
The Internet of Beefs - rinze
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/16/the-internet-of-beefs/
======
CommieBobDole
This is an excellent analysis of the state of the modern internet, though I
don't entirely agree with his diagnosis of the cause; I think it's more down
to two main things:

1\. We are all, at heart, covetous xenophobic apes, and we've been doing the
same basic thing (arbitrarily define an in-group and an out-group and proceed
to wage total war on the out-group) since before we were even human. This is
just the latest iteration of the thing we've always done.

2\. For more than a decade now, people have been spending fortunes building
platforms and algorithms that rely on ever-increasing user 'engagement', often
without really knowing what that is. As it turns out, conflict is the most
engaging kind of engagement. Twitter especially is a machine for conflict - it
funnels anger-inducing information to the user and makes it trivial to strike
back at the source of the anger. I really don't think anybody did this on
purpose, but it's what we ended up with.

~~~
devchix
>conflict is the most engaging kind of engagement

This doesn't feel right. I ask myself, do I go places to look for people to
fight with? Emphatically no. Do you? Probably not. I just read this
great|hateful book|movie|thing. I want to talk about it with people who have
experienced this book|movie|thing, would be great if they saw it the way I
did, also great if they disagreed but we could discuss it with a shared
language and experience. I feel we are too far apart and too lonesome to go
around picking fight, do picking fights form groups? I don't usually engage
because 1) strangers on the Internet mean little to me; 2) I think I hold an
unpopular opinion; 3) I'm not driven to articulate every thought I have.
Conflict drives a good story, I think that's true in a narrative sense, but I
don't think it's true we humans go looking for it. I want to believe we are
more cooperative creature than a belligerent one. The whole Twitter/Facebook
"like" culture is a testament, we want to belong.

~~~
jamesrcole
>> _conflict is the most engaging kind of engagement_

> _do I go places to look for people to fight with? Emphatically no. Do you?
> Probably not._

People seem to love information that ridicules and hates on "the other side"
(e.g. in politics). They like seeing the other side being put down, and the
feeling of superiority they can get from that.

~~~
ghayes
I've noticed this pattern emerge more than ever on the front page of reddit.
The vast majority of generally public posts tend to be deeply negative, for
example, from right now:

1\. Joe Biden calls game developers "little creeps" who make titles that
"teach you how to kill" 3\. Father tackles son’s opponent after illegal move
at high school wrestling match 4\. Jaylen Brown murders LeBron 5\. Puerto Rico
fires two more officials after Hurricane Maria aid found unused ... 6\. This
is how a grown woman decided to act toward someone peacefully protesting a fur
store 8\. Joe Biden calls game developers "little creeps" who make titles that
"teach you how to kill" 9\. Breaktester gets what he deserves
(/r/instantkarma) 11\. Just another day in Texas (/r/idiotsincars)

More than half of the front page is about the "other side" losing, and this is
on one of the most browsed websites on the Internet.

------
Lammy
This article resonates with me and my experiences online to a startling
degree. Specifically:

“We are not beefing endlessly because we do not desire peace or because we do
not know how to engineer peace. We are beefing because we no longer know who
we are, each of us individually, and collectively as a species.”

I think we are seeing a genuine lack of strong family, social, and
organizational ties among most people, myself (sadly) included. I don’t think
I or any of my peers fully grasp what we’re missing and how isolated we truly
are. I think we as a cohort had very good reasons for participating in that
change, such as me (an LGBT person) leaving the Catholic church I was raised
in rather than bury that other part of myself to fit in. The problem is that I
replaced it with nothing, and I think the same pattern has repeated across
many other people and many other traditions. The temptation is to suggest
MeetUps and other things built to connect people, but those suggested
replacements don’t come with the same assumption of trust built in like many
traditional organizational and family ties do.

~~~
DoreenMichele
Trust is earned. It's not something you can assume.

That "assumption of trust" you speak of included an assumption that either you
weren't LGBT or you would bury it your entire life for the comfort of the
larger community.

Matthew 10:34-36

 _34 "Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not
come to bring peace, but a sword. 35For I have come to turn "'a man against
his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her
mother-in-law- 36a man's enemies will be the members of his own household.'_

I would say you did the actual Christian thing by leaving. But I'm not
Christian, so I'm sure many will find that assertion offensive.

Community cannot be founded upon an assumption that some people will bury an
important part of themselves like that. That's a foundation of sand and will
not last.

We are seeing such things dissolve because we have other options these days.
In the past, people often grudgingly tolerated it because they had no place to
go, not because being part of some larger community was some wonderfully
fulfilling experience most of the time.

If the world is seeing a loss of identity, it is because we are being freed
from the shackles of our old identity. It's normal for there to be a
transition period where no one knows what's what.

That's not a problem. It's just a stage in a process.

It's only a problem if we get stuck here and fail to establish a new identity.
Then the great experiment fails, the opportunity to become something better is
lost and we likely see things crash and burn so the world can sort of return
to it's old ways that kind of worked.

~~~
codebolt
> That "assumption of trust" you speak of included an assumption that either
> you weren't LGBT or you would bury it your entire life for the comfort of
> the larger community.

The LGBT community comes with it's own shackles. They assume the only natural
thing is for someone to structure their whole identity and lives around what
might just be a developmental phase of their youth. I'm certainly glad that
type of thinking wasn't promoted when I was growing up.

~~~
DoreenMichele
I'm not heterosexual. The LGBT community has made it crystal clear they want
nothing whatsoever to do with me.

I don't speak for that community. My remark in no way suggests that their
agenda is somehow superior to that of the Catholic Church.

~~~
codebolt
> I'm not heterosexual. The LGBT community has made it crystal clear they want
> nothing whatsoever to do with me.

Care to expand on your experience?

~~~
DoreenMichele
Nope.

------
tlb
This framework helps me understand why prominent thinkers on Twitter get so
much content-free hate in their replies. Most replies aren't even
disagreements with the thing they're replying to. They're missiles in a beef
war, against some perceived elite group. So it's not necessary to understand
the claim and make a detailed refutation. They can just reply with a generic
personal attack, and that keeps the culture war going. And generic personal
attacks get multiplied by the crowd more than specific nuanced ones, because
they're easy to imitate.

Also:

> You can only predict it by trying to understand it as the deliberate
> perpetuation of a culture of conflict by those with an interest in keeping
> it alive.

ie, the warriors are playing an infinite game that they enjoy. You can't win
by out-arguing them. The only way to win is not to play.

~~~
durpleDrank
"missiles in a beef war" I love this phrase.

------
pochamago
I've always thought anonymous imageboards were excellent training grounds for
how to deal with all of this. When there's no upvoting or ability to filter
people by name, you have to learn how to deal with people who often truly are
only posting to make you mad. There are two good responses, both of which are
extremely difficult if you have no practice: ignoring it; engaging sincerely
and with the assumption that the other person is doing the same. If you
persist with the first they'll eventually go and bother someone else, but this
is doubly hard because it requires everyone to ignore them, and that only
really happens when the bait has grown stale. The second often results in them
switching from the troll persona to actual sincerity, but it requires several
back and forths of responding with goodwill to bile, and I think it's even
harder to accomplish in forums where people have tied their name to their
opinions.

~~~
woutr_be
It's a good training ground to learn to control yourself for sure. But as soon
as there's filtering and up- / down-voting, you'll quickly learn that none of
that matters.

I tried to engage in some Reddit discussions regarding politics in my country,
and as soon as you don't follow the general sentiment, you get downvoted and
eventually banned. Even if you're absolutely sincere and have good arguments
as to why you think like this, you'll just get labelled a troll for
disagreeing with something. While it's very frustrating, it's also truly
scary, they just end up creating their own echo chambers, only allowing people
who agree with them to post or comment. Eventually this moves on to the real
world where they'll assume everyone has the same opinion because they've been
living in an echo chamber.

~~~
throwawaybbb
It's an odd world where 4chan back in its worst days had a better community
than fb, Twitter or reddit do today. And that's with the gore and other
unmentionables.

------
jcoffland
HN is pretty good at moderating discussions. Which is the main reason I come
here. Still, I've seen plenty of beef only thinking here and I too have been
guilty at times.

It can be quite frustrating when you make an observation about someone's
comment only to have them automatically assume you were in disagreement. It's
good to assume a generous interpretation. Since tone is so hard to gauge on
the Internet, discussions quickly devolve otherwise.

~~~
mrspeaker
HN is now my last un-deleted social media account... and even here I end up
removing 50% of my posts, and regretting another 30-odd% after realizing they
were low-value emotional negative "beef" post.

Why is "if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all" so hard in
practice? Why do I just NEED to throw in my 2 cents?!

~~~
ggreer
The vast majority of people do follow that rule, but there are _so_ many
people reading these comments. If even 1% of them have a moment of weakness
(or are kinda dickish personalities), they'll drown out the nice comments.

~~~
dt3ft
That is also true offline. Does Debbie downer ring a bell, for example?

------
nostromo
At some point people will realize that Twitter doesn't matter. The sooner that
happens the better.

For whatever reason, our elites and media are convinced Twitter is _very
important_. Nothing is worse than getting criticized by the peanut gallery.
Twitter can end careers, cancel television shows, bring down elected
officials.

That power quickly turned from, "complain about lost baggage on Twitter and
get an airline ticket voucher for $50" to "I demand anyone I disagree with be
exiled to Elba."

The truth is Twitter already doesn't matter, like, _at all_ to almost
everyone. Ask your aunt or brother-in-law about what's trending on Twitter and
you'll get a blank stare. But journalists and elites continue to be terrified
of, and enthralled by Twitter. They've collectively forgotten that "sticks and
stones may break my bones..."

~~~
danharaj
I think you're taking for granted how twitter is used as a global cafe by
communities that would otherwise be disjointed and isolated. For every
controversial tweet or tweet of drama, theres thousands of enriching
conversations happening that could otherwise not occur.

I think it's ironic that negative takes on the twitter model tend to be as
shallow and polarizing as they claim the platform to be. As for me, I think
there's some worth to it that could be taken even further if decentralized
analogues become widely popular.

~~~
gambiting
>>For every controversial tweet or tweet of drama, theres thousands of
enriching conversations happening that could otherwise not occur.

I don't believe that this actually happens. Definitely not on twitter anyway.

~~~
wtmt
>>For every controversial tweet or tweet of drama, theres thousands of
enriching conversations happening that could otherwise not occur.

> I don't believe that this actually happens. Definitely not on twitter
> anyway.

I believe that the GP has it reversed. I’d rephrase it in the other sense
(what I see as reality) as:

“For every enriching conversation happening on Twitter, there are millions of
controversial tweets or tweets of drama that occur and would anyway occur.”

------
dluan
Throw in Nadia Eghbal's Tyranny of Ideas
([https://nadiaeghbal.com/ideas](https://nadiaeghbal.com/ideas)) and you'll
realize it's not humans beefing, but ideas. Posting is praxis, and the
internet is a series of tube battlegrounds for the best ideas.

I'm a multitour veteran of the scarred hellscape where modern and historic
ideas struggle - 4chan, TEDx conferences, irc, VC conference rooms, local
candidate door-knocking campaigns, reddit, and of course twitter. The brawling
is better there than in academic journals and library shelves. Today I proudly
do my duty fighting off the bad ideas with the Good Ones.

Jokes aside, this is a horribly lame and out of touch take, saying that
people's righteous anger is in fact not because of their legit complaints
about society, but because _they just want to argue_. It's a both sides false
equivalence, equal to PG implying he's better off being an "accidental
centrist", whatever the hell that means.

~~~
Yhippa
Sometimes I love arguing just to argue. I wonder how many other people there
are like me?

~~~
godDLL
In my own experience:

1\. everyone starts out like that

2\. some realize that and (sometimes having thought of it for a while) make a
decision to persist/stop that

3\. some years have passed by since, and now you can't get that reaction out
of me, only understanding

------
chadcmulligan
Is it though? or is it the disenfranchised finally are able to have their
opinion heard? We also get to see the emperors now and we realise they have no
clothes - they're just like us.

My hope is this is a brief period of education of everyone to see each others
opinions and something better can come of it. As always there are those at
work trying to maintain their positions.

For myself I have learnt a lot about the belief systems of other people from
the internet. I can only hope others are doing the same, we all have to get
along.

Edit: I think of it as the great flattening, to coin a term, previous
societies were hierarchical with people in charge handing down dogma. There
were some dissenters - they were called antisocial at one stage. Now everyone
is at the same level, I've had conversations on forums with people who
invented tech, wrote books I've read, I could if I was so inclined seek out
other fields - everything is open now. This is bound to cause some 'beefing'.
End of beef.

~~~
4thwaywastrel
I don't think the posted conception of the culture war as a "holding pattern
of conflict" is incompatible with the idea that it's also a legitimate
outpouring of the voice of the disenfranchised.

Some might say that we've become stuck in that outpouring, and enamoured with
conflict rather than any kind of coherent vision for how to be.

~~~
chadcmulligan
Could be, maybe these conflicts are fundamental to being human and no
resolution is possible? This is the new normal?

------
wwweston
Q: How would one distinguish between IoB culture and a culture in which there
is a meaningful conflict between ideas and values?

~~~
omgwtfbyobbq
The resolution of that conflict. The author posits that the IoB tends to
maximize conflict and avoid resolution.

~~~
wwweston
Observing what avenues for possible resolution exist seems like a good place
to start and a productive line to pursue.

But it seems to me that there are some conflicts with deeper roots than IoB
culture that have gone on much longer than the internet has existed: whether
or not people should be able to be understood as property, whether sacred
texts are meant to be understood in the same way as scientific descriptions
when it comes to understanding cosmology, to what extent and where
institutions like markets, or states, or churches should shape our lives.

Violence has been employed and even full-fledged war has emerged over
questions like those, so apparently better avenues for resolution were
unavailable.

Does that mean those things were also based in beef-first thinking? If so, was
everyone on each side of those conflicts equally guilty of beef-first
thinking, and that's how war happened?

~~~
omgwtfbyobbq
If the architects of these conflicts behave in ways that maximize the duration
of the conflicts and minimize the chance of resolution, then that sounds like
beef-first thinking.

If it's just two (or n-many) sides caught in an asymmetric struggle where they
both want some sort of resolution and neither one has the resources to get
there, then I see that as a stalemate.

Most wars to me don't seem to be beef-first because they resolve eventually.
Even when they go on for a while, it's usually because one or more faction/s
isn't able to end it and the other/s aren't okay with the costs of ending it.
If a war could be ended at a reasonable cost to someone, and they decide they
would rather have it continue indefinitely, then that's closer to beef-first
thinking.

~~~
wwweston
OK, so between this exchange and a revisit of the article, maybe I think I
see:

Conflict itself is not the signal of beef-first culture. Pitchforks aren't
either, nor being able to pick out Mooks and Knights. All of those things can
be done in the service of values.

Beef-first thinking involves personal/tribal status as first above all other
values, perhaps even practically driving out all other values.

And personal/tribal status aren't really inherent values, they really only
exist in contrast to some Other. Which means they're inherently tied to
actively sustaining conflict.

------
DoreenMichele
I'm not going to be able to wade through this entire article. If this is at
all an accurate characterization of Twitter, that might explain why I have so
few followers.

I don't engage in this stuff on Twitter. I've overall had fairly positive
experiences on Twitter. I continue to try to figure out how to connect
positively on Twitter and on the internet generally.

I don't agree that the only antidote is to go seek out walled gardens and the
like. The real solution is to be the change you want to see.

Don't go looking for beefs.

Try to bring solutions, not complaints.

Try to have some empathy for people and assume "They must be having a bad day"
or "Wow, they must have a lot of baggage on this topic" and politely decline
to get into some shitshow with them.

Remember that having empathy for others (instead of just assuming everyone is
simply intentionally being an asshole) doesn't mean being a doormat. Respect
yourself. Don't kiss their ass to mollify them or something. Instead, just
shut up and quit putting out the fire with gasoline.

~~~
jcroll
> Don't go looking for beefs.

You can't even post a question on StackOverflow without creating a beef (e.g.
"Why would you want to do that?")

------
samatman
Venkat is enjoyable as always, but the central conceit of this essay is an
insult to crash-only programming.

The crash-only approach to feuding online is to _stop responding when someone
beefs with you_. Don't try to mollify, don't flame back, don't explain
yourself, just: close the tab, do something else, and reboot Twitter later, in
a known-good state.

------
anonu
I think this article captures the Zeitgeist of this internet era perfectly.

I'm a bit surprised at the hasty conclusion though:

> The conclusion is inescapable: the IoB will shut down, and give way to
> something better, only when we know who we want to be — individually and
> collectively — when the beefing stops, and regenerate into that form. Only
> that will allow history to be rebooted, and time to be restarted.

The IoB is driven by human nature. It's demise would only lead to beefing in
some other arena that we cannot postulate yet...

------
jrochkind1
I'm not quite sure what to make of this, but I think I agree with this
conclusion:

> We are not beefing endlessly because we do not desire peace or because we do
> not know how to engineer peace. We are beefing because we no longer know who
> we are, each of us individually, and collectively as a species. Knight and
> mook alike are faced with the terrifying possibility that if there is no
> history in the future, there is nobody in particular to be once the beefing
> stops.

> And the only way to reboot history is to figure out new beings to be.
> Because that’s ultimately what beefing is about: a way to avoid being,
> without allowing time itself to end.

What this era calls for is us to discover new ways of being human. It sounds
grandiose, but I think that's where we are.

~~~
godDLL
I have to say that in my own experience nothing foretells me of an end to IoB.
Which is just a new conceptualization of "Eternal September", as far as I
understand.

Let me contrast my own world-view perturbations with what we see attributed to
"meeks and knights" in the article:

I remember my internal world-view and thinking and feeling from about the age
of 4. I am 36 now.

So most people don't.

I was either raised to understand or had that built-in that I was bread and
born into a world that is set up by multiple interested parties, and I had a
place in the machine. Or had to build my own processes that mined the value-
system and become a part of that machine.

Most people don't. Many think they're special. Many feel entitled.

I did not easily get on with people at first, but did make an effort to
understand what Russian is meant to imply, Jew meant to imply, Boy meant to
imply; in terms of where my place is and who my enemies are and what I am
supposed to think and do about them.

Most people pick that up from their surroundings (not being ADD like me), take
it in as a given, and embody it throughout and henceforth. Which is a point
that I needed to research to understand.

"Most people" is ME, at one point in time or another. That is, people change,
people react before assessing their position, people get represented by
something or someone for the purpose of this fight or that fight. I learned
that all the human "evil" and the moral good could be teased out of my own
life experience, given enough time and argumentative power. Any action or
inaction or inattention can reflect on me, put me in that "most people"
category for a moment.

That makes me an individual, and a part of a larger humanity.

But no associations exist in-between. No shared interest that persists. No
values that don't change, no long game that plays out this way or that.

I have no permanent in-group, no close associates with a shared vision, not
even some permanent foe group that is always opposed to the way I think or am.
And I am starting to think that this is exactly how most people are most of
the time now. And that this is a marked change from how even my own parents
used to be.

I think I am ill-equipped biologically to handle that kind of thing. The
shifting of values, the arbitrariness of goals, the loneliness of most people
most of the time.

Mayhap, in this constant endeavour to minister the masses and disperse their
attention from focusing on the imperial divide of workers and benefactors that
resulted in the world that I find myself in, that resulted in me being how I
am; humans have finally hit the ball out of the park? Perhaps the game can not
continue. Maybe, we are currently lost, all of us, individually.

The way we used to align and declare ourselves, the shared goals and values,
the in-group and the out-group used to be larger categories of things. I think
today it all has devolved into very petty squabbling.

I live in the land of Israel (or Palestine if you prefer), and it's pretty
quiet, if you ignore the news media ruckus. It used to be much bloodier before
my time, I understand.

I'm not sure that it was better the way all that has been resolving itself
before. But it sure was less lonely.

------
kick
I hesitate to criticize this person, because they're presumably writing for an
audience that already knows them, and probably are following for this style of
writing, but I have to ask: What is it with think-pieces that state obvious
and widespread conclusions while using jargon and jokes to obscure how basic
of conclusions they really are?

I can't fault people who do this because they're paid by the word and taking
5,000 of them to describe the color of the sky brings them a nice amount, but
I don't see why it's done here, where that doesn't seem to be a consideration.

~~~
quacker
Agree. Out of context, this takes a ton of effort to understand.

Some examples

\- _Great Weirding morphs into the Permaweird_

\- _underground Internet that I’ve previously called the CozyWeb_

\- _unflattened Hobbesian honor-society conflict_

\- _Mookcoins are mined by knights through acts of senpai-notice-me_

\- _retreat into what I call waldenponding or to the CozyWeb_

Several of these link to other essays which, in turn, use ever more jargon
whose definitions are found in yet other source material.

~~~
twic
It reads LessWrong's cooler brother.

~~~
piaste
More heavily watered down than cooler, I suspect.

The only other Ribbonfarm article I've read was the "premium mediocre" one, in
which they described _themselves_ as a premium mediocre blog, adding "the
actual upper-class readers read SSC or Marginal Revolution". On the limited
basis of these two articles, I am leaning towards the idea that it was an
accurate assessment.

~~~
claudiawerner
To learn about the link with SSC, it does not at all surprise me that
Riboonfarm shows the same aspect of someone talking about various topics (in
particular sensitive and sociological ones) without showing any evidence of
reading any established research on them.

It's perplexing how similar essays on natural world, not taking into account
any research on physics in the last 100 years or more, would not be nearly as
appreciated. If it's not acceptable in physics, why do we accept it when it
comes to sociology or media studies?

~~~
scottishcow
Why is it perplexing? People put more trust in fields where researchers follow
(or are expected to follow, at least) the scientific method.

I work in what may be called a "soft" science field, I don't complain when
people don't view our output as authoritative as that of hard science. I'm
proud of my work, but I don't claim to have any monopoly on truth (or even a
better grasp of truth, for that matter) just because I have a list of academic
publications. It's the nature of the field.

~~~
claudiawerner
You don't have to put trust in a field to do an overview of the existing
literature and show how and where it is wrong. Neither philosophy or
mathematics, for example, don't follow the "scientific method" (let's assume
the Anglophone conception as opposed to Wissenschaft for the sake of arument),
yet I would hope that people would rightly call out a post on utilitarianism
that doesn't take into account arguments from the last twenty years, or an
argument against metaphysics that stops at Hume, and they'd be skeptical of a
proof of the Riemann hypothesis expressed in all but the terms of
mathematicians.

If you're more convinced by my mathematics example than my philosophy one, it
just shows that this isn't about the scientific method at all, but standards
of rigor in argumentation, which soft sciences are perfectly capable of, at
least internally within frameworks. In that case, all it would take is for the
author to mention which framework they believe has the most explanatory power,
and why.

Lastly, I fail to see why this would be such an issue in the first place; as
an example, take a claim like "viewing pornography is associated with
misogynistic attitudes", or even more strongly, that pornograhy causes such
attitudes. The fact that it is a broad claim, that relies on population
samples and indirect measurement, does not make the research into the topic
(both in support and in denial of the claim) any less valid to be ignorant
about, if you're writing an essay on whether porn should be censored or not.

Different epistemic standards are not an excuse for ignorance. "Not as
authoritive" is not the same as "no authority at all", and it's especially not
the same when the essay in question itself is engaging in that topic.

~~~
scottishcow
The public doesn’t owe anything to academics; whether or not they decide to
pay attention to literature of a certain field, it is their choice. I was
merely stating my observation that while many seem to consider it worthwhile
to pay some level of respect to physics or mathematics, fewer appear to do so
with regards to sociology or media studies. Are such attitudes justified?
Perhaps so, perhaps not - but either way I find nothing perplexing that the
public does not respect all fields of inquiry equally.

~~~
claudiawerner
We're not talking about "the public" generally, we're talking about someone
who has thought about a topic and possesses enough interest to write about it.
One would think that in the interest of intellecutal honesty they would
investigate previous work. If they haven't, it's a valid point of criticism of
the work, and I have criticized the work on that basis, just as I would
criticize someone writing on space-time who hasn't bothered to look into
Einstein, or someone writing on electronics as if they're discovering
Kirchoff's law for the first time.

------
bwing
[https://samzdat.com/2017/06/28/without-belief-in-a-god-
but-n...](https://samzdat.com/2017/06/28/without-belief-in-a-god-but-never-
without-belief-in-a-devil/)

samzdat makes similar points in this article -- esoteric but insightful

------
Multiplayer
I've already retreated to mostly cozyweb! It's great here.

~~~
dt3ft
I started building a new cozyweb community. To join, users need a valid phone
number. I hope that this will dramatically decrease spam and beefy
interaction. I don't expect the community to be huge, but I'd rather have it
cozy and small than huge and chaotic.

~~~
dredmorbius
Simply limiting size, throttling invites, and ejecting troublemakers, goes a
long ways to civility.

I'd cultivated a surprisingly good, small (~40-50) member community on G+ at
one point, largely on that basis.

Mutual anonymity (myself as founder and moderator) worked. It wasn't conflict-
free, but conflict resolved, quickly. Most often problems removed themselves,
rarely (2-3x?) they had to be removed. That was done as quietly and civily as
possibly.

------
alexis_fr
> Importantly, unless you do something dumb that makes you vulnerable to being
> drawn into the mook-manorial economy against your will, such as saying
> something that can be used against you while in a position of authority in
> an important institution, the IoB is an opt-in conflict arena. You only opt-
> in to the Internet of Beefs driven by a sincere grievance if you are mook
> enough to want to.

I find this vert true. The particularity of HN is that they did not gather by
beef but by learning about the startup scene and skills.

------
vasilipupkin
Undoubtedly, some of what this article describes, routinely takes place on
twitter. However, I find that something else takes place on twitter much more,
or at least as frequently. It goes something like this:

1) Something somewhere happens.

2) A person who may be famous or well know for some accomplishments, perhaps
even super impressive accomplishments in a particular field of business or
creative endevours, decides to comment on 1) on Twitter

3) Note that this person usually has no particular expertise or knowledge in
the area of 1) despite having overall success and fame and lots of followers

4) It turns out that because of 3) their opinion expressed in 250 characters
often ( not always ) is either somewhat silly, potentially offensive to some,
outright dumb/misinformed or simply lacks sufficient nuance.

5) because of 4) lots of "mooks" and "knights" come out of the woodwork and
attack this famous person, along with all kinds of legitimate critics

6) said person feels under attack and/or cancelled and bemoans the state of
Twitter, the world and the internet

Now, it may be unfortunate that Twitter mobs attack these people simply for
their opinions. But if you opine on something you have no expertise in to a
very large audience in public, then I think you should grow thicker skin and
prepare to also weather some criticism just on the off chance you actually say
something dumb.

It's as if only these people, with their declarations of their opinions have
the right to say something controversial, but nobody else has any right to
respond to that controversial thought with any criticism or disagreement.

~~~
dasil003
I don't particularly care about someone's feelings being hurt on the internet.
The problem with Twitter and most social media is that they have lowered the
effort to interact as low as possible in the pursuit of engagement. The result
is a system in which any kind of intelligent discourse tends to be drowned out
by a torrent of tribally approved virtue signals. These platforms are
dominated by the need to respond quickly in order to generate another dopamine
hit, and actively work against deep thinking.

~~~
vasilipupkin
Twitter is a firehose of information. In order to have a good experience on
Twitter, you have to curate who you follow so that you don't see things you
don't care about. Once I have done that, I see plenty of extremely intelligent
discourse on Twitter, from humor to book recommendations to deep tech
discussions to intelligent/sophisticated political takes, to analysis on
startups, etc. So, no, I would have to disagree with you.

------
mark_l_watson
Good article, resonated with me.

I think the problem is people care both too much about other people’s opinions
and also are too forceful pushing their opinions at other people.

I think it was the stoic philosopher Epictetus who said people love themselves
more than other people but value other people’s opinions about themselves more
than they value their own opinions about themselves. Don’t worry so much about
what other people think and say.

------
nsainsbury
What's interesting about this as well is that participating in this economy of
beefs makes people deeply unhappy right to the core, and yet they can't seem
to step away.

Take any Twitter user with over 20k followers, and almost to a T they appear
to be extremely unhappy, depressed, and anxious wrecks who use Twitter to put
on a happy face and pretend they're not.

------
thebiglebrewski
Man was I really hoping this was an API for cows in a field and sensor data
attached to each beef. BaaS, or Bovine as a Service.

~~~
mikhailfranco
Surely BaaS would be for sheep.

~~~
thebiglebrewski
Legit

------
onceUponADime
Imagine two curves, ressources, and population growth, one bouncing against
the other, deminishing it. Imagine a blind force, trying to adapt to this
circumstances.

How would a neuro-typus look like, that adapts to strife? How would its build
up look like?

What would be the treshold to bring it out of hibernation in hiding out in the
open? What could return it to hibernation?

Would it try to create a everlasting thirty year war, if it could? What re-
purpose could such a neuro-typus have in peace times? Is something that is
adapted to its surrounding even sick- can you call someone who traumatizes and
revels in it, in its environment even sick?

Is religion - the maximum production of genetic lotterys for the great lottery
of war- at cost of liberty, just another peace time adaption to this adaption
to the perfect cycle of strife? How many neuro-typuses are there? Can diffrent
neuro-typus form a social machinery?

Has the peacefull humanity, this idealized version ever existed? Or is this
just some luxery delusion, created by science? Give me energy in abundance,
give me fertilizer, give me fresh-water, give me forrests, i shall devour
them, and call myself peacefull.

Will virtual violence (games) allow to hack/circumvent the cycle of strife
behaviour?

Will self-surveilance gadgetry allow us to behave, even when the state
collapses?

We live in intersting times.

We could feed this regressive behaviour for another thousand years, if we had
fusion and spaceflight- but then, we would be exponential up and out there,
holding the rocks of gods. Maybe its better to resolve this down here.

To harden the roots of the scenario-tree, give it all the chances to self-
control, learned in a thousand years of repetition.

Dang, I wish you could invest kharma in a point, with a dividend, depending on
investment. And with insolvency goes away all your posts to the underworld.

------
aazaa
Some of the requirements for a durable beef:

1\. The two sides are evenly matched.

2\. There is no way to objectively decide the merits of the beef.

3\. Each side of the beef has at least one skilled Knight capable of
"eviscerating" Knights of the other side.

4\. Knights who do not care one way or another about the ideas involved in the
beef. Only the conflict matters to a good Knight.

5\. Mooks on each side are plentiful and eager to please the Knight they
serve.

6\. Knights view their own Mooks as a necessary evil.

7\. Mutual dislike between Mook clans must be real.

8\. Knights seek balanced matches with no clear outcome. Only the conflict
matters.

Remove any of these elements and the beef loses its appeal and participants.

------
ggm
I often ask myself why Facebook, Twitter and Instagram say "follow" instead of
link or associate.

People who seek followers give me cause for concern.

~~~
stanferder
Should be "observe".

------
Thorentis
This is an interesting framework in which to analyse the Internet and the
communication that occurs on the Internet, but I don't think all parts of the
analysis are correct. Or at least, I think many assumptions about the reasons
for people behaving as they do have been made, that are not necessarily
correct. I think the observations of behaviour are fairly accurate for some
significnat proportion of those involved though.

Could it be, that the Internet has simply magnifed what humans have already
been doing for hundreds (thousands?) of years? The rise of the Internet has
also coincided with a large portion of the English speaking world (where the
Internet first originated) being at the highest point of literacy and
education in history. This simply means that the ability of each human to
express their own ideas to another human is at an all time high. Now, add to
that the ability to: * Observe the large numbers of people that agree with you
(social media) * Broadcast your opinions on other groups of people to
everybody that agrees with, and to everybody that disagrees with you (social
media) * Carry the ability to make these broadcasts with you at all times
(smartphones, tablets) * Be able to get instant feedback on your broadcasts
(real time messaging, notifications)

... and you have simply magnifed existing human conflicts, desires for
attention and belonging, opinionatedness, and so on, by many orders of
magnitude.

What we are seeing on the Internet is simply the human experience and human
nature on steriods.

\---

The writer raises some doubt about how much of what they call the Internet of
Beef is actually a culture war. But I have no doubt in my mind that it is a
culture war. What is culture? The collective views, values, customs, art,
morals, and beliefs of a large somewhat cohesive group of people. This is
exactly what is being constantly debated, influenced, changed, synthesized,
refined, and convoluted by the on-going Internet wars. It is shaping our
culture.

Internet culture - due to the prevalence of smartphones and other devices -
has begun (it begun a while ago) leaking into everyday culture. It makes sense
then, that the politics of the day would be influenced by what happens online
too. You can no longer separate the online world from the "real" world. The
real world is made up in large part by the Internet world. Our culture has
simply been given superpowers if you like, in order to rapdily evolve and
shift and change at unprecedented speed.

------
dsalzman
"the term freelancer comes from mercenary knights, with no fixed loyalties, in
the medieval era" \- Great TIL

------
tylerjwilk00
Fascinating and thoughtful article.

I loved this short poignant sentence: "To participate is to lose."

It's so true and so sad.

------
ianai
I think it’s something like group solipsism. Nothing can be trusted except
what “I” decide. Which is only helpful in so far as maybe we can address this
internet backed societal problem with rhetoric similar to how we would address
solipsism.

------
octocop
The internet is a large amplification device, everyone single expressed
feeling or thought is amplified to be the most important topic of our time.
Including this post and my comment, people should stop being so serious and
enjoy living.

------
taurath
My only thought is that this article falls into the same trap it’s describing
by oversubscribing to conflict and outlying activity.

------
yosito
This was one of the most entertaining and insightful pieces I've read in a
long time. In general, I think it seems like a pretty accurate understanding
of the state of the world/internet. But I think it stops short at the end
where it talks about moving on from the beefs into new ways of being that will
be significant to the future. I think plenty of people have rejected the
beefing and moved on to new, positive ways of being. Many people are focusing
their energy and lives on science, art and lifestyles that are completely
removed from the constant conflict of the modern internet and instead focused
on human progress. While plenty of beef can be thrown around about humanism,
humanitarianism, the human progress movement and sustainable development
goals, those focused on those things seem to have removed themselves entirely
from the internet of beefs. I'd suggest Bill Gates as one prominent example.

------
dsalzman
The best tangible community example of the IoB is Nutrition. Cesspool.

------
scottlocklin
Jesus, people making a big deal out of twitter again. Newsflash: twitter is
the comments section you took out of your website. It's a shitty version of
Usenet; unlike Usenet or the comments section, it lacks any way of subdividing
into interest groups and commonalities, so it's one giant global puke fest.
Journalist types love it because ... they're narcissistic wingnats and are
addicted to stroking their nerd dildoes. It has nothing to do with social
atomization; I'm pretty sure North Korean twitter would be the same thing,
because arguing on the internet appeals to people's lizard brains.

TLDR: twitter isn't real and you are mentally ill.

------
CoffewithMlik
This all sounds like a japanese role-playing game.

------
sigmonsays
4 times is not enough. maybe post it again?

------
monadic2
In my experience, the vast majority of people have triggers that shut down
reasonable communication. For instance, economics is a touchy subject on this
forum. It takes a great deal of patience to put up with people who may end up
wasting a large amount of your time.

In reality, I think the understanding that people should avoid conflict can
only exist in periods of increasing consumption to distract from an
understanding that societal engagement depends on more than voting. This is
why voting does not require an explanation, especially in online forums: to
silence minority opinions without actually confronting contradicting ideals.

------
jaredcwhite
TL;DR: Here's my beef with all the people on the internet with beefs.

------
narrator
In the same way that Spark turns a program into a plan for cluster
computation, there's some sort of process by which an idea and a bunch of
talking points gets compiled into a big distributed staged media campaign
through all channels and institutions that forces culture change that no one
asked for. The canonical and somewhat "innocent" example of this is a major
advertising campaign for a new pharmaceutical like Prozac for example, where
the company pushing it has to explain it through ads, articles, movies (Prozac
Diary) and so forth to the general public over a number of years so that
people get it as a new element of the social landscape.

Related to this is a question that has bugging me is how is the social justice
_" ideological pipeline"_ constructed and operated? How does an idea, become
an obscure scientific journal article, become a slew of newspaper editorials
and human interest stories, which forms a twitter mob, in which the
ideological program has been installed on all the "beef only" thinker nodes,
then it's own Netflix show, and super hero movie and then becomes a law where
you get put in prison for using the wrong pronoun.

~~~
pjc50
> then becomes a law where you get put in prison for using the wrong pronoun

You were going so well until this point, because I guarantee you won't be able
to find the story to back this up; it will turn out that the "wrong pronoun"
was part of a sustained campaign of harassment or part of a death threat or
suchlike.

> how is the social justice "ideological pipeline" constructed and operated?

I could talk about how this works, but only if you're genuinely interested and
willing to take it seriously. And not as part of a beef.

