The best solution here is to completely disconnect from social media or (at most) have an incredibly sanitized presence. Unless your job or livelihood revolves around needing to engage with a random internet audience (i.e. you're an influencer, entertainer, etc.) stay away from having a public persona on Twitter/Facebook/etc.
The only community I interact with candidly tends to be this one. I don't post on Twitter, Facebook, etc. because the vast majority of mainstream social media users (a) don't tend to have good-faith debates on any intellectually-interesting topics, and (b) will always find something to rip out of context and crucify you.
But this is easier said than done. Dopamine's a helluva' drug.
+1. I did exactly this a few years back when I saw a prominent member of the Nodejs community get savaged for linking to an article (exploring the idea that campus speech codes might adversely impact autistic people). I thought "if they can (nearly) take down this guy (a Nodejs technical steering committee member) for linking to a blog post, what are they going to do to me, Joe Nobody?" I was primarily a consultant at the time and relied on being invited to conferences to give talks & trainings in order to drum up new consulting work. Reputational damage would have been devastating to my income as a freelancer.
So participating "in the public sphere" was just not worth the risk. I had no idea what view I express today might in the future be deemed unacceptable. Even just being visible on there makes you more of a target–it's harder to have a pile-on on, say, someone's blog.
I miss twitter and facebook at times (quit facebook for different reasons), but overall it's a huge relief to not be contributing to those ecosystems.
Yeah I stopped consulting and for a full time gig around the time I quit Twitter. You’re right I really couldn’t afford to quit while I was consulting, at least it seemed unwise at the time.
I don't see how that would have helped OP. He wasn't called out for things he said or did on social media, barring a few people who piled on over extremely "sanitized" exchanges.
I think your "best solution" aligns well with what the OP appeared to be doing, and he still burned.
It's important to note that just because the mob forms on social media doesn't mean its consequences are limited to social media.
> I think your "best solution" aligns well with what the OP appeared to be doing, and he still burned.
OP has a huge Twitter presence (600k+ followers), and I guess my point is when you have that kind of presence you open yourself up to being a "pseudo-public" person. Sometimes, you need to do this (if you're a politician, for example). But usually you don't.
People will get more riled up when the person they're crucifying is famous - clout-chasing is a real thing. Although you (sadly) sometimes have exceptions to this rule, so you're right that it's not a complete solution.
Not at all. I had more than that before I quit twitter and I am about as minor a figure in a sub-sub-sub-industry as one can be; actually-famous people have millions. Not-quite-famous people have hundreds of thousands.
No one actually has the reach of their entire follower count. If there was a way to analyze your own followers to root out Bots and inactive people, who knows how much lower the number would be. That isn’t counting active users who don’t pay attention to you. And even if they pay attention to you, it might be in a non caring way. Outside of 16K being a big number. That number alone doesn’t mean much when it comes to modern social media.
A good easy contrast is the “phenom” of how flighty, not loyal, and weaker of a connection TikTok followers are. I believe it is very hard to go from being big on Tiktok to elsewhere. Contrasted by other social media.
Also. This is all coming from some one who has never had more than 200 of so followers on any social media.
Not really. If you put a classified ad in a Chicago paper saying you were having a garage sale, you were exposed to a million people and had the direct attention of the many thousands who would actually read the ad. If you spent an hour putting up flyers at major intersections near the bar you were playing at on Thursday night, thousands of people per hour would see them.
It's important to remember that there are as many people following 10K people as are being followed by 10K people. They aren't really paying attention to 10K people's photos of their lunches or stray observations on Ohio sports.
To add on top of that. It’s really the accusers’ following that is important. The target may not even have a social media profile as long as they have some online identity to point to.
> vast majority of mainstream social media users (a) don't tend to have good-faith debates
This. Thank you. I have unconsciously wondered into such debates on social media cesspools, and approaching it like I do with HN, which is atleast more logical
I think a key reason is HN has (IMO) a well-designed vote-based moderation system. Flamebait tends to get downvoted/flagged pretty quickly, burying it where it belongs.
Contrast that to pure engagement-focused social networks like Facebook or Twitter, which do the opposite: prioritize showing flamebait, because people are engaging with it and therefore it must necessarily be quality content!
HN does not have out-of-control mobs and flamewars because HN has dedicated human moderators who monitor hot conversations and use a variety of tools to de-escalate them.
Voting manages the day-to-day and gives them signal to work with, but ultimately open communities (i.e. that anyone can join) need active moderation to remain stable over the long term.
Agree. Reddit has a unique ability among large social networks to bring up sanity and good discussion. If there is misinformation being being spread I'd expect information disputing it to be in the comments 90%+ of the time. (Except for the niche subreddits as you mentioned)
You're assuming that internet mobs only attack based on misconstrued online content, but that's far from true.
I think the best solution here is to speak up on behalf of those who are unfairly attacked, in spite of the negative fallout from getting involved. The worst thing that can happen in cases like this is when nobody supports the victim. That can be profoundly traumatizing.
> I think the best solution here is to speak up on behalf of those who are unfairly attacked
The reality is that there is no easy way forward, no simple answer:
You don't know the truth any better than the mindless mob. If someone is accused of sexual assault or harassment, do you want to risk defending them, only to find out later that you guessed wrong? When the video comes out showing the crime, do you want your name permanently associated with trying to protect them?
The witch hunt / lynching / mob attack is always the wrong act, regardless of what someone has done. Perhaps the best you can do is to point that out, but that is also difficult. People will not read the nuance and assume you are on the other side. And you only have so much social capital - when everyone blocks you after the first time you stand up, what do you do after that?
Having a following on social media has great benefits for regular techies, not just influencers and entertainers, etc. It lets you magnify your resume to reach people with authority who you normally couldn't connect with. It helps you get spots at conferences, seats on cool new projects or positions that you can further leverage to increase your online fame and bump up your compensation. You can also use your following to get preferential treatment with companies and authorities, have your problems solved faster. Got your app removed from the Play Store with no explanation? Raise a stink on Twitter.
That's one of the reasons why people are so quick to join the fray and throw a punch. They want to be that one quick Tweet that goes viral, gets them thousands of followers and builds their brand.
As a regular techie with a 16,000 person following you are not getting any of those perks. Your app will die. You may feel like you are raising a stink but a phone call would work better. Recruitors finding you on twitter is possible, submitting your resume ensures they have it is a better strategy. Making conference organizer friends on twitter or in person can get great conference speaker spots but not something the average developer does.
You can certainly be both an "influencer" and a "techie" but what you describe is someone participating in the "influencer" side of things and no longer being just a "regular" techie.
There are a lot of benefits of being an influencer, but it has its downsides too.
No kidding. Getting off facebook was game changing. I also just started blocking everyone strong on the outrage / offense scale (I used to be friends with a pretty broad section from right to left though I'm left). But everyone just lost their minds.
HN is one of the better places by far, and I think it takes active action by someone at the top to hold the line.
On here we also get extreme reactions still though - The only reason apple does X is because they are evil and want to spy on you etc.
One idea you see in nature and also developing countries is camouflage. You basically give your kids a very generic name so they blend in, harder to search etc. In developing countries people really operate with nicknames a lot more and sometimes have multiple "real" names.
One of the things that IMO helps HN a lot is that it de-prioritizes politics (at least hotly debated topics,) in part due to the rules, and in part simply due to having something else to talk about.
I don't think politics in general as a topic should be banned, but there is exactly zero intellectual gratification in reading a thread where I can predict without reading what the opposing sides are going to say and the respective counter-arguments.
I just can't see how thread #32768 about affirmative action or thread #65537 about abortion can be more interesting than the previous one. You'll just be served defrosted opinions.
Yeah I cut Facebook out of my life and went cold turkey after realizing it was not healthy place and now find it actively repellent to be on it. The only reason i haven't closed my account entirely is because Messenger and my D&D group uses it for scheduling. even that I use the web site and refuse to allow it a foothold on my phone.
I get my dopamine from Instagram. But I'm on Facebook because it is a unique source of connections and information and the anti-social media crowd seems unwilling to acknowledge this. I certainly understand if some people don't see Facebook that way. Maybe they don't have a need for certain niche communities or they don't care about keeping in loose touch with far flung friends and family. But I have found tremendous value in those things. That's fine if you don't, but at least acknowledge that many people do and simply saying "quit Facebook" doesn't help those people. And the problems persist.
I think rejection from society at large is a fundamental human problem. We went from literal witch hunts to figurative ones, but the concept and human psychology has more or less always been the same.
The graph of meaningful human relationships is always going to be small and consist only of bidirectional edges. It's a road to accepting that and forging self-worth based on the people you know and care about, and who know and care about you, not the people who will never know you let alone care about you.
Adults are, generally, prejudiced, biased and unfair. Most people will have no problem with favouring their friends, but vehemently accuse others of favouritism, nepotism, etc. By nature, we are suspicious of strangers, and rightly so, but it's also holding us back in everything.
It takes active role models, introspection and life-long seeking of enlightened approaches, to break the mold. Few do, but when one do, many can follow.
> The best solution here is to completely disconnect from social media
I've thought about that, but your reputation is being destroyed. You'll offer no defense? You'll let everyone who you value get that impression of you? You'll allow it to become permanent, public record for anyone who ever looks you up with a search engine?
I think he’s saying you should disconnect before any of that happens.
There is no defense against the barrage of a Twitter mob, doesn’t matter how hard you try. It also seems that the better the reputation you have, the more difficult it is to recover.
If you are not part of the platform it can’t hurt you. I’m not on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, any of these services, so the mobs can’t really get to me. They could be flaming me there right now and I’d have no idea and it wouldn’t bother me at all! Excising social media altogether pretty much removes this vector of harassment.
> If you are not part of the platform it can’t hurt you. I’m not on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, any of these services, so the mobs can’t really get to me. They could be flaming me there right now and I’d have no idea and it wouldn’t bother me at all! Excising social media altogether pretty much removes this vector of harassment.
What if the people you know are reading it, and it affects your friendships, your job, your business partners, your reptuation?
People are going to believe what they want to believe regardless of information presented disputing. You can expend energy and effort and get frustrated by not changing anyone's mind, or not and have the same result. ???
Social media is pure poison that exploits every frailty of human nature. And it is optimized to be this way, even if unintentionally, because that's what makes money.
To me it shows humans simply cannot (yet?) deal with such wide-reaching communication. It's fine in neatly organised and moderated forums. But those still have some sense of privacy, similar to how people at a workplace can freely talk about things that wouldn't be fine to say on live TV.
But social media turns everything into live TV, potentially analysed with more rigor than any TV show ever witnessed, and with algorithms implicitly optimised to make the things most visible which generate the most powerful emotions. And it doesn't seem like the social media concept is going to disappear soon, it's just part of everyday life for many.
Hey, since we're on the topic of better social networking, I wonder if a side project I've been working on for the past few months might be of interest to you. The website, Reason, is an app for helping people connect with others with similar interests through group chats. It's kind of like Meetups, but online and designed for people who would like to find semi-regular groups of friends and acquaintances to chat about some specific topic.
The only community I interact with candidly tends to be this one. I don't post on Twitter, Facebook, etc. because the vast majority of mainstream social media users (a) don't tend to have good-faith debates on any intellectually-interesting topics, and (b) will always find something to rip out of context and crucify you.
But this is easier said than done. Dopamine's a helluva' drug.