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by luso_brazilian
3497 days ago
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This cannot be stressed enough. There are plenty of behaviors that people, specially young people going through the "rebellious" phase of their lives, engage for the shock value, for the "I'm the only sane man among sheeps" feeling and that can usually be explained by the lack of maturity and contact with the real world. The only result that comes with ostracizing these people is to throw them at the arms of the only groups that will accept them with open arms: people seriously sharing the same ideology and that will welcome this person with open arms. The real solution to ignorance is not to cut the ignorant from the flock but to show them the errors on their ways. People tend to grow out of these phases and helping them out in that path instead of cutting them and punishing them is a much better way to deal with this problem. |
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I first saw it with gamergate a while back. As someone very close to the games industry, and in games media back then, I was very interested by the movement (which, at the time anyway, wanted to put a spotlight on corruption in games media)... then after it did some good, it turned into a "hunt all the SJWs" parody of itself and very much became an example of what the alt-right is today.
What happened there was simply people not listening... and instead of listening, sharing whatever story fell in line with the narrative. Twitter makes it easy to block dissenting opinions. Reddit naturally silences disagreement with downvotes. Facebook just natively doesn't show you the stuff you don't like. Social media is a fucking scourge, I swear.
As the movement becomes more and more extreme, it attracts more and more extreme people and the moderates naturally leave (or convert), as they have no way to fight the trend back on a platform that amplifies the majority.
And of course both "sides" in a fight become involved in a cherry-picking fight of who can find the worst of the other's community and showcase it as proof of how relentlessly EVIL the "other side" is. Because, you know, everybody's like that, right?
It's fucking impossible to be a moderate nowadays. This is probably the main reason why I enjoy commenting on HN, where discussion is possible (probably because of details such as upvote counts not showing and a really nice sorting algorithm). Though it has its own issues with community flagging - Take this post for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12977633 (A moderate article that looked at issues on the left, flagged out despite 100+ upvotes)