When you interact online, you fundamentally are interacting with only yourself. It is a solipsistic endeavor. You fundamentally choose which comments to respond to; unlike the real world, where a conversation occurs between two people, you can instantly drive into a conversation whenever you see fit, and leave whenever you wish also.
Therefore, the choice of which conversation, which comment, is entirely yours. And since the comments available are literally never-ending, you have the ultimate choice as to which you are responding. Therefore, every conversation you have is with a version of a person you have constructed in your head.
This is what enables people to be mean and rude on the internet. It's because they are talking to a construct which is fundamentally in their own head, often times with their own nasty internal conflicts applied.
This is also the fundamental mistake people make about the online world being a place where "discourse" can change anyone's internal landscape. It cannot, because it every discourse on the internet is by definition completely a subset of the ego of the single individual.
As soon as it appeared, when I was like 16 and an adept of philosophy, classic theater and general litterature which were, with video games, big escapes at the time, we were all talking around me about this network of people looking at themselves yelling in the void.
A few years pass by and everyone is addicted to facebook for news so much that my parents became fascists, my sister went through communist then populism and now post stuff like the EU is going to steal our savings, my friends are either gone off of it or completely vain selfying their vacation to no one in particular.
And now I post yet another comment to myself, marvelling at my english and smiling at my little twist. You're right, we don't talk to each other at all we just show our best angle to ourselves while raging jealously at other people's better angles.
> Therefore, the choice of which conversation, which comment, is entirely yours.
It's not that simple though. You're likely to be part of a broader community and simply deciding to leave that community, and all of your friends, over the actions of one person, is not very reasonable. Often times we are forced to be around people we don't particularly like. When that person does something valuable, they get a level of protection from being reprimanded for their bad behavior that isn't afforded to outsiders of the group, so kicking out such people often becomes difficult as well.
That's a neat idea but what about people who only see each other in real time chats (voice or text)? You can stop reading but AFK you can also walk away and it's pretty much the same.
What I'm not seeing is what is going on in the lives of these people that fosters such negative behavior. These studies almost never ask questions like "Are you being abused by your parents?" or "Have you been molested?"
There is this presumption that they engage in malicious behavior simply because they think they can get away with it, basically. It's an "idle hands are the devil's workshop" theory and generally lacks substance.
Sure, people do all kinds of stupid stuff when bored and when they have time on their hands, but why are these young adolescents online all the time? Does this mean they have a terrible home life and no one is paying attention to them?
I don't really like proxies like "Spends a lot of time online." I spend a lot of time online. I don't bully people.
For me, the internet is a means to have a life when that wouldn't otherwise be possible. I earn income online. I have hobbies online. Etc.
I really dislike the subtext that "spending time online is bad and more time spent online is worse." I would guess it is something more like "Spending time online to try to escape your shitty life in an abusive household means you take your baggage out on internet strangers because that seems safer and more do-able than resolving your thorny problems."
I don't think it's only adolescents. You can see rich Google employees bullying poorer developers on Twitter in the name of social justice. Some of the bullies must be at least 50 years old.
Social media and Twitter are bad because you can form virtual tribes and yield to age-old instincts.
The more individualistic people are, the less they join those tribes. Individualists tend to be grumpy though, for which they are bullied by the perfect Twitter moralists.
In this field, sending out surveys with "objective" questions to a large amount of people to collect data is the only way to get your research deemed "scientific". I think everyone would agree that the role of the scientists and writers of these pop-psych articles should be to interpret the point and help readers come to an insightful and true conclusion like yours, but really everyone in the psychology and journalism fields are forced to run a "I'm just reporting the facts like my boss wants me to" mantra to keep their job.
It's kind of sad that this academic system makes it so only well-paid therapists get to do that, because of course looking at the current state of affairs in the world and coming to and reporting on and building insight on the logical conclusion that only hurt people hurt people isn't "scientific research" because the peers in your field only allow themselves and others to repeat what the numbers in the excel spreadsheet say. The psychology and objective journalism fields are great examples of dysfunctional academic systems.
I like Alice Miller's hot take on her field in her book "For Your Own Good". I'm just going to straight up copy her text:
Those who swear by statistical studies and gain their psychological knowledge from those sources will see my efforts to understand the children Christiane and Adolf [Hitler] as unnecessary and irrelevant. They would have to be given statistical proof that a given number of cases of child abuse later produced almost the same number of murderers. This proof cannot be provided, however, for the following reasons. Alice Miller lists off 1) child abuse takes place in secret 2) testimony of victims on their own suffered child abuse is often very flawed to protect their parents 3) experts in criminology have already noted this trend in their scientific research
Even if statistical data confirm my own conclusions, I do not consider them a reliable source because they are often based on uncritical assumptions and ideas that are either meaningless (such as "a sheltered childhood"), vague, ambiguous ("received a lot of love"), or deceptive ("the father was strict but fair"), or that even contain obvious contradictions ("he was loved and spoiled"). This is why I do not care to rely on conceptual systems whose gaps are so large that the truth escapes through them, but rather prefer to make the attempt ... to take a different route. I am not searching for statistical objectivity but for the subjectivity of the victim in question, to the degree that my empathy permits.
I think looking for deeper motivations such as abuse will likely prove fruitless in these cases.
A few years ago the 14-year old old daughter of a coworker of mine got into a lot of trouble after being revealed as the person (cyber)bullying two classmates because they were "flaunting their new iPhones on social media too much". Anecdotal for sure, but kids can be mean and with the internet still offering a veil of anonymity, incidents like this are bound to happen.
> The study also found that adolescent males are more likely to engage in cyberbullying than females, aligning with past studies that show aggressive behaviors tend to be more male driven.
for a certain definition of aggression. but social media bullying is a Mean Girls phenomenon. it's reputation and character assassination, which is aggressive behavior. male aggression tends to be physical and they spend more time playing video games, while females spend more time on social media. as a result, girls are seeing higher rates of depression compared to boys.
here's the research on this topic that Jonathan Haidt and other academics are maintaining;
Men do reputation and character assassination pretty routinely. They are no strangers to smear campaigns or even subtle manipulating group against one. Males use words for aggression quite a lot, actually.
Being online leads to a deep mental disturbance that just grows and grows.
It's like you're hungry and you're reading through an endless stack of menus with this weird idea that the menus will sate your hunger. And you just keep on reading, about sandwiches, pizza and Chinese food. But none of the reading helps. You just keep on getting hungrier.
I think that the Buddhists talk about this state, in their version of Hell.
It's only natural that this would lead to "demoniacal" behavior.
I've thought about this problem a lot - I want to create a social network that has the following attributes:
- $1 a year to participate
- You must read posts/articles to reply. Imagine the mechanism in which this is determined to be "perfect."
- No pictures
- Karma is gathered by writing posts that are read a lot, as opposed to comments that have a lot of "upvotes."
- Upvotes/downvoting doesn't exist.
From my experience the social media addiction is heightened by 3 attributes:
1. pictures
2. how controversial something is
3. trolling
The issue though is that a social network like I described would be something people wouldn't want to use, so it wouldn't really serve to be a place people could go to that's a healthier community. It's a tough nut to crack.
I wonder if social media had the potential to be a force of good or if it was doomed from the start. I'd like to run an AB experiment where social media companies didn't optimize for engagement. And maybe an AB experiment where they tried to optimize for healthy usage, even if it harmed engagement.
I don't think social media was doomed from the start - there were many years of healthy enough communities (I'm mostly familiar with LiveJournal in the early 2000s) that didn't have all the downsides of modern social media. You saw updates in most-recent-first order, if you refreshed the page you got the same thing (perhaps with a new update at the top, but it was easy to tell when you'd caught up), and if you had too much stuff to read, you figured out how to trim some of it away ("FRIENDS CUT!"). The cost to operate the infrastructure was fairly minimal, and it accomplished most of the things we actually would like from social media without the downsides.
What we haven't proved is that you can have social media run by a publicly traded, ad-revenue-funded company without all sorts of harmful effects (with the main interface being smartphones with push notifications). That's where all the nasty "engagement" effects come from - trying to drive eyeballs to ads to improve revenue. It's very much a zero-sum game - every pair of eyeballs has 24 hours in the day, so the goal is to command their attention for as many of those hours as possible. That's where the evil creeps in.
> I'd like to run an AB experiment where social media companies didn't optimize for engagement. And maybe an AB experiment where they tried to optimize for healthy usage, even if it harmed engagement.
This is just a theory but my fear is that social media that's optimized for "healthy usage" probably looked more like the forum and blog culture that social media killed.
Optimizing for engagement means you basically have a genetic algorithm on your hands for surfacing the content with the most "viral-potential." Eventually that stuff eats the healthy parts of the internet because people inevitably talk about the viral stuff that's happening, which means your healthy-use forum is nonetheless revolving around the conversation in the viral centers.
From there it's a matter of time before people start going directly to the viral source to keep up with the context and conversation. And once they're there, because it optimizes for engagement, it crowds out their use of everything else.
So there's a natural selective pressure here. Optimizing for engagement/addiction gets you a network effect that leads to overshadowing any other type of socializing. Unless there's some mechanism to actively select against virality and engagement they will naturally rise to the top even independent of ad-impression incentives.
I've been using a chronological order social media for a couple of years now and I wouldn't trade it for a sorting algo.
Sure, I miss some things that are likely interesting and sometimes I need to mute some that post too often.
I think content tagging is what people were really asking for when they got "optimized for engagement."
Sure. Instagram was that. They have limiters that will tell you to take a break, they have a marker that tells you you've caught up, and the default view is subscriptions-only.
I only see my friends' stuff on Instagram and it's lovely. Though they've recently changed to stick random stuff underneath the last post from a friend which does diminish the point somewhat.
What's your threshold for doomed? The kinds of conversations/actions that have happened haven't changed all that much since the Internet as we know it began. The term "flamewar" and "troll" were coined on Usenet. The only differences between now and then is scale and visibility.
In addition, how does one define "engagement" and "healthy usage"? Way back when, people spent much of their free time on a landline. Does one go on to blame AT&T for "optimizing for engagement" by providing a service that could keep people connected to any person in the country for hours upon hours while the phone company made millions minute-by-minute? Ultimately this depends on the person and his/her wants/needs (however "unhealthy" you think they might be) and those can only be determined by oneself regardless of how much data someone else collects.
Your AB experiment would only work if you had sentient gingerbread men as a control group. Even then, I doubt it would say or change much about what people do on a person-to-person basis.
Social media encourages dogpiling. "Engagement" measures shares, reactions and comments. Shares get more eyeballs on a post and "the algorithm" further promotes posts already garnering a lot of "engagement", creating a feedback loop. More eyeballs means more people commenting and a greater likelihood of repeating what has already been said, hence more dogpiling.
Early online communities were not only much more heavily moderated than even sites like reddit or HN are today, but they also usually had explicit rules prohibiting dogpiling because it made it impossible to have a discussion or actually explain to someone why what they said may have been deemed offensive, inappropriate or wrong.
If you spend more time "interacting" on social media, you probably encounter dogpiles more frequently and end up contributing to them more than someone who mostly just consumes social media and doesn't actively participate. This probably also means you face more of the resulting backlash, further polarizing your views of the "others".
This seems to generally lead to one of two outcomes: Either you quit, or you embrace the angry surface level discourse and turn lashing out at people online into a hobby. You can see this happen in real time on Twitter because the character limit rewards witty one-liners and comebacks over wordy nuance (even if people try to work around this with threads, but note this doesn't work well for replies and this still requires replying several times in a row and results in notification spam).
To put it differently: social media is competitive and encourages antagonistic behavior (because people are more likely to "engage" something snappy they disagree with, than something nuanced they agree with). Cyberbullying is just the extreme end of it.
If we wanted to avoid this, we would need to encourage cooperation over competition. But even sites explicitly built around cooperation (like Stackoverflow) often end up promoting competitive behavior by introducing rewards and privileges for supposedly cooperative behavior. If you gamify cooperation and reward people for being "good at cooperating", you just create a competition with extra steps and this can still poison the well.
Humans, their personalities and traits, have barely altered in 1000s of years. The internet is polarising the worst aspects. Humans haven't changed, but their worst behaviour is unleashed by anonymity.
My opinions not so much on the study itself, but the topic of general shitty behaviour people seem to display on popular social media platforms.
Personally, I think it has less to do with things like anonymity, up/downvotes and other gamey systems employed that tend to get blamed and more to do with the communities themselves.
Specifically, their size. But also, the willingness of moderators to enforce a few basic rules of civility.
I think they suffer from that same phenomenon that makes cities on a whole, less friendly than smaller towns and communities. I realize there's exceptions, but speaking generally this tends to be the case.
To further the comparison a bit, you're also more likely to have the police respond with favourable results to personal and petty crime in smaller towns.
You can see the same things in smaller internet communities. Whether they're pseudonymous or not or whatever kinds of upvoting systems they have or not, there's less people, moderators tend to respond more quickly to personal attacks and things and usually in more reasonable ways than automated algorithms.
Again, generalizing, but when communities are small enough all the people participating are recognizable and when moderators are active in enforcing those basic rules of conduct, people tend to behave a little more reasonably.
As a sidenote, I'll throw HN in as an exception to the size thing, because it's a pretty large community, but dang and the mods are like super human or something so manage to keep the conversation pretty civil most of the time here.
> I think they suffer from that same phenomenon that makes cities on a whole, less friendly than smaller towns and communities.
There is data that shows the opposite is true[1]. While the pace of life is faster in urban areas -- which may be jarring to people aren't accustom to it -- living in areas with high population density teaches people to be courteous and respectful.
How the fuck do I use the adtech delivery system you generously gifted to me in order to read the body of a research article[1] from this public institution of higher learning?
This is so trivial it's useless nonsense. This is like saying that that existing in reality is linked to bullying. Yes, sure, you have to exist in physical space to be non-cyberbullied. And you have to exist in a digital space to by cyberbullied.
[+] [-] rland|5 years ago|reply
Therefore, the choice of which conversation, which comment, is entirely yours. And since the comments available are literally never-ending, you have the ultimate choice as to which you are responding. Therefore, every conversation you have is with a version of a person you have constructed in your head.
This is what enables people to be mean and rude on the internet. It's because they are talking to a construct which is fundamentally in their own head, often times with their own nasty internal conflicts applied.
This is also the fundamental mistake people make about the online world being a place where "discourse" can change anyone's internal landscape. It cannot, because it every discourse on the internet is by definition completely a subset of the ego of the single individual.
[+] [-] HNfriend234|5 years ago|reply
Since then my productivity has improved and my mental health has improved as well.
[+] [-] xwolfi|5 years ago|reply
A few years pass by and everyone is addicted to facebook for news so much that my parents became fascists, my sister went through communist then populism and now post stuff like the EU is going to steal our savings, my friends are either gone off of it or completely vain selfying their vacation to no one in particular.
And now I post yet another comment to myself, marvelling at my english and smiling at my little twist. You're right, we don't talk to each other at all we just show our best angle to ourselves while raging jealously at other people's better angles.
[+] [-] testing12321|5 years ago|reply
Much different than non-internet discourse? Definitely feels different(shared experience), but unsure if it is - 'fundamentally'.
[+] [-] near|5 years ago|reply
It's not that simple though. You're likely to be part of a broader community and simply deciding to leave that community, and all of your friends, over the actions of one person, is not very reasonable. Often times we are forced to be around people we don't particularly like. When that person does something valuable, they get a level of protection from being reprimanded for their bad behavior that isn't afforded to outsiders of the group, so kicking out such people often becomes difficult as well.
[+] [-] swiley|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] westmeal|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lifeformed|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inventtheday|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DoreenMichele|5 years ago|reply
There is this presumption that they engage in malicious behavior simply because they think they can get away with it, basically. It's an "idle hands are the devil's workshop" theory and generally lacks substance.
Sure, people do all kinds of stupid stuff when bored and when they have time on their hands, but why are these young adolescents online all the time? Does this mean they have a terrible home life and no one is paying attention to them?
I don't really like proxies like "Spends a lot of time online." I spend a lot of time online. I don't bully people.
For me, the internet is a means to have a life when that wouldn't otherwise be possible. I earn income online. I have hobbies online. Etc.
I really dislike the subtext that "spending time online is bad and more time spent online is worse." I would guess it is something more like "Spending time online to try to escape your shitty life in an abusive household means you take your baggage out on internet strangers because that seems safer and more do-able than resolving your thorny problems."
[+] [-] colloq|5 years ago|reply
Social media and Twitter are bad because you can form virtual tribes and yield to age-old instincts.
The more individualistic people are, the less they join those tribes. Individualists tend to be grumpy though, for which they are bullied by the perfect Twitter moralists.
[+] [-] Wohlf|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skim_milk|5 years ago|reply
It's kind of sad that this academic system makes it so only well-paid therapists get to do that, because of course looking at the current state of affairs in the world and coming to and reporting on and building insight on the logical conclusion that only hurt people hurt people isn't "scientific research" because the peers in your field only allow themselves and others to repeat what the numbers in the excel spreadsheet say. The psychology and objective journalism fields are great examples of dysfunctional academic systems.
I like Alice Miller's hot take on her field in her book "For Your Own Good". I'm just going to straight up copy her text:
Those who swear by statistical studies and gain their psychological knowledge from those sources will see my efforts to understand the children Christiane and Adolf [Hitler] as unnecessary and irrelevant. They would have to be given statistical proof that a given number of cases of child abuse later produced almost the same number of murderers. This proof cannot be provided, however, for the following reasons. Alice Miller lists off 1) child abuse takes place in secret 2) testimony of victims on their own suffered child abuse is often very flawed to protect their parents 3) experts in criminology have already noted this trend in their scientific research
Even if statistical data confirm my own conclusions, I do not consider them a reliable source because they are often based on uncritical assumptions and ideas that are either meaningless (such as "a sheltered childhood"), vague, ambiguous ("received a lot of love"), or deceptive ("the father was strict but fair"), or that even contain obvious contradictions ("he was loved and spoiled"). This is why I do not care to rely on conceptual systems whose gaps are so large that the truth escapes through them, but rather prefer to make the attempt ... to take a different route. I am not searching for statistical objectivity but for the subjectivity of the victim in question, to the degree that my empathy permits.
[+] [-] echelon|5 years ago|reply
Do they start behaving good to other people?
Do they recognize their past behavior and feel bad for it?
[+] [-] vsareto|5 years ago|reply
Wouldn't there be worse behavior problems than internet bullying if that was the case? Like, physical bullying or violence or worse?
[+] [-] Chazprime|5 years ago|reply
A few years ago the 14-year old old daughter of a coworker of mine got into a lot of trouble after being revealed as the person (cyber)bullying two classmates because they were "flaunting their new iPhones on social media too much". Anecdotal for sure, but kids can be mean and with the internet still offering a veil of anonymity, incidents like this are bound to happen.
[+] [-] undefined1|5 years ago|reply
for a certain definition of aggression. but social media bullying is a Mean Girls phenomenon. it's reputation and character assassination, which is aggressive behavior. male aggression tends to be physical and they spend more time playing video games, while females spend more time on social media. as a result, girls are seeing higher rates of depression compared to boys.
here's the research on this topic that Jonathan Haidt and other academics are maintaining;
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w-HOfseF2wF9YIpXwUUtP65-...
[+] [-] Solvitieg|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] watwut|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lbj|5 years ago|reply
"Possession of car linked to car crashes"
[+] [-] swayvil|5 years ago|reply
It's like you're hungry and you're reading through an endless stack of menus with this weird idea that the menus will sate your hunger. And you just keep on reading, about sandwiches, pizza and Chinese food. But none of the reading helps. You just keep on getting hungrier.
I think that the Buddhists talk about this state, in their version of Hell.
It's only natural that this would lead to "demoniacal" behavior.
[+] [-] exo-pla-net|5 years ago|reply
People engage with social media at least in part out of social urges. However, consumption of social media leads to increased feelings of loneliness: https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/is-a-steady-diet-of-soci...
So, social media is indeed a diet that just makes one hungrier.
But does loneliness lead to more aggressive / "bullying" behavior? This hasn't been well studied, but evidence suggests this is the case: http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/comm/malamuth/pdf/85jspr2.pdf
[+] [-] endisneigh|5 years ago|reply
- $1 a year to participate
- You must read posts/articles to reply. Imagine the mechanism in which this is determined to be "perfect."
- No pictures
- Karma is gathered by writing posts that are read a lot, as opposed to comments that have a lot of "upvotes."
- Upvotes/downvoting doesn't exist.
From my experience the social media addiction is heightened by 3 attributes:
1. pictures
2. how controversial something is
3. trolling
The issue though is that a social network like I described would be something people wouldn't want to use, so it wouldn't really serve to be a place people could go to that's a healthier community. It's a tough nut to crack.
[+] [-] Jaygles|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Syonyk|5 years ago|reply
What we haven't proved is that you can have social media run by a publicly traded, ad-revenue-funded company without all sorts of harmful effects (with the main interface being smartphones with push notifications). That's where all the nasty "engagement" effects come from - trying to drive eyeballs to ads to improve revenue. It's very much a zero-sum game - every pair of eyeballs has 24 hours in the day, so the goal is to command their attention for as many of those hours as possible. That's where the evil creeps in.
[+] [-] naravara|5 years ago|reply
This is just a theory but my fear is that social media that's optimized for "healthy usage" probably looked more like the forum and blog culture that social media killed.
Optimizing for engagement means you basically have a genetic algorithm on your hands for surfacing the content with the most "viral-potential." Eventually that stuff eats the healthy parts of the internet because people inevitably talk about the viral stuff that's happening, which means your healthy-use forum is nonetheless revolving around the conversation in the viral centers.
From there it's a matter of time before people start going directly to the viral source to keep up with the context and conversation. And once they're there, because it optimizes for engagement, it crowds out their use of everything else.
So there's a natural selective pressure here. Optimizing for engagement/addiction gets you a network effect that leads to overshadowing any other type of socializing. Unless there's some mechanism to actively select against virality and engagement they will naturally rise to the top even independent of ad-impression incentives.
[+] [-] TheJoYo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] renewiltord|5 years ago|reply
I only see my friends' stuff on Instagram and it's lovely. Though they've recently changed to stick random stuff underneath the last post from a friend which does diminish the point somewhat.
[+] [-] Dracophoenix|5 years ago|reply
In addition, how does one define "engagement" and "healthy usage"? Way back when, people spent much of their free time on a landline. Does one go on to blame AT&T for "optimizing for engagement" by providing a service that could keep people connected to any person in the country for hours upon hours while the phone company made millions minute-by-minute? Ultimately this depends on the person and his/her wants/needs (however "unhealthy" you think they might be) and those can only be determined by oneself regardless of how much data someone else collects.
Your AB experiment would only work if you had sentient gingerbread men as a control group. Even then, I doubt it would say or change much about what people do on a person-to-person basis.
[+] [-] hnbad|5 years ago|reply
Early online communities were not only much more heavily moderated than even sites like reddit or HN are today, but they also usually had explicit rules prohibiting dogpiling because it made it impossible to have a discussion or actually explain to someone why what they said may have been deemed offensive, inappropriate or wrong.
If you spend more time "interacting" on social media, you probably encounter dogpiles more frequently and end up contributing to them more than someone who mostly just consumes social media and doesn't actively participate. This probably also means you face more of the resulting backlash, further polarizing your views of the "others".
This seems to generally lead to one of two outcomes: Either you quit, or you embrace the angry surface level discourse and turn lashing out at people online into a hobby. You can see this happen in real time on Twitter because the character limit rewards witty one-liners and comebacks over wordy nuance (even if people try to work around this with threads, but note this doesn't work well for replies and this still requires replying several times in a row and results in notification spam).
[+] [-] hnbad|5 years ago|reply
If we wanted to avoid this, we would need to encourage cooperation over competition. But even sites explicitly built around cooperation (like Stackoverflow) often end up promoting competitive behavior by introducing rewards and privileges for supposedly cooperative behavior. If you gamify cooperation and reward people for being "good at cooperating", you just create a competition with extra steps and this can still poison the well.
[+] [-] cwkoss|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IndySun|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grawprog|5 years ago|reply
Personally, I think it has less to do with things like anonymity, up/downvotes and other gamey systems employed that tend to get blamed and more to do with the communities themselves.
Specifically, their size. But also, the willingness of moderators to enforce a few basic rules of civility.
I think they suffer from that same phenomenon that makes cities on a whole, less friendly than smaller towns and communities. I realize there's exceptions, but speaking generally this tends to be the case.
To further the comparison a bit, you're also more likely to have the police respond with favourable results to personal and petty crime in smaller towns.
You can see the same things in smaller internet communities. Whether they're pseudonymous or not or whatever kinds of upvoting systems they have or not, there's less people, moderators tend to respond more quickly to personal attacks and things and usually in more reasonable ways than automated algorithms.
Again, generalizing, but when communities are small enough all the people participating are recognizable and when moderators are active in enforcing those basic rules of conduct, people tend to behave a little more reasonably.
As a sidenote, I'll throw HN in as an exception to the size thing, because it's a pretty large community, but dang and the mods are like super human or something so manage to keep the conversation pretty civil most of the time here.
[+] [-] robbyking|5 years ago|reply
There is data that shows the opposite is true[1]. While the pace of life is faster in urban areas -- which may be jarring to people aren't accustom to it -- living in areas with high population density teaches people to be courteous and respectful.
[1] https://thepointsguy.com/news/are-new-yorkers-friendly/
[+] [-] jancsika|5 years ago|reply
How the fuck do I use the adtech delivery system you generously gifted to me in order to read the body of a research article[1] from this public institution of higher learning?
[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/23727810.2020.18...
[+] [-] yesenadam|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] motohagiography|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] superkuh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ipsocannibal|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ktkoffroth|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ExcavateGrandMa|5 years ago|reply
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