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Comment by tibbar | Hacker News Reader

The author claims that unhappy, unsuccessful people fill social media with misplaced anger because they have too much time on their hands. These are the ‘other people’, while we, the knowledge workers are Happy and naturally repulsed by social media.

This is a really condescending take, and I don’t think that unhappiness and mental illness magically avoid knowledge workers - perhaps even the opposite. I do think that earning a software engineer’s salary makes you view the world in a different way than most people, and it’s true that I don’t see too many software engineers (angry or otherwise) on Facebook, but perhaps that’s because we’re all hiding here. :-)

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It is not necessary for misery to avoid knowledge workers for the author's arguments to hold water.

An in my experience it specifically does apply to knowledge workers, people with more than enough money, etc.

Who cares if something is “condescending”, if it’s true?

This knee-jerk moralizing is a huge part of why “Internet is bad”.

We weren’t like this 10 years ago. The Great Awokening has made everyone more judgemental.

>We weren’t like this 10 years ago.

The argument made in the article is that bitter, ostracised people who want to lash out have existed forever. The biggest change in the last 10 years is that the internet has become more accessible to this group and allowed their voice to be heard.

Not saying the author is right, but it's an interesting perspective and definitely worth considering.

More disturbingly that his perception of old media is one of a careful, curated gate keeping process to ensure those producing information knew where the bounds should be.

I find this somewhat disquieting. I certainly thought it was somewhat true up to the early 1990s.

The implication is that it was always known that people are easily manipulated. They needed protecting from themselves and the manipulators need to come from a certain class.

I object to that notion, but I am appalled at the base insanity that Facebook creates so I find myself conceding the point.

It appears to me that we haven't really switched the model, but looking at the analysis of the tiny number of influencers it takes to generate 90% of anti vax or whatever propaganda on facebook it seems clear this isn't democratization.

We have simply been handed a different set of carefully curated sources of information.

Carelessly curated but highly tuned for engagement...

Von Braun said "Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?".

Facebook says "As long as people keep reading the content, who cares what the content is?".

This seems like it is true but there is a weird bent to the misinformation that gets amplified. I don't know if it is the audience or the creators.

It's worth bearing in mind that the mainstream media are far from unbiased when taking about the benefits and harms of their gatekept information vs sources like Facebook which they don't control. For example, I remember the BBC pushing an article about Facebook anti-vaxers putting the UK in danger of a serious measles outbreak that was a sterling example of deceiving with true facts. The percentage of eligible kids receiving their vaccinations had dropped, but it was a mere fraction of a percent below the UK's all-time record high a year earlier. The UK was indeed failing to meet the UN goal of 95% of kids double-jabbed, but it had never acheived that in the first place. And after digging up some NHS publications, it turned out that the UK was in danger of a measles outbreak, but the big problem was all the people who didn't get vaccinated in the 90s due to anti-vaccination misinformation spread by the BBC and other mainstream media before most people even had internet access. Basically, the BBC was spreading misinformation to blame Facebook for a problem that they themselves were actually responsible for.

It pisses me off to no end when someone says something like, "Given how much google/fb/amazon has been in the news, theres no question that they're now evil"

Anyone can confirm the challenge of poverty even in the 1st world, with minimum curiosity, exactly the way RFK did in 1967[1] and John Edwards did in the aughts [2]. We live in a world of plenty but surrounded by vast communities of need.

[1] https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2018/06/01/...

[2] https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=119247...

> bitter, ostracised people who want to lash out

Yet all of his examples are of conservatives, even though liberals do the same (often worse). The whole article itself was a very politely written “lashing out” at people who vote differently than he does.

Yes that’s fair - and I’m not necessarily saying he’s wrong. But I think his framing reinforces an us vs then perspective, and if we practice seeing another group of people as deeply broken and misguided then we reinforce a divide. And in a way, that justifies other people’s anger at us. So even if this distinction exists, I’m not sure we should practice noticing it.

Conversely, the "Great Awokening" is a direct result of the legitimate "democratization" that the article discusses.

It seems to me that the knee-jerk opposition to "wokeness" always comes from people who would rather sweep problems that don't affect them under the rug than acknowledge that they need to be fixed. They are the aloof, socially normative people in this article, utterly confused by and thus dismissive of the struggles of those outside of society's standard ingroup.

"We weren't like this 10 years ago" because, as the article describes, those concerns were previously ignored by the mainstream because they didn't fit the experiences or interests of those who had influence over the mainstream. Now that those institutions have lost that filtering power, we're hearing from more real people with more real problems. Healthcare access, structural racism, mental health resources, poverty, etc. They are taking their little hammers to our Twitter feeds. The solution isn't to shame and ignore the people complaining about them - it is to fix those societal issues that cause the pain to begin with.

On the contrary, "structural racism" seems to me an almost religious, simple explanation (akin to "sin", "wickedness" or "the Devil") that papers over a much more complicated and nuanced situation.

There is a massive hodgepodge of ethnic communities in the U.S., of all possible colors, and their societal and economic outcomes do not conform or correlate to the idea that people of darker skin are more oppressed by the society and are worse off.

We absolutely were like this 10 years ago.

10 years isn't that long ago. All those sites were around then, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, Hacker News...

Even the topics changed only a little bit. GamerGate was 7 years ago. 4chan and 8chan were reviled before that. The major political debates are as old as time. The division between American and European morality is about as old as those world-views.

I also didn't like that the deranged person is a Trump supporter. There are deranged democrats in not small proportions. The point of the article was good but it too was polarizing.

The author trying to elicit sympathy for "the deep state" as a group of despised people seemed like an extremely contrived example. I agree that the article was polarizing, and caricature-like.

Unfortunately you fall in the same kind of trap. I would argue that it matters not for the argument. Whoever Your Guy is. The trap is the diatribe (my position is superior to yours) and it’s solution is better politics of inclusion. At least that’s how I read it.

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