Viral clip in question: https://www.tiktok.com/@espnatbat/video/7688719334973230366

Article is about the impact of social media pile-ons (and has been getting praise within tech) so it is within scope for HN.

Those comments are pure vitriol juice, my god, and they just keep coming from all angles as to why that dude is an absolutely piece of shit on very little data. Incredible stuff, and a good lesson right there.

TikTok threw up a big "login" popup that I couldn't skip, so here is a youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUwQmrEFf7E

Normally the comments on that video are something I could laugh along with, but reading them after the article is... sobering.

I'm Danish, but how is this terrible? I should show these people a video of my twins sleeping in a snow covered trolley outside the bar I was having a beer and a board game by the window at.

In Copenhagen I was strongly adviced not to leave my bicycle unlocked outside, for quick visit at a grocery store. Everyone I know takes their bikes home overnight.

I started to notice a bit over a decade ago (about the same time as Cersei's walk of shame on GoT) that millennials as a generation were piling into naming and shaming people publicly as blindly appropriate punishment, without any consideration of what could go wrong and considering it their right and entitlement to do that. Any time a public figure gets into any kind of trouble, people demand to know all the details so they can satisfy their need to express outrage. It really is not healthy. Even if another person who was harmed comes out to express that they are satisfied with the outcome and the process that was followed, the crowd still wants to know all the details so they can feel angry.

I think it's their frustration of other things they can't control - climate change, K-shaped economy, PFAS in everything, no healthcare, 7% and rising mortgages for $1.5 million 1000 sq ft built in 1965 shitboxes, corruption by politicians, suppressed elections, pedophile rings operating carte blanche while law enforcement casts a blind eye, presidential pardons for sale to the rich, clawbacks of longstanding LGBTQ and women's rights... culture wars against trans people to distract from class inequality.... and on and on.

Well, I can't make much progress on or change those things so let me distract myself checking out this shitbird who won't help his wife or hold the baby while she gets some nachos. I can be outraged at him because it's small and tangible compared to being outraged at structural inequality of our current economic reality or the looming climate crisis.

for our parents generation, mortgage rates were 10%+

That this is something that has to be told to adults is the saddest part of humanity. No one has grown up.

Very well written both in prose and tone. I'm glad she decided to tell this story. If the author isn't a professional writer I think she could be.

This is a great "behind the scenes" style look at the actual people behind a viral clip. Luckily they have an extremely strong relationship to help soften the blows here, I'm not sure an average (not even bad!) relationship could come out of something like this unscathed.

There's something feral in us that comes out from time to time, especially online from the safety of our screens. I found the announcers within the range of good fun but when it gets to people reaching out to break up their marriage or telling him to kill himself it becomes really sobering.

I think this is part of what people are calling the lonlieness epidemic - despite thousands of screaming voices the whole thing makes me feel hollow and hopeless.

I'm sure the original was hers but this is pretty clearly spruced up with AI.

The first part I thought the same thing, what are the chances someone randomly is a great writer, once the tells hit though I couldn't unsee the AIisms.

The world is getting stranger though, the tells will disappear eventually and everyone will be a pro.

pretty clearly spruced up with AI

Get used to it. I don't think we're far from every bit of prose online, being at least edited, if not authored, by AI.

If people don't want to read AI, then they won't be reading anything but literary classics.

I'm not saying I find the prospect thrilling; just that it's inevitable.

As for the topic, projecting values, and life stories onto people from single data points, is a favorite sport of just about anyone. We often see people on this very forum, praising or attacking others as a person, and assigning motives; based on only a single comment. One habit that I've developed, is if someone posts something either in support or in opposition to one of my posts, I look them up, and try to find out as much as possible about them, before responding. It often fails, because people don't want others to know about them, but I suspect that it succeeds, a lot more than people might think.

I honestly do not understand this at all. I never use AI to edit my writing, nor do I want to. To me that defeats the entire fucking point of writing.

It's like learning to play an instrument, and then using AI to make you sound better. Why bother to learn at all then??

I get I may be very much in the minority here, but I still hate it.

Everyone loves to hate right away when they see something like this. It's a good practice to try to make up a story that gives an alternate, less vilifying explanation to what you're seeing. This is a great response from Erika. Thanks for sharing.

She’s a great writer.

A lot of people owe this family an apology. Here’s a sampling of some of the vile comments left on Reddit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Fauxmoi/comments/1wpll52/clip_of_a_...

Wow, Reddit is horrible. Atrocious behavior. Leave your brains in the anteroom!

Whoever sees this and it reminds them of their current relationship, DUMP HIM

you can tell by the body language, lack of initiative, and lack of joy and welcome-ness for his woman and baby to be back, everything you need to know.

There is a VERY good chance that when he realizes he went viral for being the *Poster Manchild* of taking your spouse for granted, of choosing to act like a parasitic blob

Modern Reddit provides a simulacrum of commentary. There are posts and people discusing these posts, but nobody understands or wants to know anything about the underlying topic. The lack of comprehension is crucial to the community.

Its unfortunate because it's not only one of the things that makes social media toxic, but it also makes it less and less like reality. Which in turn pushes away people who have more "normal" views, thereby making the community even more extreme over time. Ask a random person in the street and they might say they think he should help her, but they wouldn't come up with these detailed narratives about abuse and manipulation. That kind of reaction is characteristic of social media and the more I see it the less I want to spend time online with those kinds of people

David Foster Wallace's This is Water speech more relevant than ever.

A really toxic part of online interactions is that it's very common for people to see a tiny snippet of another person's life and then project all of their own personal resentments onto them.

Is there any benefit to social media? Just seems like a new form of cancer we have to deal with now along with everything else.

A place for those who would be marginalised by their own community, gay, religious apostates etc etc.

Communicating with relatives on the other side of the world.

Maintaining old friendships that would have died due to distance.

Somewhere to find like minded people.

Somewhere like hacker news (I count it as social media top) where I discovered great books, expanded my horizons and learnt that there were other ways at looking at the world.

Anyway, it's not all bad :)

You can do most of that with IRC. There's a distinction imo between static webpages / IRC / forums, and modern "social media".

I live alone, and have friends throughout the US.

Social media kept me from attempting suicide during COVID. It helps me feel loved and connected.

Yeah, there are faults, but condemning it wholeheartedly is like suggesting we should abolish ICE cars immediately.

And suggesting we abandon it as a comment on a social media platform is ironically self-unaware.

It’s not only online. Just last weekend, someone heckled me at Costco because my wife was pushing a heavy ass cart while I was walking freely next to her. She chose to do it, I offered to take it and she refused. But somehow a random stranger had something to say about it.

Online behavior is unfortunately a slightly worse mirror of real life. If you want to experience people outside of your bubble, just go to any public hearings or meetings and you’ll find that a lot of people are quite out there.

Ok, but like were you offended, I feel like it's mostly a harmless slightly funny observation. I wasn't there but like were they really trying to be mean spirited with it? I live in the south and there's a pretty much constant running stream of public commentary on any and everything going on and 99.9% of it is friendly intentioned even if on the surface it's deriding. So really the idea of thinking someone is making a meaningful judgement is strange. And of course, even if they really were, why care?

I’ll jump in- why care? Because it sucks to have people taking pot shots at you. If it is just one, then sure, that isn’t so bad, but when you have a group doing it, it can become existential. You may not have seen this type of violence before but it is unsettling. A group of people can do low effort violence that feels fun and harmless to them (each taking a lazy swing at someone), but the cumulative effect can be beating up or killing someone. Getting yelled at, or having someone write threatening things to you, is not as bad as being punched or having a stone thrown, but it is still damaging to humans.

Not all hurtful and harmful behavior is violence and we need to maintain the distinction.

Don’t want to be the semantics guy but hurtful and harmful behaviour is by definition violence.

That seems to be a big part of it.

There's a widespread problem of anti-intellectualism and acting-out, including, in the US, by both right and left. Most of the learning feedback to that -- pointing out to people when they might be missing something or acting unfairly -- is ignored, except to attack those who point it out.

AFAICT, for various reasons, they're proud of being warriors for their beliefs, and anyone who sounds like they're saying anything differently is the enemy, and the only thing you do with an enemy is score points against them or hurt them, while trying not to concede anything that the enemy would claim as points or hurt you. It's a toxic recipe for society.

Coincidentally, recently I've decided even Fedi isn't safe from that (it's just different and fewer people doing ideological bully thinking), and have resigned myself that issues of substance can't be discussed there either. Maybe the only safe thing to post is cat pictures.

I think it's much less a problem with HN. Of course, over time you realize certain positions get downvotes that aren't flattering to the people doing it, and some annoying commenting behaviors, and not always all the integrity we'd like to see, which are relatively mild by social media standards. However, I'm also seeing occasional random individual actor extreme toxicity problems with HN. And I'm anticipating some related but different kind of problems from how AI-powered tools will be easily used with the corpus/firehose to play toxic games.

Telling women they're being abused even when the woman herself disagrees is a very ironic pattern I see often. Somehow it's seen as anti-sexist and yet it puts the onus on the woman to justify herself like the case here where she wrote an entire article. What happened to letting women make their own choices? I'm sure some of them are legitimately concerned, but I think a lot of people just want to spread their preferred narratives about the world.

As a black man, I can't help but think of the whole Chris Brown thing here. Yes, I personally found what he did disgusting, and if everyone else obviously felt that way, I would keep that up.

But no -- I know too many Black women who have -- I suppose -- chosen forgiveness. Too many intelligent humans that I know or know of, are good with this for me to say "No, ladies, you are wrong."

Quite a common thing to see online where strangers judge relationships off some small slice. You see it on reddit and relationship subs all the time.

The internet feels like one those shitty religious villages were everyone is gossiping.

Another important story hiding in there:

Six weeks before my daughter was born, my employer of 13 years laid off my entire division. Ramses had just put up the down payment on a bigger home for our growing family. My unemployment meant he was facing the mortgage payments and managing a remodel on his own, while we prepared to welcome another child.

That man has found a treasure of a woman!

Almost anyone can be seen as a hero or a zero if the right 15 second clip is captured. We love it when our best moments hit social media, but everyone also piles on when we are caught at our worst (or what appears to be bad, even if it not).

It is amazing how many haters emerge like in this case, when there is so much more to the story.

Algorithmic social media amplifies and promotes our basest, vilest impulses. Crowds were always worse than people, but now these "technologies" put that into turbo-overdrive, 5 billion people at a time, pushed and prodded by the engagement-maxxing machine. I don't see a bright future if we don't get a hand on this, and I don't see us getting a hand on this.

Another side to the story is that I wonder how many of the reddit/tiktok posts pouring gasoline on the discourse were LLMs.

If it was the other way around they would be saying what a hero he is lol.

Kinda off topic, but as a single Father I cant help but notice how much less of a support system Fathers get. When shit hits the fan its always people assuming the worst. A Fathers major support system is their Wives and Family. Good for him for having such a great Woman by his side... Im not complaining, just an observation

Yeah, it is complicated because we do live in a very misogynistic civilization with patriarchal privileges. It’s just often difficult not to overcompensate to counterbalance and resist these circumstances. Treat people as individuals instead of the archetypes.

As author wrote: we need to practice the benefit of the doubt. Or I like the “trust but verify” pattern

And yet, tons of comments on Threads from women saying she's been gaslit or even that the husband must have threatened her with violence and forced her to write this.

You can't win with these people.

normal people -- employed, in a relationship, with chores and hobbies to occupy their free time -- simply do not participate in the gender war on the Internet. most are blissfully unaware that it's even happening. the womanosphere is a mirror image of its critically panned counterpart -- a refuge for the unhappy and/or mentally ill, an obnoxiously loud minority.

I guarantee you that every woman on Earth is aware of mistreatment due to her gender. Sexism is not a fantasy created online, as you assert.

[flagged]

What I notice quite often is a sort of "LLM derangement syndrome" where people start flagging the most innocuous figures of speech and speech pattern as "clearly LLM".

Quite ironic when we are talking about an article which argues for extending the benefit of the doubt.

I thought the piece sounded like AI as well, so I ran it through Pangram, which reports it as 100% AI. Considering Pangram's extremely low false positive rate, I'm inclined to believe this was AI written.

Thing is, it might be or it might not be. At some point you have to realize that some people need wheelchairs to move, some people need glasses to see, and some people need LLMs to write.

IMHO It's when you see someone who is paid to write/think using LLMs that you might make a value judgement.

I once knew a girl who wore prescription-free glasses b/c it made her feel smarter so she'd study longer. Not kidding. I made a value judgement about that. But she got the studying done. There's been other more prevalent cases of that on socials.

It might be worth letting some people write in any way they can.

i suspect in some time people might begin to flag every bit of text they see online as "LLM sounding", even if it's very clearly not

All other things aside, 20 dollars for a can of beer!?

If you have reasons to want to limit how much most people drink at your venue, this would be a good way to do it.

More like a captive audience of people who have self selected for having disposable income that they don't mind being parted from.

I had my first kid a couple years ago and found myself spending a ton of time holding my kid while he slept, since it's the only way he'd reliably sleep. I spent a good amount of that time browsing various parenting and new baby subreddits.

One very common pattern I saw is that the conclusion is always that the dad is useless. Any provided facts are downplayed. Any omitted facts are imagined in the most negative light possible. And to be fair, there really are LOTS of cases where the dad is useless. The issue is more that posts needed to contain a mountain of evidence to return a neutral ground where the dad is no longer seen as a piece of garbage, rather than starting from neutral ground.

I feel for moms, who in addition to giving birth and having their lives upended to raise a baby, are now told that not only are most men garbage, but their man is garbage too. I feel for the dads, who even if they work hard are told how useless they are, and have to combat a stream of negativity fed to their spouse. It's a divisive wedge thrown into a new family, one that social media algorithms are only happy to encourage for engagement.

When I see instances like the one in this topic, I can see how the default narrative has been applied here. The radio announcers surely aren't aware of the storm they're creating, but it suddenly thrusts two average people into the social media spotlight, where people are happy to assume any missing details to fit their narrative. Everyone is going to apply the default story without taking any time to consider the possibility of other context.

EDIT TO ADD: I know there are manosphere spaces that are toxic too. As a man I've had no problem avoiding them, so this is one of my first extended exposures to this type of content, which is why it stuck with me. Probably also because I felt personally unwelcome as a dad.

People are animals and animals can be trained. Dogs can be trained, elephants can be trained, tigers can be trained. This fact is hated, but has been known for thousands of years.

Foreign adversaries, political extremist groups and so on are all clawing away at every facet of society that can contribute to training people to be and do what they want. For all of our information, language and intellect, those strengths are just an open vulnerability if they aren't protected.

You have to train yourself sufficiently on the grounded basics of reality, the truth and the nature so that when adversarial training against you and others strikes you can be wise enough to push back like this. You have to be able to surround yourself with people who disagree and stand your ground, because they're all being pumped with garbage from everywhere and don't know any better.

It is one of Russia, China, Cuba's and even Iran's way of attacking the US at a distance by funding these groups and amplifying the dumbest stuff you can imagine until these minority voices reach majority saturation in some of the information spaces where they can fester. Taking over education, journalism, social media and so on.

If the idea of the open society is going to survive into the next century, we're either going to need AI to ground society if we can prevent AI from becoming too centralized, or we're going to need to rapidly change education to teach people to think even if the reason we haven't been doing so up to this point is that it fragments society too much. If the alternative is a fragmentation that our enemies control, then a new enlightenment may be the better way.