Comment by dencodev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dencodev | Hacker News Reader

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I was a little shit as a teenager and I hate that I was. Trolling was only "in good spirit" because I was a heartless asshole that completely lacked empathy for others. What comes to mind to me as the epitome of my teenage years was thinking this was funny:

https://www.somethingawful.com/news/were-all-gonna/

A writer for the SA website made fun a website of a mother who was grieving her stillborn children. Forget any opinion you might have about the mother or her presentation: this a woman who had several children die before she ever got to know them. It's potentially one of the most traumatic things that can happen to someone, and this writer decided to ridicule how this mother grieved:

>Your poison womb is making heaven too fucking crowded.

I hate myself that I thought this was funny. I hate that I used words to belittle the LGBTQ community. I hate that I was that edgelord that held to statistics about crime rates and intelligence as they related to race. I hate that I made fun of people for their sexuality. I hate that I discounted sexism, racism, and ableism.

It was never in good fun. Some people grow out of it and others don't. I am still working constantly to better myself and catch myself when I have prejudice thoughts.

I think a lot of people online don't understand how to get attention besides by acting outrageous like this. Getting attention online by doing something good that everyone else is doing is really hard. A lot of people seek out the seemingly underemployed strategy of doing the outrageous things that others aren't.

Maybe it's got to do with the fact we're competing with everyone online for attention, and the issue could be helped if more activity was in smaller clusters, where people didn't have to resort to outrageous strategies to get attention because there's less competition. (Discord servers provide one specific example of what I'm thinking of.) But it seems like as long as the global cluster exists too, people will seek attention on it too for its greater rewards, unless there's something about the smaller clusters that's even more rewarding.

Thats exactly why you hand out bans or send the teenager to timeout - it teaches them that bad attention seeking is not desirable and not rewarded with attention.

The internet lost the lesson some time ago because even bad attention is good attention when it comes to KPIs. More sharing is good sharing.

Teenagers are complicated creatures. Admittedly, this stuff seems impossibly extreme? Maybe I am indeed rather naive. I must have frequented much more harmless online communities. I never understood the appeal of SA or 4Chan. At the same time I can see how, as teenagers, people can get sucked into these communities, where edginess lures one in with some kind of false promise of 'freedom' from the rules of a society that appears to have rejected oneself. Even if that rejection may be self-imposed. At some point it's just a competition for who can say the most horrific things. I don't know how one would counteract this. The funny thing is, I also cringe at what I wrote online as a teenager, but I never took it to these extremes. However, recognising it (and 'hating' oneself for it) is a first step in fixing the problem, hopefully.

I can't absolve the entirety of my behavior by the online communities I was a part of, but they definitely worsened and encouraged it. I wish I had better role models as a teen and maybe I wouldn't have acted that way. Unfortunately my parents weren't very involved in my life and I spent every moment I could on the internet to escape other problems in my life. I think I had a lot of anger and frustration and places like 4chan were an outlet for that. Clearly growing up with 4chan being your main cultural influence is not going to lead to a well adjusted young adult.

You should relax. It seems like you were doing it because disaster porn is funny. At least you are cognizant enough to realize this. A lot of SJWism is similar, except they don't do it for fun (though, they get enjoyment of some form from it)

Relax about what exactly? You're saying I should just accept my (long) past bigotry?

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