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Comment by highmastdon | Hacker News Reader

People say: man up. I’d say let’s ignore the toxicity and go about our way. If someone wants to be an asshole, fine by me, but I’m not letting them take my fun out of my life. Therefore it would be good to have a way of hiding stuff that you don’t feel like putting your energy into. Sort of shadow banning but only for yourself.

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"Man up" is great advice, but it's from an era where socialized interaction happened mostly in person. In those times, the consequence of insults was almost always physical violence, sometimes to the death in a formally arranged way.

Perhaps somebody needs to invent that device that allows us to punch people over the internet.

Yes and that makes me think. What if we could un-anonimise the internet for things like these. I think the anonymity of the internet makes trolls, toxicity, bullying and such much easier. Where if it’s your actual name that’s next to it, it influences your real life as well. Recruiters will search for your name on the internet and if you come off as a toxic bully, it’ll have consequences

nah.

There is empirical evidence otherwise, e.g. toxicity on Facebook. On the contrary, it gets far more personal if people know each other too and petty infighting dominates.

Recruiters looking up your name on the internet is awful. It got better, but a few years ago they haunted you to your last refuges.

Some people have their real names attached to their profiles, but I assume most prefer it the other way around.

Yeah, that sounds like an excellent idea. I would also add punishments (social media bans to start with, perhaps fines and even prison time for extremely serious cases) for spreading obvious lies.

You have my fork!

It's difficult if you're seen as an authority figure, if you're one writing the code. Ignoring assholes could well simply inflame them further when they see other people receiving official replies, when their 42 posts have garnered nothing.

I certainly brush off the seething wastrels when they come my way, but I'm merely another member of the community and I have the luxury of ignoring them, flagging them, and letting someone else decide whether they should be kicked out or not. I really can imagine that if you cannot ignore these people (or have to add five people to your /ignore, every single day) it will wear most people down to a nub after a few years.

mute/block button?

of course the implementation varies from product to product but is usually not obvious to the other party

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