Comment by Garvi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Garvi | Hacker News Reader

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The fact that social media demonstrated(faked by censorship) apathy after the Snowden revelations did the most damage to personal freedom as a single incident in history.

Now everyone that respects privacy feels like they're alone. And all the broken people have a target to bash, to feel better about themselves. I'm talking about the folks using "I don't need privacy, because I have nothing to hide (this means I'm better than you)" to avoid facing their personal problems.

The main problem of the situation we're finding ourselves in is this: How can you dispute information obtained this way? Reporting this: https://www.militarytimes.com/off-duty/military-culture/2021... ..is what gets you arrested for child porn possession. This man was snatched from his home without a warrant. The last remaining journalists, still working in this environment, took note. Make no mistake. The original story from Rolling stone magazine has been removed. Of course the people that followed the story closely, looked the other way in fear of being accused of supporting pedophilia. There was no outrage.

I'm talking about the folks using "I don't need privacy, because I have nothing to hide (this means I'm better than you)" to avoid facing their personal problems.

As between someone who says I really don’t care if they know I use Viagra, wear size 13 shoes and like guacamole, and someone worried about a knock on the door for child porn, I can tell you who probably needs to spend some time with a professional on their personal problems.

[flagged]

Please don't post like this here, regardless of how wrong people are or you feel they are. It's against the site guidelines because we're trying for a different sort of discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You may not owe wastes of sperm better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.

(Edit: I appreciate that you downregulated this in your replies to other users - I'm sure that prevented the thread from turning hellish.)

Hey dang, as said I made a mistake by pointing a finger towards a single faction, but I was not flaming, its a really wealthy point of view to look at everything that look unpleasant as aggressive/bad/flame, because it’s about the classy salot to don’t empathise with human rights abuse/racism etc and wealth redistribution, but some people can empathise and feel the anger and not keep calm and when talking about clear violations, but not necessarily be trolls or flamers, I was not flaming, i was genuinely hoping that those cross-faction segment of people would realise how crap they are

But yeah if you can keep the distance and express calmly the contempt for some people go ahead, they had a lot of reasonable people in the ignavi circle of dantes inferno, I see that as italian

I dont know but to me look weird to talk nicely as upper class “hello my dear, have you by any chance read about today’s violation of human rights, have you got a calm idea?”

I believe you that it wasn't your intent, but the definition of flamebait isn't about intent, it's about effects [1]: what effect is a post likely to have? what subthread is it likely to generate? That's what determines the expected value of a post [2]. If you post things like "right wing waste of sperm", "vomit their hate", and so on, the likely outcome is a flamewar whether you intended it or not—and you're responsible for it whether you intended it or not. (And this case was not a borderline call!)

But you're also making a good point in your reply and I don't want you to feel like it hasn't been heard—especially because I think we mostly agree.

Emotions are important and need to be given a place. HN's rules are not intended to constrain everybody into a starched, repressed state, nor to exclude anyone for bringing up something unpleasant or something they feel strongly about. That would end in a kind of heat death. We're not interested in that. (And I agree that there's a class component to this.)

The question is how to express emotions in a way that leads to more curious, respectful conversation and not to a flamewar in which people just get mad and rush to defend their side and bash the other side. This is an open question—it's not something that we've figured out yet as a community or a culture or in terms of moderation. But FWIW, here's my current take.

It's much better if you express your emotion explicitly as something you are feeling. If you directly share what you're actually feeling, that will make your comment more interesting to other people and make it less likely to come across as an attack.

Many people (including me) have a hard time doing this, so instead of saying openly how we feel, we encode our feeling into a statement about a thing, an idea, a person or group—and then we bring our emotion in through the 'back door', by packing as much intensity as we can into our language. Sound familiar?

This feels safer because it's less vulnerable up front, but it's a recipe for internet disaster because people will get triggered by your intensity rather than hearing your actual feeling—and to be fair, it's not their fault, because you didn't really give them a chance.

To take a blunt and vulgar example, if I tell someone "you're a piece of shit", or even if I say about a third person, "they're such a piece of shit", I'm using intense language that is clearly coming out of my emotions, but I'm not actually sharing what I feel or why I feel it—I'm withholding the parts that have to do with me. If I could actually say what I'm feeling and maybe share some relevant experiences, then I would not be attacking anybody, and I'd be giving people information that maybe they could respond to on a more human level.

I actually hate what I'm saying here because personally all of my conditioning runs in the opposite direction—I don't want to relate to anybody, I don't want to share myself, and I certainly don't want to talk about my emotions. That's probably why I come to the internet in the first place, to get away from all of that; and to put it mildly, I'm far from alone in this. But as a community, I don't think we have much choice, because the only other options are "exclude all emotion" or "just vent", and neither of those works—at least not for HN.

This is one of those cases where it's super helpful to have a single variable that you're optimizing for and can follow wherever it leads. On HN, we're lucky to be in just such a situation: we're optimizing for curiosity and nothing else [3]. How does that relate to the above? Very directly: conversation gets more interesting when people share themselves, rather than just their opinions. This is better for curiosity than talking about who is a "waste of sperm" (to use your phrase) or a "piece of shit" (to use mine). So this is the direction we need to move, even though some of us might prefer not to.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Anger is a valid emotion, but it does not advance the conversation or gain you adherents to your cause. Here, it will almost certainly do the opposite.

Just to give you an idea, you could have easily undermined the argument that reaction to Snowden's revelation was a societal shrug.

No mine was not anger, was a display of contempt (english is not my first language, i translated “disprezzo”) towards that part of society that advocates for principles only when it shrinks what they think its their rights, but when it affects in negative ways people that they don’t consider people then turn the other ways

well, that applies across the political spectrum. being hateful against a group is your personal choice

Right now, who do you think looks more ridiculous?

a) Your strawman, who is apparently comfortable without privacy from the government, but does support free speech so they can be racist?

b) The guy who replies to a comment advocating for privacy by derailing the discussion with an inflammatory post, seemingly forgetting that the patriot act had bipartisan support, and in an ironic twist, also presents an anti-free speech position which demonstrates they themselves lack the integrity to defend civil liberties.

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You're right, apologies

Probably you’re right I shouldn’t have pointed the finger towards a single faction

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