? Even after he lost his job? (which there was no chance of avoiding - as you say, he went against the CEO of "one of the most prominent companies in the world".) That seems rather implausible if you know how these mobs generally behave. Forbearance - of the sort you might expect from an individual who has been wronged and sought appropriate restitution - never happens, because it's not a stable equilibrium. What happens is that the "storm" eventually blows over naturally, but that's a rather different dynamic.

Not sure if he would have been better off or not. I'm glad he didn't grovel; we shouldn't incentivize mobbing innocent people, especially under overtly false pretenses (though it's entirely unfair that the innocent party has to endure all of the consequences for doing what is right while the mobbers get off scot-free).

Might be wrong as I haven't followed this too much. But, my impression was that he mostly played a clueless person caught in a grotesque situation. Doubling down would mean going after his accusers directly.

He's in a tough spot given who he's up against. In an oligopolistic industry like ours it's risky to be hated by anyone.

But I do think it would work in the sense that he'd have a larger group of people cheering for him. And this is solely about clarity. If you're too nuanced in what you're broadcasting to the world people don't know how to react. Nobody wants to waste time trying to figure you out. Doubling down is exactly about taking out any nuance for a stronger message.

AKA the "we don't negotiate with terrorists" strategy of dealing with social outrage mobs

Same setup works well for companies too. Yes it's difficult to accept the short term PR hit, but at the end of the day, the social media mob will likely have zero influence on the success of the business or how many sales it makes.

That's arguably one reason certain games companies have gotten away with horrible, rather anti consumer behaviour for years (like EA), because they realised early on that boycotts and internet complaints do not matter. For them, it's like 'who cares if the angry mob is calling for our heads over on Reddit, because Madden/FIFA/whatever will still sell millions of copies'

At the end of the day, most drama queens and controversy fanatics don't make companies money, and those that do will give up their boycott in time. So the answer is to do nothing and just watch everything fizzle out.

I'd be curious to hear some mentioned, in case there are examples I missed.

Never explain never apologise.

My advice to anyone would be don't make even the slightest effort to please people who hate you.

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