Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by enriquto 1915 days ago
> What do we do about this?

There's not much we can do about that; the world is a horrible, unfair place. If Socrates was born again, we would kill him again.

3 comments

I disagree. People can do things about cancel culture, in particular, give a thought about whether something that people are saying about somebody is really true and whether to participate in an online boycott (of an individual) based on a 2nd hand experience. Especially if you're in a position of power, consider if you should give in to the mob, which might not even relate to you.
Or just delete your Twitter account. Then it all magically goes away.
I know someone who deleted their Twitter account and still gets harassed by people that want to get him fired over a year later. Not going to give details for hopefully obvious reasons.
Of course there's something we can do. We get to make choices.
> We get to make choices.

I'm quite disillusioned at that point, I'm not sure that our choices can be good after all... There's lots of well-intentioned people doing horrible things, and at the same time I find myself systematically in the losing team when I try to take what it seems to be the correct stance.

Chin up.

The world may be a far more horrible place than is commonly known but you can help your friends and loved ones. You can support the people you like and you can do nice things for yourself; such as a nice walk, have some great food, get a very decent sleep.

Yeah, seeing what is happening can be very very depressing, dealing with people who don't care about their own hypocrisy and double standards, who have no problem in damning a person for very minor things.

But there are other things in life and more people support your stance than you think, they're just unwilling to say it with how things are. Hope things go well for you.

Your last sentence perfectly captures something I think all the time, but could never articulate pithily.
I know that you're not "supposed" to comment on voting here, but I feel the need to call out the fundamentally broken culture here around voting. I said something mildly nice about some else's writing, and I've gotten 3 downvotes? Really?

I think the people running the site really needs to consider consequences for excessive downvoting. Having a discussion here is really unpleasant, because of the random drive-by voting. It's easier to have a discussion on Reddit, and Reddit is terrible.

Don't worry too much about the upvotes and downvotes, it's not a big deal :) Some of the best comments on this site are completely greyed out!