All of this still exists offline, BTW. This is how riots happen. What the internet does is make it more possible by connecting more people than we traditionally could communicate with, and providing a safe space for any kind of discussion to happen. It's a tool our tribal monkey brains aren't ready for.
Same for pile-ons. I'm not so naive to think that they never happen offline, but there's a higher cost to doing them than there is when all you have to do is write 140 characters to dunk on someone you won't even remember in two weeks.
So it's a matter of community morals and values, and laborious moderation efforts to sustain it. Once the community grows large enough, moderating content becomes unmanageable. All large social media sites struggle with this, as they literally can't keep up with the amount of content. This is a scale problem that is unique to the internet.
Imageboards push actually contrarianism to some degree as it gets more replies (the only metric equivalent to a voting system)
I dunno but Slashdot but you can have a voting system if users are not using it to silence those they disagree with. Not showing the score goes a long way of keeping it sane, like HN.
Eventually you won't be shocked.
It's anonymous and you can say (almost) anything you like. Moderation of large subs is a joke, even before the strike. Just like the reddit "Trust and Safety" team, the mods of this particular subreddit, even though the post violated a sub rule along with the site rule, stayed up, unlocked.
> but not anymore if it becomes viral enough.
Not everyone wants to be a celebrity. But just read _this_ thread. You have at least one individual justifying this behavior.
But it quickly changed as reddit became a more mainstream 4chan alternative rather than the welcoming community it was in beginning.
If the person is actually smart in a field, they probably have jobs in that field. A job that is often extremely mentally or physically involved, leaving little time for revisiting that job over recreational periods (no time to hang out arguing with strangers, life's tough enough). There might also be NDAs involved, or concerns from higher-ups that the user might post anything that might embarrass the company, etc. It is also completely common for the smartest people in a field to have not an inkling on how to set up a website or join social media (because they are generally... on the older side).
The result is that Reddit, and social media, are mostly people who have studied those fields and didn't get in. The results are self-evident.
The disease of righteousness is available to all.
Being able to reflect and examine one’s own thoughts and beliefs is harder than fitting in and being righteous.
You need certain cognitive capacity in order to engage in sophistry.
I don't know if that makes it less worse, or worse.
Enabling righteousness, where others are wrong, or missing the details, or thinking there can't be any understanding in something they don't understand or disagree with is a big problem.
Lots of people whack others over the head to externally validate their beliefs. I think Evangelism might even fall under that category by some definitions, no offence.
It's like an LLM were set free.
"He probably stalked her from the age of 12 and waited till she was 19 before he bought her an ice cream of the flavour her mum liked before she died. All so that she'd invite him to this party where he could fight this other guy.
Imagine you think this guy is a friend and he only became your friend because he hated someone else.
As someone with trauma because of my parents dying when I was young, finding out that the one guy who was your friend is not would be devastating."
Part of the problem is, we tend to ignore age. That sort of post could have been made by a 9 year old.
Oh, the others are just the "deplorables". Say anything that isn't hard left and get banned. That being said, the developer subs are much better than Stack Exchange, where you have egotistic moderators high on power.
Reddit just lends itself to tribal behaviors.
You're given and us Vs them narrative and if you fall on the wrong classification by whoever decides they want to apply a label, any harm you can come to is delightful and cherished. Violence is justified too. "Words are violence" so violence can be used to "defend" against it.
I think it goes well beyond Reddit and has all to do with creating a context of righteousness and dehumanization to be able to justify mob behaviour and, ultimately, violence. Power, in one word.
For vigilanteism it seems simple to me: it was the original counterforce against anti-social sociopathic and predatory behavior such as murder - predating law enforcement, predating law, predating humanity. Even animals arguably engage in "vigilanteism" when retaliating against another pack's attack, or when pack leaders are overly cruel and tyranical. The deterence of "don't hurt us - or we'll hurt you".
We rightfully look down on vigilanteism now as it tends to short circuit things like the due process of an assumed-to-be effective, functional, and ethical legal system... but those are some pretty big assumptions, and I have several bridges to sell you if you think they're always true, or if you think everyone agrees on which legal systems rise to that level. Vigilanteism is merely the default form of "justice" that we sometimes rise above, given the right circumstances.
Circumstances which are often lacking online.
Or better yet, round the redditors up and send them to Siberia
I wonder if anyone who wished doom upon X in the past years is finally getting the satisfaction they wanted from watching its steady demise. Personally I don't see anything stopping someone from just making Twitter: The Sequel and starting the whole cycle all over again. There's nothing that outlaws the creation of an internet cesspool.
I don’t miss Twitter. I would absolutely miss Reddit.
“The greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people breaking the rules but by people following the rules. It's people who follow orders that drop bombs and massacre villages.”
Sometimes I wonder why things like vigilanteism and other bad behaviors were so prevalent in the past, but then you go to these communities and realize it hasn't gone away, it's just moved online. Which, I guess is progress of a sort (less violence) and a big step backwards when you think about how in the past you could have moved away from a mistake or embarrassing encounter, but not anymore if it becomes viral enough.