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Comment by lapcat | Hacker News Reader

> Somehow we've built a culture where its socially acceptable, and even rewarded, to behave online in ways that would never be acceptable in other social settings.

I don't think we've "built" the culture per se. I think it's more like humans evolved over millions of years for small, in-person groups, and we're not "built" (by nature) to handle the endless sea of online strangers. On the internet, the personal familiarity is gone, the proximity is gone, the facial expressions and tone are gone, and indeed the fear of repercussions is mostly gone.

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> On the internet, the personal familiarity is gone, the proximity is gone, the facial expressions and tone are gone, and indeed the fear of repercussions is mostly gone.

The idea of writing and sharing thoughts is an ancient one. Engaging with that content in an easily publishable and shareable way, is.

The quoted sentence above is 100% right. If you replace "On the internet" with "In a book," and I think the sentence would highlight the differences with the internet a bit clearer.

The internet is unique from a book because others can engage with it in a real way (beyond a book club). A book club keeps that proximity, familiarity, and expressions together for better communication. An online forum loses all of these.

I agree with you that we’re in the infancy of context free communication (text only posts). But disagree that it wasn’t built (or couldn’t be changed, my extended interpretation)

There are wildly different experiences with communities online. Communities are also a thing that can be built intentionally.

We can also learn from prior works. Lessig (1999) identifies four elements that regulate behavior online: Laws, norms, markets, and technology

- *Code/architecture* – the physical or technical constraints on activities (e.g. locks on doors or firewalls on the Internet)

- *Market* – economic forces

- *Law* – explicit mandates that can be enforced by the government

- *Norms* – social conventions that one often feels compelled to follow

I think the biggest factor is actually moderation. Smaller communities can be effectively moderated. This may fall under "Norms", but the difference is that (non-government) moderators will enforce the social conventions regardless of whether you feel compelled to follow them. But perhaps familiarity is still a factor in smaller online communities, because the participants often get to know each other.

Unfortunately, larger communities are effectively beyond moderation IMO. I don't think that the one or two moderators are enough on Hacker News, and of course the social media platforms are even worse. In the "real world", the non-online world, a significant portion of the population will flout the laws, regardless of government enforcement, and a significant portion will flout the social conventions. That will also occur in the online world.

To put it another way, all you need is one bad reply to ruin your day. :-)

I’m a mod on /r/ruby and it’s got 80,000 subscribers. I like to think it’s not “beyond moderation”. We have fairly aggressive rules (around tone and impact) and very high standards and I would say most of the time the community meets or exceeds those standards

I think there are limits but I also don’t feel that most platforms have hit them or really even tried. Most platforms that would benefit from a stronger sense of community typically do the bare minimum to not run afoul of laws (in terms of paid moderation). Even the ones with strong volunteer mods (like Reddit) are known for underinvesting in mod tools, that’s the source of the recent protests.

> one bad reply to ruin your day

On /r/ruby we have two kinds of problems that bubble up intentional and unintentional. The majority of slights are unintentional and when called out are very apologetic and seek to make things right. For the intentional abusers, there’s the ban.

I think of it less like building a wall and more like flattening the curve. If you can stop the cascade of frustration (where one pissed off user leads to another…) then it pays off dividends, even if you can’t catch 100% of the cases.

Anyway. Thanks for the opportunity for a chat. I love thinking about this stuff.

> I’m a mod on /r/ruby and it’s got 80,000 subscribers.

I think that's smaller than Hacker News, which has only 1 or 2 moderators, whereas it appears that r/ruby has 8 moderators?

As far as scale is concerned, it looks like r/ruby had 19 comments within the past 24 hours? https://www.reddit.com/r/ruby/comments/ Whereas HN had 19 comments within the past 2 minutes. https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments And a site like Twitter has something like 350,000 tweets per minute.

The most important difference, in my opinion, is that /r/ruby is focused on a single technical topic. In a sense, it's self-selecting and self-moderating, unlike HN or social media sites which are general-interest and include topics such as politics and other controversial social issues that are prone to generate nasty disagreements.

I don’t disagree with any differences you pointed out. I still think a lot of the internet could have much higher standards than it does today.

did you use this handle on slashnet?

> fear of repercussions is mostly gone.

Is it? Because AFAICT people censorship themselves online all the time for the fear of repercussion. It's like being on tape 27/7 where anyone that doesn't like you can watch your old tapes and loook for problems.

For obscure people, especially anonymous randos, there are practically no consequences. When I hear people complain about "repercussions" from online speech, they usually just mean criticism. And that's all the article author seems to mean too. "I realize this section makes me sound like a Perfectly Logical Person who does not get upset by negative public criticism, I promise this is not at all the case and I have 100000 feelings about everything that happens on the internet and get upset all the time."

Of course famous people can get into some trouble for what they said in the past, but they usually bounce back and then find a new crowd of followers with a different ideological cast than their previous crowd of followers.

This is not true, regular "anonymous randos" get doxed regularly and the crazies call up an demand they be 'fired', they get threats to their family, friends and livelyhood.

Do you have any examples?

I'm not in the habit of keeping recorded data of on these, but internet witch hunts are not a new thing. I'll let you search for it.

> I'll let you search for it.

No, you made the existence claim, so the burden of proof is on you:

> regular "anonymous randos" get doxed regularly and the crazies call up an demand they be 'fired', they get threats to their family, friends and livelyhood.

You can't even provide one example? I'll let you search for it. I'm not going to search for unicorns or pots of gold at the end of rainbows.

Writing style and unique patterns (like time of posting, argument frequency, ideology affiliation, and so on) are some of the things that could reveal someone’s identity and result in actions taken against him.

> that could

The question isn't whether it's possible, the question is whether it actually happens.

It happened to me and a friend, who too is in the IT and we go to great length to be anonymous. If something is possible to such a degree, it ought to happen. If it happened to us, it surely happens to somebody else too, especially considering that most people are not too concerned about hiding their trails.

> It happened to me and a friend, who too is in the IT

What happened exactly?

I can, but why bother when you're itching for a fight over the obvious. Enjoy your day.

> I can, but why bother

Because that's how discussions are supposed to work. You make a claim, and you support your claim with evidence and reasons. You don't refuse to give evidence and run away just because your interlocutor disagrees with you. After all, what would be the point in providing evidence to someone who already agrees with you?

People are incredibly masked online, that is true. They run their posts before the “upvotable” heuristic before submitting. But in a small familial community you can’t just be technically correct while also being an ass in how you make your point. Most of the smarmy self-righteous posts you find on Reddit would be met with an open-palm smack, or worse, if delivered in the same way to a tribal leader 10,000 years ago. All of the human connection is gone in this form of communication. It is a system filled with ideologically mind broken serfs who all jockey for a small bit of clout in order to break free of their perceived chains. The things said here are as true as the statement “that is wet” when looking at a beautiful waterfall.

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