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Comment by seydor | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if there is a way to measure it, but there is a big increase in spitefulness in online conversation. I 'm not even sure it is driven by karma-hunters because it seems people care less about it, but there is a desire to publicly display antisocial behavior. Maybe because antisocial is more tolerated now?

Bad faith is the driver. It's probably a majority of people now who respond in bad faith. They assume that everyone is talking in bad faith, probably to justify their own bad faith. Maybe it represents a broader shift in attitudes. That's also why humor and sarcasm are not tolerated, because people assume bad faith behind it. This was markedly different in the 90s and 00s where any joke was allowed and the intent was always assumed to be humor.

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I sense a deep fear of inadequacy in a lot of online comments. People feel they need to say something that's accepted by the forum, so they often go for chest-thumping. They also fear saying something that will require argumentation, so a lot of discussions that could be meaningful end up being slagging matches, that way you can play it to a draw: say something rude and then when the other person is offended you point at how they focused on being offended rather than the argument. The other person will then point at how the first person was rude in order to avoid the issues, so basically both are right.

There really is something about it being online that makes this terrible. I've never seen in real life debate that things deteriorated to what one reads regularly online.

I don't really like arguments, but I really hate to do it online, moreover on online forum. There's so much social aspect happen when doing argument or discussion when offline, or at least with voice call.

With online text, I feel like each party only try to defend their own point and will not meeting concussion. On online forum, it's just a waste of time.

It's a lack of consensus, not a search for validation. This is a natural (and fairly well understood) consequence of "diverse" democracies.

I think there might be a split in world views. There is a new emerging set of beliefs that are incompatible with some more traditional beliefs. When discussing them people tend to focus on the consequences of these beliefs and not the axioms. It also seems that people are not willing to agree to disagree online. Yet they're often happy to in offline relationships. I think this is a consequence of how superficial online interactions are.

HN appears, to me, as one shining light in the darkness. Conversations here remain civil. I have just deleted my Twitter account for that very reason. If they had an army of Dangs they might be able to moderate to the degree that HN does. However I don't think Dangs scale.

My take is that it's the scale of things that pits the entire world against itself in every issue. Because irregardless what belief you have, whatever your take is, chances are there exists an individual that is passionate about the exact opposite of your take. And the global interconnectedness has removed all barriers from instantly arguing, in some cases letting you setup keyword searches that notifies you when your "enemy" dares to speak up. Add to that the fact where there's lots of passion there's less of reason. Which will make you more inclined to argue in bad faith.

I think that you nailed it. I would add that as long as we don't reach for rocks to throw at each other (or the online equivalent), having and respectfully expressing diverging opinions is okay.

Slaboj Zizek had something to say apropos this that still troubles me. Former Yugoslavia was obviously built on an uneasy, contrived social balance, but it was not beneath the surface. According to Zizek humour was racist, disgusting, commonplace and absolutely accepted part of life. It started to disappear leading up to 1991, replaced by a "chilling political correctness". He suggested that a culture of rude banter was a necessary safety valve, and silence portends violence. It seems plausible, but I've never heard another former Yugoslav confirm that, and Zizek talks a lot of tosh sometimes.

I got mild dang scolding for one unduly snarky comment a year or so back and really appreciated it.

One of my favorite online communities back in its heyday was somethingawful. You had to make a one-time token payment of a few bucks to be able to post, and they'd triumphantly ban you at the first or (usually) second hint of obnoxiousness.

yes, somethingawful was a very unique site. Especially under clever writes like Frolixo, whose humor I still miss. It was a kind of humor that was mildly abrasive yet not too much as to be toxic. You just sort of knew it was humor. I guess the site is still up, but last time I checked it had lost its funny.

This behaviour is not just limited to culture war topics (or even controversial tech topics like Electron). I think there's some level of the literal point scoring with karma encouraging point scoring types of conversation on any topic

Yes, the entire purpose of karma is to encourage people to do whatever makes the number go up and not do whatever makes the number go down. On HN the assumption seems to be that people will tend to upvote civil, substantive, thought provoking comments and downvote everything else, but in reality all such systems tend towards a path of least resistance to reward - people will do what's easiest to gain karma, not what's best, and what that is tends to be extremely context sensitive.

I can agree with that. Luckily, karma, as implemented here, doesn't seem to prevent people from sharing what they have to say. Not like on Slashdot where karma really is a bitch. Been there for 20+ years and still think it's an awful to moderate because we have the same 20 guys dominating almost every discussion

I think the HN karma is subtle enough not to take it too seriously, and yet it's still there to give you the signal your comments may be out line. When I first started reading HN, I didn't even realize there was a karma feature. I also like how there are no notifications, so it doesn't feed a back and forth argument from continuing past its expiration. It may be a little less convenient, but it seems to strike the right balance.

There is a big difference between rebuttals by an expert for a post and general commentary.

This is specifically prevalent in the financial information space. Last week the news broke that the Twitter deal won't close.

Naturally, everyone who thinks of themselves as relevant needed to comment on it (myself included) Some people with valuable information others with less valuable information.

On Twitter / Stocktwits / Discord / Telegram commentary and rebuttal merge which makes it really hard to follow the threads.

On WSJ, Seeking Alpha, etc, the UGC articles are very long and don't encourage a proper discourse. The reason WSB on Reddit was so successful (14M users) was the simple fact that they encourage an online discussion that is weighted by quality.

"WSB weighted by quality"? What am I missing here?

The basic functionality of Reddit includes upvotes and downvotes that provide a ranking which arguably can be seen to measure quality. Second, quality lies in the eye of the beholder. ;-)

Probably a few k worth of gamestop money.

> Bad faith is the driver. It's probably a majority of people now who respond in bad faith

Worse than that: it's very close to universal on some sites, like Twitter.

> They assume that everyone is talking in bad faith, probably to justify their own bad faith.

Yep, it's a positive feedback loop.

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