[jiofih]

I’ll refrain from commenting on the first point - you already accused me of “bias and reactivity” and now that I asked you to flesh out your thoughts you turn to personal attacks, just like you did with the author. That’s something to reflect on.

It’s not “the negative interactions of the few” when you have thousands upon thousands of people jumping into the latest issue of the day. Usually they’re people from all over the world, without any access to context or more information on whatever is going on, which means there is no room for analytical thought - you watch the events unfold from afar, without interjecting, or you join the mob. See the recent basecamp controversy.

You’re intentionally ignoring the evidence as “not the majority”, “the lazy”, but it’s a fact that this is happening, and happening on platforms like Twitter and Reddit. We didn’t have this on Usenet, forums, news sites or any other previous media tool - it is evidently a product of social media, it’s format and reach today. The existence of this phenomenon was not even in question in the article, the point is how to interpret these events.

Those quotes are not statements of absolute truth, but the author is trying to paint, in broad and colorful swathes for illustration purposes, the mentality that emerges from this phenomenon.

[cindarin]

Your very first words to me were an attempt at an insult, so please save the crocodile tears from having your hypocrisy mentioned. I accused you of bias and reactionary tendencies, although I was intending anyone who reacts to the existence of social media this way.

I'll attempt to be clear. I believe your bias is your agreement with the author on this topic. The reactionary tendency to which I referred is the one I believe you and the author share, that social media inherently diminishes discussions and people involved into an unthinking mass. There's no evidence of this, so I assumed it was simply a delusion borne of reaction to seeing something you didn't like. These are clearly unproved assumptions on my part, but you've done nothing to indicate otherwise.

To address the rest of what you said, it's largely false. The phrase "Flame War" originated on usenet and other early message boards. The undesirable human communication styles existed prior to any internet medium and certainly will differ in form medium to medium.

On Twitter, the people who interact with a post are a small fraction of those who see the post who are fraction of the people using the medium. Of those who interact, there are likely to be various opinions. It is quite literally the few. It can still be an easily recognizable phenomenon while being perpetrated by relatively few members of the population.

Yes, the scale of communication between individuals has continued to increase as time progresses. The internet has revolutionized that. That unfortunately does mean that you will come into contact with more individuals who say or do things you dislike. Broadly condemning people as unthinking or other baseless assumptions is not a reasonable response to this phenomenon. It's lazy.