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saltbearerThis first rant was brought out of my cohost drafts on September 10th, 2024, just after the shutdown was announced.
draft jubilee: uhhh be nice on inñernet pleece
[this has been sitting in my drafts for a while, and upon taking another look at it, it seemed infinitely more postable with the removal of just a single line, so here]
it shouldn't simply be assumed that someone you're responding to, especially if they appear to be making an effort to present themself as acting in good faith, is actually engaging in bad faith / deliberately acting stupid or only pretending to miss something they're skirting around / not going to listen / incapable of growth / unworthy of clarity — someone more “worthy” of your energy is already listening.
for everyone's benefit, it is always better to prioritize being constructive and sympathetic vs. non-constructive and rude. the latter is not your only option, nor your strongest option, and if the former isn't worth employing, neither is the latter.
showing direct anger and hostility toward people via posting online is always a choice you have time to think over before hitting submit, and is one that I feel should essentially never be made, as it often provides an avenue for escalation and derailment, distracts from opportunities to communicate more constructively, and can hurt silent observers in unexpected ways.
depending on who your words reach, prematurely disengaging before establishing a mutual understanding could have negative downstream effects.
I think a very important thing to note about bullying / shaming is that those most affected are sensitive to how you feel, or at least to being perceived as having drifted away from your values. if they care about how you feel / visibly aligning with your values, it was probably possible to find a more benign way to work with them instead. if they’re more resistant to it, you might just be entertaining a troll.
... heck, I'm gonna need to get used to no automatic "read more"
I participated in / observed more than one space that started off merely “rugged”, but gradually became outright toxic and threatening, because as the worst actors drew attention from outsiders, guilt by association started to come at a higher social cost, so the voices of reason that challenged those who ought to have been kept in check were pressured to distance themselves. post–brain-drain, the communities radicalized, and they either calcified around those least fazed by how they were perceived, or they kept attracting people who amplified their toxicity and volatility... or people who weren't tolerated in less-toxic spaces which they might have initially preferred the general attitudes of, despite those spaces being broadly unsympathetic to their values, who were then won over and radicalized by the toxic sympathetic.
it seems undesirable to let ideological opponents be the ones to form bonds with people who you could have reached before they headed down a troubling path, and be the ones to give them space to express their honest thoughts for others’ consideration.
obviously, repressing someone's expression doesn't change their underlying experience of truth. low-effort shaming without an argument to back it up might convince the shamed to shut up for a time, but as no lesson is really learned, that leaves them to be someone else's problem later, or maybe to seek out and hunker down in radicalizing venues.
consider offering some good, relevant reading material, if you can't be bothered to write much yourself.
if, for whatever reason, you determine hostility to be warranted, it's best to be precise with who you target, not sloppy.
it should be your responsibility to move your crosshair off of the people you don't intend to hurt before you pull the trigger, not the responsibility of those you're aiming at to take bullets intended for others.
utilize the time you have to consider how your words may be interpreted, practice empathy for those under your crosshair, and learn how to aim around unintended targets, so no one has to wonder whether the bullet was pointed at them.
for the record, though I don't consider this post to be like an attack, I am aware that I've got Anyone Who Says Mean Things On The Internet under my crosshair behind people who actively encourage doing it up in front, and a sizable portion of those in the line of fire are people I like and/or people who have had their patience tested harder than I ever will, in all likelihood.
in any case, I don't think flippant hostility should be rationalized as virtuous, and I find it alarming that certain people evidently find that contentious. I don't think “always try your best to maintain a baseline image of respectful conduct, even when it's hard” should be too controversial of a take, but it feels stressful to put here, and the fact that it's stressful to say that seems like a bad sign that makes it worth saying.
these feel like sensible principles that people want to find excuses to avoid adhering to — excuses which are sometimes elaborate, and superficially sturdy from certain angles, but which remain unconvincing to me.
the suggestion that lashing out at a person is meaningfully productive beyond brief catharsis isn't congruous with what I've personally witnessed leading up to anything I'd classify as a genuinely preferable outcome of addressing tensions online.
I know tone- and many other language-policing sentiments aren't exactly popular here, but it's felt like I've been peeking through my fingers cringing as I've watched language drivers clip side mirrors on road signs and swerve into pedestrians and otherwise get into avoidable accidents, wishing they'd just take their foot off the gas and pull over to collect themselves.
I chat all day every day, and sometimes weigh in on discussions that people can get heated about, and sometimes have a lot to say about them.
I can't think of a time in recent years where I said something just because I wanted to make someone else feel worse. I can't think of a scenario where that would've been a smart thing to do. it has not been hard for me to avoid sending insults to people. I can remember outright insulting people in less-recent years, and I still feel embarrassed looking back, as one does.
... okay fine I remember one instance of at least partly hoping my words would make someone feel worse from just last year:
(Image contents:)
Twitter user tweets in support of the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia, and Biphobia. I reply to a hidden tweet from a suspended account, which said something like "No one will ever accept you", with "ftfy" and a screenshot of text: "I, personally, won't accept you, because I lack the empathy and curiosity that would drive me to try to properly understand others' disparate life experiences in good faith, as well as the reasoning skills that would enable me to understand the actions they take. Life is easier when you don't watch where you're walking, or care whose toes you step on. I'm not just oblivious to where I'm walking, though, I go out of my way to step on others' toes! Yep, I'm all about those Christian values I hold so dear! I don't like the idea of going to Hell, but I'm banking on it not being important what's in my heart, as long as my voice is tiny and impotent enough that I won't make the world too much worse of a place by vocalizing the disdain I hold for others whose common factors are that they try to love and accept themselves and others like them. The idea of a man like myself loving another man is repulsive to me, because the first man I always think of (in any circumstance) is myself - one who is inherently repulsive, and would have nothing but unkind words to offer me if I felt a romantic attachment to him."
and I'm about out of words
so
tl;dr it's Literally Possible to not say a mean thing, you can even delete a mean thing after you type it, you can just not be mean! you'll probably always not regret not being mean on the Internet! I'm not even kidding! you can just not! always!
now to let this sit in my drafts for weeks until no one has said anything mean on the Internet recently
if you see this post it means people stopped being mean, so what's even the point now, it's just a relic from those halcyon days of people still being mean on the Internet
Originally, I was planning on posting this second rant as a reply to a days-old post on bluesky, formatted as screenshots... but, upon seeing a couple new replies from the OP, doing such so directly seemed less-appropriate, because I felt like my takeaway had been slightly off-the-mark from what they intended... maybe — I was very sleep-deprived, and too out-of-it by the time I was done writing to judge whether I was on-point enough anyway. And now I don't care to. Appropriately for the latter part of this post, I would pin my possible confusion on the original sentiment being broken up into a few smaller thoughts to fit the platform, one of which had been shared with some context not attached... my brain pattern-matched prior experiences, where people had used enough of the same words, to something perhaps subtly distinct.
This text is 8,172 characters and would need to be split between 28 skeets, not accounting for word boundaries. It's presented as screenshots for immediacy’s sake, but I'll rehost my own text on Dreamwidth and Pillowfort, where the formatting can be less-obnoxious, and I'll drop links in the alt-text for easier reading or sharing.
Whenever I see it (which happens all too frequently), I feel the need to push back against the sentiment that we should shrug off the pressure to be nice. (And I waste a lot of time reiterating myself, despite saying that a benefit of writing things like this is being able to simply link back to them in the future...)
I will always call for kindness and civility in online spaces, whenever a serious point needs to be made to someone in particular.
I have very much needed to Get A Clue in the past, with regards to certain things that people would like others to Have A Clue about, and are often vocal about wanting others to Have A Clue about.
I was unwilling to put in any effort to Get A Clue while my general preoccupations were with unrelated things, and while everyone I was exposed to who Had A Clue seemed to be an asshole who was unwilling to respect the intelligence of the unenlightened, or to explain why they believed what they did, or to at least explain why they wouldn't take the time to explain.
Naturally, I sought out and spent a fair amount of time around people who felt similar to the way I did. I am very much not speaking of an abstract theory of why it's hard to get others on the same page as oneself. It was a widespread sentiment in such communities that we, first-and-foremost, did not like the people we couldn't see eye-to-eye with because they were unnecessarily rude to others, and so they were not people whose behaviors we wanted to emulate in general. It's about the easiest thing to intrinsically dislike.
Their rudeness got in the way of every message they tried to send. Beyond poisoning our views of them as people beyond their opinions, it provided points from which discussions were likely to become derailed into purer expressions of the fact that we made each other miserable.
People downplay the importance of their own involvement in the Internet, and its efficacy as a tool for changing others’ views, but small interactions can have major impacts on individual levels — sometimes not even for the people engaging, but for the passive observers. Ultimately, a significant shift in one of my own perspectives came from seeing someone thoroughly, civilly expressing their Having A Clue experience to someone online who needed to Get A Clue. (I'm sure there's a lot I'm saying here that You don't need to be lectured on, but a bit or piece here or there may match with a reader who needs a reminder.)
Though we have the Paradox of Tolerance to contend with, it's best not to assume that people with badly-differing views aren't worth interacting with, categorically, because they could only ever be dumb and never adopt your rational viewpoint. Progress does not happen that way.
Of course, an unfair dynamic in play is that those who Have A Clue are often the most-at-risk and the least-equipped emotionally/intellectually and/or in terms of time to go around sharing what they know with every random troll who comes their way. A lot of them are understandably worn down from trying anyway, and a lot more preemptively separate themselves from those who'd benefit most from gaining new sympathy for their perspectives.
One doesn't necessarily have to go looking for trouble to stamp out, but it's in one's best interests not to escalate tensions and make things more toxic, and less trouble tends to come to those who make a point to express general good will toward others, even when it's hardest. (And if you have it in you to stamp out a little trouble, more-vulnerable people will be silently cheering you on!)
It's just like the classic idiom: when life gives you lemons, and you don't have enough time, knowledge, or materials to bake a lemon meringue pie, make lemonade, and then don't piss in it! Or maybe the even-more-ancient wisdom: don't feed trolls candy, unless you’ll make sure they'll then brush their teeth.
Having a good sense of humor, and being able to find ways to joke about a subject without compromising too much on what about it deserves respect, is a valuable utility. I found it a lot easier to respect anyone who would at least try to make me laugh, or poke fun at any superficial appearances of silliness to their beliefs. It made it feel like we may not forever be each other's enemies.
Merely showing anger and hostility, thus treating others like enemies, is not so effective at making them personally care about your feelings. Perhaps there are people who can be swayed by anger, but if someone can't deeply appreciate why you're truly angry, the richness of the emotion goes to waste. The probable takeaway they'll have from a demonstration of your anger is that they make you angry, and they won't reflect much on what exactly it is about their position that makes you angry... or they'll reflect, and come away with something terribly wrong, because they're not thinking about it in the same way that you are. You can't hurt that which doesn't understand pain.
What this all points back to, of course, is that Twitter clones are fundamentally terrible ideas, and I think the format straight-up should not exist except as a means of distributing weird memes and shitposts, hence my not playing to the arbitrary, asinine limitations imposed by it, and bypassing them in the most straightforward way I can by writing in a text editor and taking screenshots. (And I still wish I didn't have to split this up in the way I have in order to keep them from being unreadably compressed! AND I NEED TO AVOID THOSE STUPID OPAQUE GALLERY NAVIGATION BUTTONS ON THE MOBILE WEBSITE...)
Microblogs are not spaces suited to big ideas. They force people to condense big ideas to fit in too-small boxes, and/or divide them up, making it easy to quote pieces out of context, for others to snap-judge. They incentivize stripping away the words we use to soften our Takes, to acknowledge that the threads we're picking at are parts of bigger patches of an even bigger societal quilt.
Of course we're Rude™ when there's no space to say “please” and “thank you”, or “I realize xyz, but...” — when we're under pressure to be less human.
They condition us to not afford people more than the tiniest moments of our time, not just because we have to fight against a cap on how long a post can (or “should”) be, but because we see those worse, awkwardly-condensed and divided versions of each other on this model of website.
If One Website isn't going to try to elegantly support all that people are trying to use it for, we, together, need to get better about using more than one website at a time to form our overall Presences, playing to their different strengths instead of running afoul of their shortcomings, and we ought to get Really Annoying about wanting services with different strengths to prioritize cooperating and integrating with each other more seamlessly instead of competing for cookie-cutter forms of engagement.
cohost.org went read-only yesterday, and I'm going to be Really Annoying about that for a long time. It wasn't perfect, and never could be, but it had a lot of good ideas that others have praised in their countless eulogies, which implementations of should be demanded from other platforms. It was The Good Website, and us former users are now actually feeling how we have no true replacement for it.
Early users of the site expressed feelings on social media that I took to be to a similar effect as the above, but a lot of users who made their way over during exoduses couldn't shake off the habits that had metastasized in them. Several who objected to the cultural shift opted to stay silent and not intervene, as significant figures engaged in behaviors they'd identified as inherently toxic, too burnt out from prior social media experiences to actively help to steer the culture somewhere healthier.
I suppose this counts toward trying to make up for past mistakes.
