| There's very little that makes me as sad as seeing extremist behaviour become the norm on both sides of the aisle. Seeing people not listen to each other and fighting empty devils. 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) |