[nappy-doo]

I worked at FB for almost 2 years. (I left as soon as I could, I knew it wasn't a good fit for me.)

I had an Uber from the campus one day, and my driver, a twenty-something girl, was asking how to become a moderator. I told her, "no amount of money would be enough for me to do that job. Don't do it."

I don't know if she eventually got the job, but I hope she didn't.

[narrator]

Yes, these jobs are horrible. However, I do know from accidently encountering bad stuff on the internet that you want to be as far away from a modern battlefield as possible.

It's just kind of ridiculous how people think war is like Call of Duty. One minute you're sitting in a trench, the next you're a pile of undifferentiated blood and guts. Same goes for car accidents and stuff. People really underestimate how fragile we are as human beings. Becoming aware of this is super damaging to our concept of normal life.

[noduerme]

Watching someone you love die of cancer is also super damaging to one's concept of normal life. Getting a diagnosis, or being in a bad car accident, or the victim of a violent assault is, too. I think a personal sense of normality is nothing more than the state of mind where we can blissfully (and temporarily) forget about our own mortality. Obviously, marinating yourself in all the horrible stuff makes it really hard to maintain that state of mind.

On the other hand, never seeing or reckoning with or preparing for how brutal reality actually is can lead to a pretty bad shock once something bad happens around you. And maybe worse, can lead you to under-appreciate how fantastic and beautiful the quotidian moments of your normal life actually are. I think it's important to develop a concept of normal life that doesn't completely ignore that really bad things happen all around us, all the time.

[karlgkk]

Frankly

there’s a difference between a one or two or even ten off exposure to the brutality of life, where various people in your life will support you and help you acclimate to it

Versus straight up mainlining it for 8 hours a day

[stephenitis]

hey kid, hope you're having a good life. I'll look at the screen full of the worst the internet and humanity has produced on the internet for eight hours.

I get your idea but in the context of this topic I think you're overreaching

[Der_Einzige]

Actually reckoning with this stuff leads people into believing in anti-natalism, negative utilitarinism, Scopenhaur/Philipp Mainlander (Mainlander btw was not just pro-suicide, he actually killed himself!), and the voluntary extinction movement. This terrified other philosophers like Nietzsche, who spends most of his work defending reality even if it's absolute shit. "Amor Fati", "Infinite Regress/Eternal Recurrence", "Übermensch" vs the literal "Last Man". "Wall-E" of all films was the modern quintessential nietzschian fable, with maybe "Children of Men" being the previous good one before that.

You're literally not allowed to acknowledge that this stuff is bad and adopt one of the religions that see this and try to remove suffering - i.e. Jainism, because at least historically doing so meant you couldn't use violence in any circumstances, which also meant that your neighbor would murder you. There's a reason that Jain's population are in the low millions

Reality is actually bad, and it should be far more intuitive to folks. The fact that positive experience is felt "quickly" and negative experience is felt "slowly" was all the evidence I needed that I wouldn't just press the "instantly and painlessly and without warning destroy reality" (benevolent world-exploder) button, I'd smash it!

[bowsamic]

I felt this way for the first 30 years of my life. Then I received treatment for depression (psychoanalysis) and finally tasted joy for the first time in my entire life. Now I love life. YMMV

EDIT: If you’re interested what actually happened is that I was missing the prerequisite early childhood experience that enables one to feel secure in reality. If you check, all the people who have this feeling of philosophical/ontological pessimism have a missing or damaged relationship with the mother in the first year or so. For them, not even Buddhism can help, since even the abstract idea of anything good, even if it requires transcendence, is a joke

[Der_Einzige]

But psychoanalysis is literally psudoscientific nonsense. You got spooked.

[motorest]

> But psychoanalysis is literally psudoscientific nonsense. You got spooked.

OP got spooked to stop suffering and love life instead? Is that your cautionary tale?

[bowsamic]

No it isn’t, it’s empirically justified, look it up. Hence why the state insurance here in Germany is willing to pay for me to go three times a week. It works

[BriggyDwiggs42]

Wow, thanks for your valuable contribution to the conversation!

[keybored]

[deleted]

[bowsamic]

I'm not sure what point you are trying to make. I don't look up to Freud and psychoanalysis doesn't work for everyone! I don't even necessarily recommend it. It just worked for me and I realised that in my case the depression was a confused outlook conditioned by a certain situation.

My point really is that you can feel one way for your entire life and then suddenly feel a different way. I'm not suggesting psychoanalysis specifically. Perhaps for others, CBT or religion or just a change in life circumstances will be enough.

The fact that these philosophies are dependent on the life situation to me is a reason to be a little sceptical of their universality. In my personal experience, in those 30 years of my life, I thought everyone thought the way I did, that reality was painful and a chore and dark and dim. Psychoanalysis helped me realise that other people actually were happy to be alive, and understand why I have not been my entire life.

YMMV = not everyone hates life

[keybored]

Interesting to see this perspective here. You’re not wrong.

> There's a reason that Jain's population are in the low millions

The two largest Vedic religions both have hundreds of millions of followers. Is Jainism that different from them in this regard? I know Jainism is very pacifist but on the question of suffering.

[keybored]

... okay.

Emergency personnel might need to braze themselves for car accidents every day. That Kenyans need to be traumatized by Internet Content in order to make a living is just silly and unnecessary.

[portaouflop]

Car “accidents” are also completely unnecessary.

Even the wording is wrong - those aren’t accidents, it is something we accept as byproduct of a car-centric culture.

People feel it is acceptable that thousands of people die on the road so we can go places faster. Similarly they feel it’s acceptable to traumatise some foreigners to keep social media running.

[keybored]

Nitpick that irrelevant example if you want.

[ashoeafoot]

ISISomalia loves that recruitment pool though

[FireBeyond]

Speaking as a paramedic, two things come to mind:

1) I don't have squeamishness about trauma. In the end, we are all blood and tissue. The calls that get to me are the emotionally traumatic, the child abuse, domestic violence, elder abuse (which of course often have a physical component too, but it's the emotional for me), the tragic, often preventable accidents.

2) There are many people, and I get the curiosity, that will ask "what's the worst call you've been on?" - one, you don't really want to hear, and two, "Hey, person I may barely know, do you think you can revisit something traumatic for my benefit/curiosity?"

[Modified3019]

That’s an excellent way to put it, resonates with my (non medical) experience. It’s the emotional stuff that will try to follow me around and be intrusive.

I won’t watch most movies or TV because they are just some sort of tragedy porn.

[coliveira]

> movies or TV because they are just some sort of tragedy porn

100% agree. Most TV series nowadays are basically violence porn, now that real porn is not allowed for all kinds of reasons.

[ocschwar]

I'd be asking "how bad is the fentanyl situation in your are?"

[FireBeyond]

Relatively speaking, not particularly.

What's interesting now is how many patients will say "You're not going to give me fentanyl are you? That's really dangerous stuff", etc.

Their perfect right, of course, but is sad that that's the public perception - it's extremely effective, and quite safe, used properly (for one, we're obviously only giving it from pharma sources, with actually properly dosed solutions for IV).

[BobaFloutist]

It's also super easy to come up with better questions: "What's the funniest call you've ever been on?" "What call do you feel like you made the biggest difference?" "What's the best story you have?"

[andrepd]

I'm pretty sure watching videos on /r/watchpeopledie or rekt threads on 4chan has been a net positive for me. I'm keenly aware of how dangerous cars are, that wars (including narcowars) are hell, that I should never stay close to a bus or truck as a pedestrian or bycicle, that I should never get into a bar fight... And that I'm very very lucky that I was not born in the 3rd world.

[gosub100]

I get more upset watching people lightly smack and yell at each other on public freakout than I do watching people die. It's not that I don't care about the dead either, I watched wpd and similar sites for years. I didn't enjoy watching it, but I liked knowing the reality of what was going on in the world, and how each one of us has the capacity to commit these atrocities. I'm still doing a lousy job at describing why I like to watch it. But I do.

[mdanger007]

Street fight videos, where the guy recording is Hooting and egging people on are disgusting

[doublerabbit]

One does not fully-experience life until you encounter a death of something you care about. It being a pet, person; nothing gives you that real sense of reality until your true feelings are challenged.

I used to live in the Disney headspace until my dog had to be put down. Now with my parents being in their seventies, and me in my thirties I fear losing them the most as the feeling of losing my dog was hard enough.

[batch12]

That's the tragic consequence of being human. Either the people you care about leave first or you do, but in the end, everyone goes. We are blessed and cursed with the knowledge to understand this. We should try to maximize the time we spend with those that are important to us.

[wholinator2]

Well, i think it goes to a point. I'd imagine there's some goldilocks zone of time spent with the animal, care experienced from the animal, dependence on the animal, and manner/speed of death/ time spent watching the thing die.

I say animal to explicitly include humans. Finding my hamster dead in fifth grade did change me. But watching my mother slowly die a horrible, haunting death didn't make me a better person. I'm just saying that there's a spectrum that goes something like: easy to forget about, I'm able to not worry, sometimes i think about it when i dont want, often i think about it, often it bothers me, and do on. You can probably imagine the cycle of obsession and stress.

This really goes for all traumatic experiences. There's a point where they can make you a better person, but there's a cliff after which you have no guarantees that it won't just start obliterating you and your life. It's still a kind of perspective. But can you have too much perspective? Lots of times i feel like i do

[int_19h]

It's not that we're particularly fragile, given the kind of physical trauma human beings can survive and recover from.

It's that we have technologically engineered things that are destructive enough to get even past that threshold. Modern warfare in particular is insanely energetic in the most literal, physical way - when you measure the energy output of weapons in joules. Partly because we're just that good at making things explode, and partly because improvements in metallurgy and electronics made it possible over time to locate targets with extreme precision in real time and then concentrate a lot of firepower directly on them. This, in particular, is why the most intense battlefields in Ukraine often look worse than WW1 and WW2 battles of similar intensity (e.g. Mariupol had more buildings destroyed than Stalingrad).

But even our small arms deliver much more energy to the target than their historical equivalents. Bows and arrows pack ~150 J at close range, rapidly diminishing with distance. Crossbows can increase this to ~400 J. For comparison, an AK-47 firing standard issue military ammo is ~2000 J.

[Dalewyn]

>Crossbows can increase this to ~400 J.

Funny you mention crossbows; the Church at one point in time tried to ban them because they democratized violence to a truly trivial degree. They were the nuclear bombs and assault rifles of medieval times.

Also, I will take this moment to also mention that the "problem" with weapons always seem to be how quickly they can kill rather than the killing itself. Kind of takes away from the discussion once that is realized.

[llm_trw]

Watch how a group of wild dogs kill their prey, then realise that for milenia human like apes were part of their diet. Even the modern battlefield is more humane than the African savannah.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

That reminds me of this[0]. It's a segment of BBC's Planet Earth, where a pack of Cape Hunting Dogs are filmed, hunting.

It's almost military precision.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRS4XrKRFMA

[keybored]

> Even the modern battlefield is more humane than the African savannah.

On behalf of dead WWI soldiers I find this offensive.

[BehindBlueEyes]

Yeah, I tracked a lost dog and found the place it was caught by wolves and eventually eaten. Terrible way to go. I get now why the owner was so desperate to find it, even without any hope of the dog surviving - I'd want to end it quicker for my dogs too if this happened to them.

[newsclues]

Humans can render other humans unrecognizable with a rock.

Brutal murder is low tech.

[graemep]

> Humans can render other humans unrecognizable with a rock.

They are much less likely to.

We have instinctive repulsion to violence, especially extending it (e.g. if the rock does not kill at the first blow).

It is much easier to kill with a gun (and even then people need training to be willing to do it), and easier still to fire a missile at people you cannot even see.

[meiraleal]

Than throwing a face punch or a rock? You should check public schools.

[ternnoburn]

Than killing with bare hands or a rock, which I believe is still pretty uncommon in schools.

[graemep]

Not in public schools in the British sense. I assume it varies in public schools in the American sense, and I am guessing violence sufficient to render someone unrecognisable is pretty rare even in the worst of them.

[int_19h]

Not at scale.

[newsclues]

Armies scale up.

It’s like the original massive scale organization.

[paulryanrogers]

Scaling an army of rock swingers is a lot more work than giving one person an AK47 (when all who would oppose them have rocks).

(Thankfully in the US we worship the 2A and its most twisted interpretation. So our toddlers do shooter drills. /s)

[HPsquared]

I'm no longer interested in getting a motorcycle, for similar reasons.

[spacechild1]

I spent my civil service as a paramedic assistent at the countryside, close to a mountainroad that was very popular with bikers. I was never interested in motorbikes in the first place, but the gruesome accidents I've witnessed turned me off for good.

[ocschwar]

The Venn diagram for EMTs, paramedics, and motorbikes is disjoint.

[zmgsabst]

You’re only about 20x as likely to die on a motorcycle as in a car.

What can I say? People like to live dangerously.

[HPsquared]

I suppose 20x a low number is still pretty low, especially given that number includes the squid factor.

[alamortsubite]

Yes, but you're also far less likely to kill other people on a motorcycle as in a car (and even less, as in an SUV or pick-up truck). So some people live much less dangerously with respect to the people around them.

[nradov]

I don't mean to trivialize traumatic experiences but I think many modern people, especially the pampered members of the professional-managerial class, have become too disconnected from reality. Anyone who has hunted or butchered animals is well aware of the fragility of life. This doesn't damage our concept of normal life.

[paganel]

My brother, an Eastern-European part-time farmer and full-time lorry driver, just texted me a couple of hours ago (I had told him I would call him in the next hour) that he might be with his hands full of meat by that time as “we’ve just butchered our pig Ghitza” (those sausages and piftii aren’t going to get made by themselves).

Now, ask a laptop worker to butcher an animal whom used to have a name and to literally turn its meat into sausages and see what said worker’s reaction would be.

[apelapan]

Laptop worker here. Have participated/been present in butcher of sheep and pigs and helped out making sausages a couple of times. It was fine. An interesting experience.

There is a lot of skill going in to it, so I couldn't do it myself. You need guidance of someone who is knowledgeable and has the proper tools and facilities for the job.

[Eisenstein]

What is it about partaking in or witnessing the killing of animals or humans that makes one more connected to reality?

[AnarchismIsCool]

Lots of people who spend time working with livestock on a farm describe a certain acceptance and understanding of death that most modern people have lost.

[Dalewyn]

In Japan, some sushi bars keep live fish in tanks that you can order to have served to you as sushi/sashimi.

The chefs butcher and serve the fish right in front of you, and because it was alive merely seconds ago the meat will still be twitching when you get it. If they also serve the rest of the fish as decoration, the fish might still be gasping for oxygen.

Japanese don't really think much of it, they're used to it and acknowledge the fleeting nature of life and that eating something means you are taking another life to sustain your own.

The same environment will likely leave most westerners squeamish or perhaps even gag simply because the west goes out of its way to hide where food comes from, even though that simply is the reality we all live in.

Personally, I enjoy meats respecting and appreciating the fact that the steak or sashimi or whatever in front of me was a live animal at one point just like me. Salads too, those vegetables were (are?) just as alive as I am.

[Eisenstein]

If I were to cook a pork chop in the kitchen of some of my middle eastern relatives they would feel sick and would probably throw out the pan I cooked it with (and me from their house as well).

Isn't this similar to why people unfamiliar with that style of seafood would feel sick -- cultural views on what is and is not normal food -- and not because of their view of mortality?

[Dalewyn]

You're not grasping the point, which I don't necessarily blame you.

Imagine that to cook that pork chop, the chef starts by butchering a live pig. Also imagine that he does that in view of everyone in the restaurant rather than in the "backyard" kitchen let alone a separate butchering facility hundreds of miles away.

That's the sushi chef butchering and serving a live fish he grabbed from the tank behind him.

When you can actually see where your food is coming from and what "food" truly even is, that gives you a better grasp on reality and life.

It's also the true meaning behind the often used joke that goes: "You don't want to see how sausages are made."

[caymanjim]

Plenty of westerners are not as sheltered from their food as you. Have you never gone fishing and watched your catch die? Have you never boiled a live crab or lobster? You've clearly never gone hunting.

Not to mention the millions of Americans working in the livestock and agriculture business who see up close every day how food comes to be.

A significant portion of the American population engages directly with their food and the death process. Citing one gimmicky example of Asian culture where squirmy seafood is part of the show doesn't say anything about the culture of entire nations. That is not how the majority of Japanese consume seafood. It's just as anomalous there. You only know about it because it's unusual enough to get reported.

You can pick your lobster out of the tank and eat it at American restaurants too. Oysters and clams on the half-shell are still alive when we eat them.

[Dalewyn]

>Plenty of westerners are not as sheltered from their food as you. ... You only know about it because it's unusual enough to get reported.

In case you missed it, you're talking to a Japanese.

Some restaurants go a step further by letting the customers literally fish for their dinner out of a pool. Granted those restaurants are a niche, that's their whole selling point to customers looking for something different.

Most sushi bars have a tank holding live fish and other seafood of the day, though. It's a pretty mundane thing.

[shadowerm]

No irony in this comment lol.

[h_tbob]

I concluded that we really should have the speed limit at 45mph on highways. Then one body dying on the road would be so rare it would be newsworthy.

[Shorel]

> Becoming aware of this is super damaging to our concept of normal life.

Not being aware of this is also a cause of traffic accidents. People should be more careful driving.

[BehindBlueEyes]

You can be aware without having to see the most gruesome parts of it to a point where it is traumatizing and damaging.

I've seen the crumpled metal of a car, I don't need to see the people inside to know it is not good.

[DirkH]

I disagree. Or at least I do for myself. It is the same reason studying physics theory alone is sometimes not enough to "get it". Often to really learn something you need the dirty real-life demo.

You don't have to excessively see hours upon hours of such footage.

But a single harsh and gruesome traffic death footage sure as hell made me more careful in traffic. No amount of crumpled car metal was going to properly internalize in me how sudden and unexpected death can be and how fragile life really is.

[sandworm101]

>> ridiculous how people think war is like Call of Duty.

It is also ridiculous how people think every soldier's experience is like Band of Brothers or Full Metal Jacket. I remember an interview with a WWII vet who had been on omaha beach: "I don't remember anything happening in slow motion ... I do remember eating a lot of sand." The reality of war is often just not visually interesting enough to put on the screen.

[portaouflop]

Normal does not exist - it’s just the setting on your washing machine.

[LeftHandPath]

Earlier this year, I was at ground zero of the Super Bowl parade shooting. I didn’t ever dream about it, but I spent the following 3-4 days constantly replaying it in my head in my waking hours.

Later in the year I moved to Florida, just in time for Helene and Milton. I didn’t spend much time thinking about either of them (aside from during prep and cleanup and volunteering a few weeks after). But I had frequent dreams of catastrophic storms and floods.

Different stressors affect people (even myself) differently. Thankfully I’ve never had a major/long-term problem, but I know my reactions to major life stressors never seemed to have any rhyme or reason.

I can imagine many people might’ve been through a few things that made them confident they’d be alright with the job, only to find out dealing with that stuff 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week is a whole different ball game.

[sandworm101]

A parade shooting is bad, very bad, but is still tame compared to the sorts of things to which website moderators are exposed on a daily/hourly basis. Footage of people being shot is actually allowed on many platforms. Just think of all the war footage that is so common these days. The dark stuff that moderators see is way way worse.

[wkat4242]

> Footage of people being shot is actually allowed on many platforms.

It's also part of almost every American cop and military show and movie. Of course it's not real but it looks the same.

[guerrilla]

> Of course it's not real but it looks the same.

I beg to differ. TV shows and movies are silly. Action movies are just tough-guy dancing.

[jnwatson]

"Tough guy dancing" is such an apt phrase.

The organizer is even called a "fight choreographer".

[wkat4242]

I mean more the gory parts. Blood, decomposed bodies everywhere etc.

And I wasn't talking about action hero movies.

[7bit]

It absolutely does not look the same. You instinctively know that what you see is just acting. I somehow don't believe that you have seen a real video of a person getting shot or beheaded or sucked into a lathe. Seeing a life getting wiped out is emotionally completely different because that's more than a picture you are emotionally processing. It looks only the same if you have zero empathy or are a psychopath.

[consumer451]

I have often wondered what would happen if social product orgs required all dev and product team members to temporarily rotate through moderation a couple times a year.

[alex-korr]

I can tell you that back when I worked as a dev for the department building order fulfillment software at a dotcom, my perspective on my own product has drastically changed after I had spent a month at a warehouse that was shipping orders coming out of the software we wrote. Eating my own dog food was not pretty.

[Teever]

Yeah I've wondered the same thing about jobs in general too.

Society would be a very different place if everyone had to do customer service or janitorial work one weekend a month.

[ANewFormation]

Many (all?) Japanese schools don't have janitors. Instead students clean on rotation. Never been much into Japanese stuff but I absolutely admire this about their culture, and imagine it's part of the reason that Japan is such a clean and at least superficially respectful society.

Living in other Asian nations where there are often defacto invisible caste systems can be nauseating at times - you have parents that won't allow their children to participate in clean up efforts because their child is 'above handling trash.' That's gonna be one well adjusted adult...