[tlb]

Public shaming can either become less common or more common over time. If it becomes more common, it might eventually become less damaging. Right now, because only 1000s of people have been targets, it's feasible for employers to search online and not hire people who've been shamed.

A historic parallel of diminishing effect is posting identifiable pictures on the Internet. It used to be a big no-no, because when only a few people did it, you really did put yourself at additional risk from stalkers. But now enough people have personal information posted that you're just one in a large crowd.

When Warhol said that in the future everyone would be famous for 15 minutes, people thought they'd be celebrated for 15 minutes. But perhaps it'll be the opposite: everyone will be publicly shamed for 15 minutes.

[Alex3917]

> If it becomes more common, it might eventually become less damaging.

I mean that's like saying if a huge percentage of Americans have been arrested then it might eventually become less damaging; that happened, and it has become less damaging, but at the end of the day it's still extremely damaging.

[tzar]

> I mean that's like saying if a huge percentage of Americans have been arrested...

No, it's not like saying that. It's saying that public shaming might eventually become less damaging. If you want an analogy that expressed the point of the commenter, one was provided:

> A historic parallel of diminishing effect is posting identifiable pictures on the Internet.

This, also, is not like being arrested.

[mlthoughts2018]

This comment seems to woefully underimagine ways that public information can be used against you.

Your public photos that are now just one in a large crowd are also subject to having your image deepfaked into revenge porn, used as a spam photo for bot account sign ups, scraped for facial recognition, found instantly by a background check seen by your employer, used to attach demographic info to your name in those shitty phone number / address aggregator sites.

These are just things we know about today. Wait till your public photo is used to trick a self-driving car or biometric scanner. Or hundreds of other things that will be invented between now and forever (since your digital photos are instantly preserved and forever available).

Hope no one analyzes your photo and charges you higher insurance premiums because you were holding a cigarette.

[twblalock]

The OP was saying that if shaming becomes common then being shamed can't hurt you relative to the general public, because most of them have also been shamed.

[mlthoughts2018]

Yes, which fails to imagine the ways that preserved public info can be used to re-shame in the future. If new ways of using that info arise later, and your public info happens to be amenable to the new ways even if many other people aren’t, then it offers permanently-existing surface area for future possible shaming that singles you out in some way previously not anticipated.

[some_not_all]

  it'll be the opposite

Why not both?