Comment by worble | Hacker News Reader

Comment by worble | Hacker News Reader

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Having been on the internet since a young age, I've always found it strange the internet is, well, so "srs business" these days. The internet has never, and as you say, will never be a harmonious place where everyone will be nice to each other. We can't even achieve this in physical spaces which can actually enforce these kinds of rules!

Maybe I'm lucky, but I find it really easy to just disasociate with online comments. Whenever I read something hurtful or mean directed to me on the internet, I can very easily just shrug it off as "some internet person" and move on, although admittedly I've never been target harassed like some people have, which I'm sure is distressing. I think part of this was growing up I was always told: "Don't use your real name online! Don't give out your personal info!", and so for me, being online was always about being someone else, a different persona if you will. These days that seems completely out of the window, everyone uses their real names everywhere, uploads actual pictures of themselves and generally their real life seems directly integrated into their online life, which is just unthinkable for me. This probably makes online abuse just that much more personal for them?

I suppose another big change of course is that all the small forums that used to make up the internet are now exceedingly being consolidated into just one or two sites. Again, back when I was a child trawling the internet, if you didn't like one forum, you just hopped to another, and there were always plenty more (sidenot: remember the 'affiliate' tags on sites? I miss those. Made the internet feel more like a big group of communities, but I digress). Of course now, if someone is being harassed on twitter or facebook or something, well, they're not going to go somewhere else because a lot of the competition no longer exists anymore.

I don't really know where I'm going with this comment honestly, I'm just ranbling. What I do know is that regulating the internet is, and always has been, completely futile. So long as someone, somewhere, can spin up a forum on a VPS or on a computer at home, and people can connect to it, there's going to be sites hosting every kind of content imaginable. If they can't even bring down the Pirate Bay with the music industries power and money, they'll never stop people saying nasty things.

What would your reaction if information about you or your loved ones was posted and people were encouraged to do nasty things to you or them?

Ignore it.

If it were a credible threat of physical harm (it rarely is), then I'd make a police report and be more vigilant with my self-defence preparation and tell my loved ones to be accordingly.

Attempting to censor the information would be pointless at best, and could easily make it worse.

Well I mean, like I say, I'm pretty careful not to let out personal information online (Although I'm sure someone could probably track me down if they really tried). Without being in that situation it's pretty hard to say. People say lots of things on the internet but it very rarely translates into reality, not without some kind of actual reason to do so. It's easy to say while not being in that sitatuation, but unless I believed that there was an actual reason to target me, someone wouldn't bother putting their own life at risk just to follow what some other random person on the internet said. Luckily I live in a pretty safe place, so I'd probably inform the police and let them take it from there.

Expressing opinions vs making specific threats is a very clear thick line for me, and yet somehow whenever I read about takedowns and such it seems many people have trouble making the distinction.

“I hate x and wish they had never been born”

Is not

“I am coming to your house tomorrow with a weapon”

Yet people treat them similarly.

From there it just becomes “anything that scares me is a threat.”

Then, it becomes obvious that people are in general scared of cultures and attitudes very different from their own.

And so there’s no tolerant chaos anymore.

It’s a Motte and Bailey argument.

Very few people support doxxing and/or incitements to violence.

But it is amazing how much censorship happens in the pursuit of curbing such threats.

I would like to echo your statement. I've always found it bizarre how people conflate insults with threats. In the vast majority of cases we can draw a very distinct line between the two. On top of that, it's not like this has any less ambiguity in meatspace.

In some psychology class long ago, I learned that one of the most self destructive things someone can do is perceive emotions as information. As in "That made me mad so what they did was clearly wrong". A lot of therapy is geared to shifting people away from that cognitive error.

But that concept is thrown out the window when it comes to Twitter/Facebook/etc.

I can't count how many times I've read "I'm literally shaking now" used as an indictment against someone else's perceived transgression. I think out of all the twitter cliches, that one makes me roll my eyes the most.

Unfortunately this is kind of how the human brain works. It presumably evolved from a simpler design that only had "emotions", adding a higher level processing function that began as something very simple, evolving over a long time into the complex neocortex we have now. The primitive emotional brain is still present, with an imperfect "interface" to the newer brain.

I completely agree and am glad I am not the only one who feels like that.

I believe a lot of the internet of that era changed with Facebook: it was the first prominent social media that encouraged (mandated even) you to use your real name and information and a lot of people went with it. Myspace, MSN or similar before that were all aliases even if you knew the people in real life. This removed a level of privacy and made attacks more personal.

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