Very well written both in prose and tone. I'm glad she decided to tell this story. If the author isn't a professional writer I think she could be.
This is a great "behind the scenes" style look at the actual people behind a viral clip. Luckily they have an extremely strong relationship to help soften the blows here, I'm not sure an average (not even bad!) relationship could come out of something like this unscathed.
There's something feral in us that comes out from time to time, especially online from the safety of our screens. I found the announcers within the range of good fun but when it gets to people reaching out to break up their marriage or telling him to kill himself it becomes really sobering.
I think this is part of what people are calling the lonlieness epidemic - despite thousands of screaming voices the whole thing makes me feel hollow and hopeless.
I had my first kid a couple years ago and found myself spending a ton of time holding my kid while he slept, since it's the only way he'd reliably sleep. I spent a good amount of that time browsing various parenting and new baby subreddits.
One very common pattern I saw is that the conclusion is always that the dad is useless. Any provided facts are downplayed. Any omitted facts are imagined in the most negative light possible. And to be fair, there really are LOTS of cases where the dad is useless. The issue is more that posts needed to contain a mountain of evidence to return a neutral ground where the dad is no longer seen as a piece of garbage, rather than starting from neutral ground.
I feel for moms, who in addition to giving birth and having their lives upended to raise a baby, are now told that not only are most men garbage, but their man is garbage too. I feel for the dads, who even if they work hard are told how useless they are, and have to combat a stream of negativity fed to their spouse. It's a divisive wedge thrown into a new family, one that social media algorithms are only happy to encourage for engagement.
When I see instances like the one in this topic, I can see how the default narrative has been applied here. The radio announcers surely aren't aware of the storm they're creating, but it suddenly thrusts two average people into the social media spotlight, where people are happy to assume any missing details to fit their narrative. Everyone is going to apply the default story without taking any time to consider the possibility of other context.
EDIT TO ADD: I know there are manosphere spaces that are toxic too. As a man I've had no problem avoiding them, so this is one of my first extended exposures to this type of content, which is why it stuck with me. Probably also because I felt personally unwelcome as a dad.
> One very common pattern I saw is that the conclusion is always that the dad is useless. Any provided facts are downplayed. Any omitted facts are imagined in the most negative light possible. And to be fair, there really are LOTS of cases where the dad is useless. The issue is more that posts needed to contain a mountain of evidence to return a neutral ground where the dad is no longer seen as a piece of garbage, rather than starting from neutral ground.
You can find quite a lot of data showing that the burden of managing domestic matters falls primarily on women. I would recommend people check out the book Fair Play which examines the problem and puts forward a system where people are assigned various personal tasks that need to be done (there are 100 in total, not all of which may apply to your life/household):
> The result is Fair Play: a time- and anxiety-saving system that offers couples a completely new way to divvy up domestic responsibilities. Rodsky interviewed more than five hundred men and women from all walks of life to figure out what the invisible work in a family actually entails and how to get it all done efficiently. With four easy-to-follow rules, 100 household tasks, and a figurative card game you play with your partner, Fair Play helps you prioritize what's important to your family and who should take the lead on every chore from laundry to homework to dinner.
I really enjoyed Fair Play. While we didn't really prescribe to playing the game rigorously or really start keeping track of cards, it was a great read for our relationship and really made both of us look at how we lived our lives and acted in our relationship. We immediately made some small but lasting pivots that removed unneeded friction and now have new-found respect for each others daily "grind".
I've recommended it to a few friends and they have had similar stories. Nothing life changing, but some small, nice changes to the dynamic and how they think about it.
> I really enjoyed Fair Play. While we didn't really prescribe to playing the game rigorously or really start keeping track of cards, it was a great read for our relationship and really made both of us look at how we lived our lives and acted in our relationship.
This is probably the best (and maybe the only) way that this is a good game. As soon as it turns into score keeping, the relationship will almost certainly go sideways.
Maybe some relationships should go sideways, but that can be addressed in a different way.
> As soon as it turns into score keeping, the relationship will almost certainly go sideways.
The system / cards is not about keeping score: each card is a task, and whomever holds the card is responsible for it from start to finish. E.g., three of the cards are "Meals (Weekday Breakfast)", "Meals (Kids; School Lunch)", and "Meals (Weekday Dinner)"; this may fall to one person, but there is also the "Groceries" card:
> Your family needs to eat. Can we all agree on that? Good. So how do the pantry and refrigerator get stocked on an ongoing basis? With CPE. This includes noticing what’s about to be used up or expire, keeping a running grocery list, and getting to the market . . . ideally before you realize there’s not a drop of milk in the fridge. Even if your family orders groceries online and your go-to dinner is frozen pizza, this card requires CPE nearly 365 days a year. Consult the various “Meals” cardholders regularly so you can be sure you have taco shells in the cupboard for taco night.
So the Meals person(s) have to plan the meal(s), and make an ingredient list for those specifically, and add to to a grocery list, but grocery buyer needs to take stock of what is already present in the fridge/freezer/pantry and buy anything missing generally, and specifically for the meals planned.
People are animals and animals can be trained. Dogs can be trained, elephants can be trained, tigers can be trained. This fact is hated, but has been known for thousands of years.
Foreign adversaries, political extremist groups and so on are all clawing away at every facet of society that can contribute to training people to be and do what they want. For all of our information, language and intellect, those strengths are just an open vulnerability if they aren't protected.
You have to train yourself sufficiently on the grounded basics of reality, the truth and the nature so that when adversarial training against you and others strikes you can be wise enough to push back like this. You have to be able to surround yourself with people who disagree and stand your ground, because they're all being pumped with garbage from everywhere and don't know any better.
It is one of Russia, China, Cuba's and even Iran's way of attacking the US at a distance by funding these groups and amplifying the dumbest stuff you can imagine until these minority voices reach majority saturation in some of the information spaces where they can fester. Taking over education, journalism, social media and so on.
If the idea of the open society is going to survive into the next century, we're either going to need AI to ground society if we can prevent AI from becoming too centralized, or we're going to need to rapidly change education to teach people to think even if the reason we haven't been doing so up to this point is that it fragments society too much. If the alternative is a fragmentation that our enemies control, then a new enlightenment may be the better way.
Owning the social networks doesn't mean you control all the information inherently, because it can easily get out of control. It wasn't that long ago that hundreds of thousands of bots had to be removed after running rampant for a long time which were manipulating trends that cause peaks on journalist's social media dashboards that influences what stories they cover.
Yes, social media bots impacting statistical trend services which some news organizations use to decide what stories to cover.
Communists caused World War 2 and yet love to play the victim. Not everybody who is against communism is a "fascist" and most people don't even know what that really means.
We're not attacking Europe, we're making Europe stronger so it can stand more independently so it doesn't require as much US intervention in the case World War 3 does start and a new front opens there beyond Ukraine. That way the US can invest more of its resources in the pacific. NATO understands this.
The reason we had to do it rudely, is because we've been trying to get Europe to do this for decades nicely and that hasn't work. So you get the rude approach.
> Not everybody who is against communism is a "fascist"
The man that bought one of the most important social networks and has substantially changed its algorithm is nearly openly a nazi. It's not just the sieg hail the day of the presidential swear-in, it's everything he does to the world and the USA. And so do all the others.
> So you get the rude approach.
You're digging your own grave. Your president is handing over your empire piecewise to your adversaries for a fistful of gold. You must understand this: the only thing worse than communism, is fascism, because it's just corruption as a form of government.
A really toxic part of online interactions is that it's very common for people to see a tiny snippet of another person's life and then project all of their own personal resentments onto them.
Telling women they're being abused even when the woman herself disagrees is a very ironic pattern I see often. Somehow it's seen as anti-sexist and yet it puts the onus on the woman to justify herself like the case here where she wrote an entire article. What happened to letting women make their own choices? I'm sure some of them are legitimately concerned, but I think a lot of people just want to spread their preferred narratives about the world.
As a black man, I can't help but think of the whole Chris Brown thing here. Yes, I personally found what he did disgusting, and if everyone else obviously felt that way, I would keep that up.
But no -- I know too many Black women who have -- I suppose -- chosen forgiveness. Too many intelligent humans that I know or know of, are good with this for me to say "No, ladies, you are wrong."
That is a problem I've had with the whole "listen to women" thing. That became a popular phrase and I said okay that's reasonable I'll do so. Over time though I'll see women on both sides of just about every issue. Even women having the right to vote you'll somehow find women who disagree(probably for political reasons).
My only conclusion is the whole idea of "listen to women" is itself simplistic as it assumes women all think the same. Certainly I still listen to women, but im not willing to assume they all feel a certain way just because a few people insist they do. Otherwise Im just ignoring the women with the minority view
> C. T. Studd, (1860-1931) the famed English missionary who served God in China, India, and Africa, once remarked: "Remember the miller's donkey. The miller, son and donkey went to the market. The miller rode the donkey all the way and people exclaimed, 'Cruel man, riding himself and making his son walk.' So he got down and his son rode; then people slanged, 'What a lazy son for riding while poor old father walks.' Then both father and son rode, and people then said, 'Cruelty to animals, poor donkey.' So they got down and carried the donkey on a pole, but folks said, 'Here are two asses carrying another ass.' Then all three walked and people said, 'What fools to have a donkey and not ride it.' So let's go ahead with our work for God and not care what folks say."
Secular wisdom for the ages! 150 years ago we would have been taking a donkey to market wrong. Now with the advent of YouTube and Reddit and Twitter we've charted vast new swaths of incorrect behavior that we can leverage to make ourselves feel superior to others.
It’s not only online. Just last weekend, someone heckled me at Costco because my wife was pushing a heavy ass cart while I was walking freely next to her. She chose to do it, I offered to take it and she refused. But somehow a random stranger had something to say about it.
Online behavior is unfortunately a slightly worse mirror of real life. If you want to experience people outside of your bubble, just go to any public hearings or meetings and you’ll find that a lot of people are quite out there.
I admired a man tending to his partner at a restaurant, and my then-girlfriend told me that she could tell from observing them that he was controlling, and his deference was purely performative.
Because "of similar situations she'd seen".
She had magically deep telepathic abilities, it seems.
Ok, but like were you offended, I feel like it's mostly a harmless slightly funny observation. I wasn't there but like were they really trying to be mean spirited with it? I live in the south and there's a pretty much constant running stream of public commentary on any and everything going on and 99.9% of it is friendly intentioned even if on the surface it's deriding. So really the idea of thinking someone is making a meaningful judgement is strange. And of course, even if they really were, why care?
> I wasn't there but like were they really trying to be mean spirited with it?
Flip genders and most likely people say things like this. Somehow men are just expected to deal with this but if it’s directed at a woman it’s all bad.
Nowadays there's the risk that someone will record you, put it on social media, it'll go big, and suddenly you have a large amount of people weighing in on your personal life without having any context. If that happens, it's likely to trickle back to you directly from other people seeing it or whatever.
The answer to this is to simply not pay attention to social media. There could be a mob on Twitter/X right now flaming me, and I wouldn't know about it or care, because I simply don't go there.
But members of your social circle (family members, friends, coworkers/bosses etc.) do pay attention, and when they do, they can make it your problem. You can ignore an Internet mob, but you can't ignore getting fired by your employer because they want to preserve optics.
I’ll jump in- why care? Because it sucks to have people taking pot shots at you. If it is just one, then sure, that isn’t so bad, but when you have a group doing it, it can become existential. You may not have seen this type of violence before but it is unsettling. A group of people can do low effort violence that feels fun and harmless to them (each taking a lazy swing at someone), but the cumulative effect can be beating up or killing someone. Getting yelled at, or having someone write threatening things to you, is not as bad as being punched or having a stone thrown, but it is still damaging to humans.
I noticed how easy it is to frame something online when you’re viewing it out of context. I’ve seen myself getting it wrong from time to time, because a title was misleading, and I don’t know why after 30 years of internet I’m not way more skeptical.
"A really toxic part of online interactions is that it's very common for people to see a tiny snippet of another person's life and then project all of their own personal resentments onto them."
While also erasing everything that is real about that person's life, too.
I cringe whenever I hear someone angrily yell something like "You don't/can't know how I feel!", because unless the person making the accusation knows the accused very, very well, they could well be really stepping it. Nobody makes it through this life unscathed. Everybody loses people they love. Everybody gets kicked in the gut multiple times in life. Yes, everyone's personal life story, if you get specific enough, isn't exactly like someone else's. I won't claim to know exactly what it's like to be sexually abused, for instance. Wouldn't dream of it. Very serious issue. But I've had kicks to the gut that the one screaming that they may not have an exact analog for either.
I may not know how your exact gut punch feels. Maybe you've had noticeably more gut punches than I have. But everybody has had some sort of experience with them.
If one day a genie's magic spell made you see text pop ups above everyone's head with their traumas and abuses in life, and the emotional and physical burdens they're carrying today, you'd probably have a very hard time walking down the street.
Similarly, I really have a distaste for any variation of the "everyone's sheep" meme, especially when it's because they're not being active in some particular political way that the person flinging the meme around thinks they should be. If you could see those popups, maybe you'd understand why not everyone has a bunch of spare time to do whatever it is you think they should do to not be "sheep". Looking out on to a crowd of people and presuming they are "sheeple" reveals a lack of imagination and sympathy with people rather that the possession of a wise eye and strong understanding of the world.
A place for those who would be marginalised by their own community, gay, religious apostates etc etc.
Communicating with relatives on the other side of the world.
Maintaining old friendships that would have died due to distance.
Somewhere to find like minded people.
Somewhere like hacker news (I count it as social media top) where I discovered great books, expanded my horizons and learnt that there were other ways at looking at the world.
There are social sharing functions and then there are algorithmic feedback loops that induce doomscrolling. Pretty sure it’s technically feasible to have one without the other.
The question to me is, with enough content and a powerful enough recommendation algorithm trained with enough eyeballs can short form videos be considered addictive in a clinical sense? If so what are the deleterious effects of the addiction? Should it be regulated?
I’m all for freedom, but we regulate drugs because we deem them bad for society.
You are describing old-school social-network designs that began to be marginalized already before Covid, not modern social media. The latter would prefer that you not forge or maintain authentic connections with other human beings, but rather doomscroll through endless-scroll content.
Keeping in touch with relatives or friends in much of the world has long since moved to chat apps like WhatsApp instead of an open social network.
I think it's not even that there's a benefit to it, it's that a lot of traditional communities that had their own forums are now exclusively on Facebook groups. I'm in several groups for mountain biking, for cars, for 3D printing, and those communities just don't exist anywhere else online other than small pockets with very little activity. Discord is the other one that has captured a bunch, but it's mostly centered around gaming, memes and tech.
There's a widespread problem of anti-intellectualism and acting-out, including, in the US, by both right and left. Most of the learning feedback to that -- pointing out to people when they might be missing something or acting unfairly -- is ignored, except to attack those who point it out.
AFAICT, for various reasons, they're proud of being warriors for their beliefs, and anyone who sounds like they're saying anything differently is the enemy, and the only thing you do with an enemy is score points against them or hurt them, while trying not to concede anything that the enemy would claim as points or hurt you. It's a toxic recipe for society.
Coincidentally, recently I've decided even Fedi isn't safe from that (it's just different and fewer people doing ideological bully thinking), and have resigned myself that issues of substance can't be discussed there either. Maybe the only safe thing to post is cat pictures.
I think it's much less a problem with HN. Of course, over time you realize certain positions get downvotes that aren't flattering to the people doing it, and some annoying commenting behaviors, and not always all the integrity we'd like to see, which are relatively mild by social media standards. However, I'm also seeing occasional random individual actor extreme toxicity problems with HN. And I'm anticipating some related but different kind of problems from how AI-powered tools will be easily used with the corpus/firehose to play toxic games.
Giants fan here. Watched the game. Even when it was happening and before knowing any of this, I could tell that Kruk and Kuip were going too far. It was starting to get super uncomfortable.
For those who aren't Giants/baseball fans, Mike Krukow (the Giants' color commentator) is retiring at the end of this season. He and Duane Kuiper have been the Giants' primary TV broadcast team for something like 37 years and have been best friends since they were teammates in the early '80s.
Krukow's mind is still sharp, but he has inclusion body myositis, and it's becoming unsafe for him to be anywhere other than at home.
It's just an emotional situation all around. They both thought that they would probably continue broadcasting together for at least a few more years, and now they're not.
So they're pulling out all of their usual schticks -- including poking fun at the fans -- and taking them really, really far because they know it's the last time.
I'm sure they would agree they went a little too far with that one.
I had a co-worker who's dad is paraplegic, and they had a family van with hand controls, so that his dad could drive it. His dad was a big guy and his mom was tiny, but she could load and unload the wheelchair without a problem. My co-worker said that sometimes people would stare when his mom was pumping gas, while his dad sat in the drivers seat doing nothing. He said they had a bit of a routine where his mom would start washing the windows and his dad would point out spots she missed.
They totally did it to entertain themselves, but I'm sure it got a few people riled up thinking that the dad was a jerk.
If it was the other way around they would be saying what a hero he is lol.
Kinda off topic, but as a single Father I cant help but notice how much less of a support system Fathers get. When shit hits the fan its always people assuming the worst. A Fathers major support system is their Wives and Family. Good for him for having such a great Woman by his side... Im not complaining, just an observation
Yeah, it is complicated because we do live in a very misogynistic civilization with patriarchal privileges. It’s just often difficult not to overcompensate to counterbalance and resist these circumstances. Treat people as individuals instead of the archetypes.
As author wrote: we need to practice the benefit of the doubt. Or I like the “trust but verify” pattern
I'd argue making women do more labor by forcing them to write articles justifying their marriage is misogynistic as well. Its just in that case people see it as acceptable because they think it's fighting the patriarchy. But really the patriarchy is not disappearing because of this comments, it's just insulting a random woman based on nothing of substance. If someone tells a women to wear more clothing to protect herself from abuse that's considered sexist, I don't see how this is different. Everyone thinks it's for the best
We consider it 'misogynistic' because women have more difficulty engaging in certain pursuits (career and enterprise) while more easy engaging in others (child-rearing, family life). It's because of our own bias that career and enterprise is worth more than family life that we say the world as a whole is 'misogynistic' instead of the truth, which is that some areas of life, it's easier to be a woman and in others a man.
I started to notice a bit over a decade ago (about the same time as Cersei's walk of shame on GoT) that millennials as a generation were piling into naming and shaming people publicly as blindly appropriate punishment, without any consideration of what could go wrong and considering it their right and entitlement to do that. Any time a public figure gets into any kind of trouble, people demand to know all the details so they can satisfy their need to express outrage. It really is not healthy. Even if another person who was harmed comes out to express that they are satisfied with the outcome and the process that was followed, the crowd still wants to know all the details so they can feel angry.
I'm not sure this is unique to that generation. Tabloids have always been like that. It's just been "democratized" so anyone can start it.
Also I note that a lot of "legacy" pretexts for shaming are off the table. It's not done to shame people simply for being gay; that's now acceptable even in Conservative circles. So perhaps the total shame has just been redistributed, somewhat arbitrarily.
(And another thing: this has evolved shame resistant politicians just like antibiotic overuse evolved MRSA)
I think it's their frustration of other things they can't control - climate change, K-shaped economy, PFAS in everything, no healthcare, 7% and rising mortgages for $1.5 million 1000 sq ft built in 1965 shitboxes, corruption by politicians, suppressed elections, pedophile rings operating carte blanche while law enforcement casts a blind eye, presidential pardons for sale to the rich, clawbacks of longstanding LGBTQ and women's rights... culture wars against trans people to distract from class inequality.... and on and on.
Well, I can't make much progress on or change those things so let me distract myself checking out this shitbird who won't help his wife or hold the baby while she gets some nachos. I can be outraged at him because it's small and tangible compared to being outraged at structural inequality of our current economic reality or the looming climate crisis.
And the mean house sale price was under $96k (which is still under $250k, adjusted for inflation).
From roughly 1953 to 2000, the inflation-adjusted cost of the mean house was around $200k-$250k in today's dollars. Now it has nearly doubled, and mortgage rates are on the rise and headed back towards 10%.
The interesting way is the way the pinned post primes people to attack without it being obvious. Basically, they use assumptive language - "is this just how it's always been. Modern marriage or traditional marriage?" assumes that this two minute clip shows this couple's entire relationship.
And that kind of language to "get discussion going" is well know to those aiming for views.
I'm Danish, but how is this terrible? I should show these people a video of my twins sleeping in a snow covered trolley outside the bar I was having a beer and a board game by the window at.
Danes being willing to leave their kids unattended outside, as good as it may be in practice, is a horrifying idea to people in the US at least, and is liable to get Child Protection Services called on you. Different culture.
In the US, CPS will go after you, even if you're just doing what's normal in our culture, as long as one single person doesn't like it.
Someone in my area was in her apartment doing dishes while her kid was playing in the playground in the apartment complex's common area in front of the unit. (https://fox40.com/news/local-news/sacramento-mother-faces-ch...) Someone called CPS and complained that she was inside, while her kid was outside. Even though most anyone would agree it was a nuisance call, they still charged her and opened a case, telling her that if her child is ever out of her direct sight, she'll be violation of the rule they just made up.
Nothing stops CPS from making up their own rules. There's even an effort to specify in each states' laws that parents letting children roam free isn't legally endangerment, but despite having such language in their laws, a mom was recently prosecuted in Virginia, for similarly letting her child roam within a gated common area. (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/virginia-mom-child-abuse-convic...)
In Copenhagen I was strongly adviced not to leave my bicycle unlocked outside, for quick visit at a grocery store. Everyone I know takes their bikes home overnight.
Living in Copenhagen, I do not recognize that. I live in a city apartment on Vesterbro. We have maybe a hundred bikes parked in the backyard, nobody I know brings his bike home for the night, unless it is a really fancy racing bike. But yes, I do lock my bike when ever I really away from it.
Those comments are pure vitriol juice, my god, and they just keep coming from all angles as to why that dude is an absolutely piece of shit on very little data. Incredible stuff, and a good lesson right there.
Almost anyone can be seen as a hero or a zero if the right 15 second clip is captured. We love it when our best moments hit social media, but everyone also piles on when we are caught at our worst (or what appears to be bad, even if it not).
It is amazing how many haters emerge like in this case, when there is so much more to the story.
I was thinking of this recently. I "dogsit" for many families and had one recently that wasn't great on leash. She would do this thing where she would lay down and try to eat something off the ground (sticks, garbage, animal/dog poop, dead mice, dead birds... whatever she could find). Much of it would likely make her sick and therefore I would have to quickly pull on the leash to prevent her from eating some random thing she found. Being an 80lbs dog, I had to tug quite hard to quickly get her away from whatever she had found. If someone saw me in that moment, they'd probably think I was a terrible dog owner. Without the context that I was actually trying to prevent harm, someone could take a video, post online with the caption "Identify this dog abuser!" and ruin my reputation.
Everyone loves to hate right away when they see something like this. It's a good practice to try to make up a story that gives an alternate, less vilifying explanation to what you're seeing. This is a great response from Erika. Thanks for sharing.
You never know what others are going through, or what is happening in a relationship between two people, even when you think you’re close to them. So the online masses making these judgements based on a short clip is kinda insane although it doesn’t surprise me.
> When I’ve cried reading the comments and the social media “explanations” of our marriage. The man people have been attacking was the one who consoled me. While strangers described how little he must care about me, he was helping me through the hurt their words have caused.
Wow, Reddit is horrible. Atrocious behavior. Leave your brains in the anteroom!
> Whoever sees this and it reminds them of their current relationship, DUMP HIM
> you can tell by the body language, lack of initiative, and lack of joy and welcome-ness for his woman and baby to be back, everything you need to know.
> There is a VERY good chance that when he realizes he went viral for being the *Poster Manchild* of taking your spouse for granted, of choosing to act like a parasitic blob
Modern Reddit provides a simulacrum of commentary. There are posts and people discusing these posts, but nobody understands or wants to know anything about the underlying topic. The lack of comprehension is crucial to the community.
Its unfortunate because it's not only one of the things that makes social media toxic, but it also makes it less and less like reality. Which in turn pushes away people who have more "normal" views, thereby making the community even more extreme over time. Ask a random person in the street and they might say they think he should help her, but they wouldn't come up with these detailed narratives about abuse and manipulation. That kind of reaction is characteristic of social media and the more I see it the less I want to spend time online with those kinds of people
The other end feeds into itself too. Someone who posts something like that also is over-exposed to content enforcing that narrative. When you see your 50th video of the day of (e.g.) a man behaving in a way you don't like, you eventually conclude that men are all bad, and your reactions begin to become more and more pronounced. You're not reacting to that man, you're reacting to every man!
I think it's also important to remember that these people are karma farming. When you can get 5k points for "man bad", who wouldn't?
Doubly reminded of that as I'm watching a DEFCON talk where he cites fake Internet points as a driving motivator. Which is my feeling too but yeah idk the whole thing is missing that "we're real people" thing.
Part of being grounded and self aware is realizing you are not your thoughts and not everything you believe is true.
The brain does what it does in an attempt to help you, but not often it hits the mark, sometimes it takes a bit of a reminder to pause and unpack things more carefully.
> Six weeks before my daughter was born, my employer of 13 years laid off my entire division. Ramses had just put up the down payment on a bigger home for our growing family. My unemployment meant he was facing the mortgage payments and managing a remodel on his own, while we prepared to welcome another child.
i thought that too, but that's not really a story, that's just normal for the US. in europe (most of the EU i am sure) and china and probably elsewhere it's illegal to lay someone off while they are pregnant. (exceptions exist, and if they apply insurance works also for the unemployed)
And yet, tons of comments on Threads from women saying she's been gaslit or even that the husband must have threatened her with violence and forced her to write this.
normal people -- employed, in a relationship, with chores and hobbies to occupy their free time -- simply do not participate in the gender war on the Internet. most are blissfully unaware that it's even happening. the womanosphere is a mirror image of its critically panned counterpart -- a refuge for the unhappy and/or mentally ill, an obnoxiously loud minority.
And every man as well (all the usual stereotypes, slurs, expectations non-stop), but men don’t complain, shrug, and carry on with our duties and hope she doesn’t get board and take half or more.
The conclusion was made from a 30s clip, and no amount of evidence can overturn that. New theories will be created to support the original conclusion to avoid any amount of critical self-reflection.
> My employer provided medical coverage would lapse before my daughter’s birth. I was at risk of not have medical insurance for the birth of our daughter
Algorithmic social media amplifies and promotes our basest, vilest impulses. Crowds were always worse than people, but now these "technologies" put that into turbo-overdrive, 5 billion people at a time, pushed and prodded by the engagement-maxxing machine. I don't see a bright future if we don't get a hand on this, and I don't see us getting a hand on this.
What I notice quite often is a sort of "LLM derangement syndrome" where people start flagging the most innocuous figures of speech and speech pattern as "clearly LLM".
Quite ironic when we are talking about an article which argues for extending the benefit of the doubt.
I thought the piece sounded like AI as well, so I ran it through Pangram, which reports it as 100% AI. Considering Pangram's extremely low false positive rate, I'm inclined to believe this was AI written.
Didn't have the same feel about the piece. But based on the parent comment, decided to also test it, using Pangram free "credits". For me it reported that only sections of it (30%) have been "touched" by an LLM. There is 60% of human written text.
Pangram does not report this as 100% LLM generated. Why do I use the word "touched" - because there are some specific details that must have come from some existing text and are not elsewhere.
How did I do the check? Please do check my results! I copied just the authored prose from the page, carefully removing any comments and site text that got mixed in. I did not have it analyze the "URL".
In looking at the details, a large part of the story is flagged as all human generated.
I've personally used LLMs when I've been very upset. I used it to rewrite / edit my rant into something with a more balanced tone. The modified text got what I wanted, my original rant would almost certainly not have.
So I do think this was a thought out piece that was largely written by a human who used an LLM as an "editor" to polish the writing. Someone took time to think about this and write it.
These patterns aren't somehow alien to human speech. It's the quantity. In ChatGPT (and I think it must be ChatGPT specifically) the default writing voice tries for dramatic and profound by dramatically overusing these figures of speech, chaining them together one after another. But they're things most writers use occasionally, one paragraph in ten or twenty. If you're giving a TED Talk or some other elaborate, melodramatic persuasive public speaking role, you might use them one paragraph in four. ChatGPT uses them every other paragraph at least, sometimes multiple times in the same paragraph, so something like a negation comparator or a triplet is present in sentence after fatiguing sentence.
It's trained on the speech of online commenters like us; That's where it's getting these. I'm not gonna change just because Timmy the Zoomer has been with his LLM girlfriend for the past three years and occasionally I remind him of her. I'm not going to deliberately code switch into somebody who doesn't open a new tab to Google things as he talks about them. And you can take my bullet point lists from my cold, dead hands.
Thing is, it might be or it might not be. At some point you have to realize that some people need wheelchairs to move, some people need glasses to see, and some people need LLMs to write.
IMHO It's when you see someone who is paid to write/think using LLMs that you might make a value judgement.
I once knew a girl who wore prescription-free glasses b/c it made her feel smarter so she'd study longer. Not kidding. I made a value judgement about that. But she got the studying done. There's been other more prevalent cases of that on socials.
It might be worth letting some people write in any way they can.
I think we are approaching the point where collaboration with ai is going to be so ubiquitous that it becomes an unreasonable thing to criticize on its face.
Even before reading, I would assume a non-professional writer would lean on ai to try to figure out what points she wanted to hit and how to phrase things. The cost right now for that is the writing can be somewhat bland, but sometimes that isn't a big problem. Haven't we all seen enough incoherent ai slop to understand the value of editorial oversight by now?
I am working on a libretto in my free time, a hobby I've had for 15 years. Lyrics that would previously take me a week often take an evening. Nearly every suggested stanza and bar is rewritten by me still, but these models can be very helpful in explore the structure of beats to hit, imagery that may or may not land, rhyme and phonetic space etc. Maybe it's ai psychosis or cope but I think my current project is a leap beyond my last two plays. Isn't that what matters for creative expression at the end of the day?
Plaease don't spoil threads with comments like this. The writing doesn't come up as LLM-authored according to the tools we use (polished, perhaps, but not generated).
Who cares? She isn't a public figure, and she never asked to be. She has some thoughts she wants to put out there after going viral due to nothing she did.
Very well written both in prose and tone. I'm glad she decided to tell this story. If the author isn't a professional writer I think she could be.
This is a great "behind the scenes" style look at the actual people behind a viral clip. Luckily they have an extremely strong relationship to help soften the blows here, I'm not sure an average (not even bad!) relationship could come out of something like this unscathed.
There's something feral in us that comes out from time to time, especially online from the safety of our screens. I found the announcers within the range of good fun but when it gets to people reaching out to break up their marriage or telling him to kill himself it becomes really sobering.
I think this is part of what people are calling the lonlieness epidemic - despite thousands of screaming voices the whole thing makes me feel hollow and hopeless.
I had my first kid a couple years ago and found myself spending a ton of time holding my kid while he slept, since it's the only way he'd reliably sleep. I spent a good amount of that time browsing various parenting and new baby subreddits.
One very common pattern I saw is that the conclusion is always that the dad is useless. Any provided facts are downplayed. Any omitted facts are imagined in the most negative light possible. And to be fair, there really are LOTS of cases where the dad is useless. The issue is more that posts needed to contain a mountain of evidence to return a neutral ground where the dad is no longer seen as a piece of garbage, rather than starting from neutral ground.
I feel for moms, who in addition to giving birth and having their lives upended to raise a baby, are now told that not only are most men garbage, but their man is garbage too. I feel for the dads, who even if they work hard are told how useless they are, and have to combat a stream of negativity fed to their spouse. It's a divisive wedge thrown into a new family, one that social media algorithms are only happy to encourage for engagement.
When I see instances like the one in this topic, I can see how the default narrative has been applied here. The radio announcers surely aren't aware of the storm they're creating, but it suddenly thrusts two average people into the social media spotlight, where people are happy to assume any missing details to fit their narrative. Everyone is going to apply the default story without taking any time to consider the possibility of other context.
EDIT TO ADD: I know there are manosphere spaces that are toxic too. As a man I've had no problem avoiding them, so this is one of my first extended exposures to this type of content, which is why it stuck with me. Probably also because I felt personally unwelcome as a dad.
> One very common pattern I saw is that the conclusion is always that the dad is useless. Any provided facts are downplayed. Any omitted facts are imagined in the most negative light possible. And to be fair, there really are LOTS of cases where the dad is useless. The issue is more that posts needed to contain a mountain of evidence to return a neutral ground where the dad is no longer seen as a piece of garbage, rather than starting from neutral ground.
You can find quite a lot of data showing that the burden of managing domestic matters falls primarily on women. I would recommend people check out the book Fair Play which examines the problem and puts forward a system where people are assigned various personal tasks that need to be done (there are 100 in total, not all of which may apply to your life/household):
> The result is Fair Play: a time- and anxiety-saving system that offers couples a completely new way to divvy up domestic responsibilities. Rodsky interviewed more than five hundred men and women from all walks of life to figure out what the invisible work in a family actually entails and how to get it all done efficiently. With four easy-to-follow rules, 100 household tasks, and a figurative card game you play with your partner, Fair Play helps you prioritize what's important to your family and who should take the lead on every chore from laundry to homework to dinner.
* https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/44071899-fair-play
* Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6FfxfRMQkw
I really enjoyed Fair Play. While we didn't really prescribe to playing the game rigorously or really start keeping track of cards, it was a great read for our relationship and really made both of us look at how we lived our lives and acted in our relationship. We immediately made some small but lasting pivots that removed unneeded friction and now have new-found respect for each others daily "grind".
I've recommended it to a few friends and they have had similar stories. Nothing life changing, but some small, nice changes to the dynamic and how they think about it.
> I really enjoyed Fair Play. While we didn't really prescribe to playing the game rigorously or really start keeping track of cards, it was a great read for our relationship and really made both of us look at how we lived our lives and acted in our relationship.
This is probably the best (and maybe the only) way that this is a good game. As soon as it turns into score keeping, the relationship will almost certainly go sideways.
Maybe some relationships should go sideways, but that can be addressed in a different way.
> As soon as it turns into score keeping, the relationship will almost certainly go sideways.
The system / cards is not about keeping score: each card is a task, and whomever holds the card is responsible for it from start to finish. E.g., three of the cards are "Meals (Weekday Breakfast)", "Meals (Kids; School Lunch)", and "Meals (Weekday Dinner)"; this may fall to one person, but there is also the "Groceries" card:
> Your family needs to eat. Can we all agree on that? Good. So how do the pantry and refrigerator get stocked on an ongoing basis? With CPE. This includes noticing what’s about to be used up or expire, keeping a running grocery list, and getting to the market . . . ideally before you realize there’s not a drop of milk in the fridge. Even if your family orders groceries online and your go-to dinner is frozen pizza, this card requires CPE nearly 365 days a year. Consult the various “Meals” cardholders regularly so you can be sure you have taco shells in the cupboard for taco night.
* https://fairplaypolicy.org/the-cards
So the Meals person(s) have to plan the meal(s), and make an ingredient list for those specifically, and add to to a grocery list, but grocery buyer needs to take stock of what is already present in the fridge/freezer/pantry and buy anything missing generally, and specifically for the meals planned.
People are animals and animals can be trained. Dogs can be trained, elephants can be trained, tigers can be trained. This fact is hated, but has been known for thousands of years.
Foreign adversaries, political extremist groups and so on are all clawing away at every facet of society that can contribute to training people to be and do what they want. For all of our information, language and intellect, those strengths are just an open vulnerability if they aren't protected.
You have to train yourself sufficiently on the grounded basics of reality, the truth and the nature so that when adversarial training against you and others strikes you can be wise enough to push back like this. You have to be able to surround yourself with people who disagree and stand your ground, because they're all being pumped with garbage from everywhere and don't know any better.
It is one of Russia, China, Cuba's and even Iran's way of attacking the US at a distance by funding these groups and amplifying the dumbest stuff you can imagine until these minority voices reach majority saturation in some of the information spaces where they can fester. Taking over education, journalism, social media and so on.
If the idea of the open society is going to survive into the next century, we're either going to need AI to ground society if we can prevent AI from becoming too centralized, or we're going to need to rapidly change education to teach people to think even if the reason we haven't been doing so up to this point is that it fragments society too much. If the alternative is a fragmentation that our enemies control, then a new enlightenment may be the better way.
> It is one of Russia, China, Cuba's and even Iran's way of attacking the US
It's the USA eating itself and trying to attack Europe, if anything. It's American fascist billionaires who own, buy, and steer these social networks.
This type of content is mostly on reddit, which leans heavily leftist. They censor right-wing views aggressively.
Owning the social networks doesn't mean you control all the information inherently, because it can easily get out of control. It wasn't that long ago that hundreds of thousands of bots had to be removed after running rampant for a long time which were manipulating trends that cause peaks on journalist's social media dashboards that influences what stories they cover.
Yes, social media bots impacting statistical trend services which some news organizations use to decide what stories to cover.
Communists caused World War 2 and yet love to play the victim. Not everybody who is against communism is a "fascist" and most people don't even know what that really means.
We're not attacking Europe, we're making Europe stronger so it can stand more independently so it doesn't require as much US intervention in the case World War 3 does start and a new front opens there beyond Ukraine. That way the US can invest more of its resources in the pacific. NATO understands this.
The reason we had to do it rudely, is because we've been trying to get Europe to do this for decades nicely and that hasn't work. So you get the rude approach.
> Not everybody who is against communism is a "fascist"
The man that bought one of the most important social networks and has substantially changed its algorithm is nearly openly a nazi. It's not just the sieg hail the day of the presidential swear-in, it's everything he does to the world and the USA. And so do all the others.
> So you get the rude approach.
You're digging your own grave. Your president is handing over your empire piecewise to your adversaries for a fistful of gold. You must understand this: the only thing worse than communism, is fascism, because it's just corruption as a form of government.
A really toxic part of online interactions is that it's very common for people to see a tiny snippet of another person's life and then project all of their own personal resentments onto them.
Telling women they're being abused even when the woman herself disagrees is a very ironic pattern I see often. Somehow it's seen as anti-sexist and yet it puts the onus on the woman to justify herself like the case here where she wrote an entire article. What happened to letting women make their own choices? I'm sure some of them are legitimately concerned, but I think a lot of people just want to spread their preferred narratives about the world.
As a black man, I can't help but think of the whole Chris Brown thing here. Yes, I personally found what he did disgusting, and if everyone else obviously felt that way, I would keep that up.
But no -- I know too many Black women who have -- I suppose -- chosen forgiveness. Too many intelligent humans that I know or know of, are good with this for me to say "No, ladies, you are wrong."
That is a problem I've had with the whole "listen to women" thing. That became a popular phrase and I said okay that's reasonable I'll do so. Over time though I'll see women on both sides of just about every issue. Even women having the right to vote you'll somehow find women who disagree(probably for political reasons).
My only conclusion is the whole idea of "listen to women" is itself simplistic as it assumes women all think the same. Certainly I still listen to women, but im not willing to assume they all feel a certain way just because a few people insist they do. Otherwise Im just ignoring the women with the minority view
The father-mother-child-donkey conundrum. Its only solution is: to hell with anyone's thoughts, we'll act as we prefer.
I had to look this up [1]:
> C. T. Studd, (1860-1931) the famed English missionary who served God in China, India, and Africa, once remarked: "Remember the miller's donkey. The miller, son and donkey went to the market. The miller rode the donkey all the way and people exclaimed, 'Cruel man, riding himself and making his son walk.' So he got down and his son rode; then people slanged, 'What a lazy son for riding while poor old father walks.' Then both father and son rode, and people then said, 'Cruelty to animals, poor donkey.' So they got down and carried the donkey on a pole, but folks said, 'Here are two asses carrying another ass.' Then all three walked and people said, 'What fools to have a donkey and not ride it.' So let's go ahead with our work for God and not care what folks say."
Secular wisdom for the ages! 150 years ago we would have been taking a donkey to market wrong. Now with the advent of YouTube and Reddit and Twitter we've charted vast new swaths of incorrect behavior that we can leverage to make ourselves feel superior to others.
[1] https://www.actsweb.org/articles/article.php?i=295&d=2&c=6
Or speculation grows and a few hours later it's suddenly historical fact, like a modern version of telephone... just with a more harmful outcome.
It’s not only online. Just last weekend, someone heckled me at Costco because my wife was pushing a heavy ass cart while I was walking freely next to her. She chose to do it, I offered to take it and she refused. But somehow a random stranger had something to say about it.
Online behavior is unfortunately a slightly worse mirror of real life. If you want to experience people outside of your bubble, just go to any public hearings or meetings and you’ll find that a lot of people are quite out there.
I admired a man tending to his partner at a restaurant, and my then-girlfriend told me that she could tell from observing them that he was controlling, and his deference was purely performative.
Because "of similar situations she'd seen".
She had magically deep telepathic abilities, it seems.
Ok, but like were you offended, I feel like it's mostly a harmless slightly funny observation. I wasn't there but like were they really trying to be mean spirited with it? I live in the south and there's a pretty much constant running stream of public commentary on any and everything going on and 99.9% of it is friendly intentioned even if on the surface it's deriding. So really the idea of thinking someone is making a meaningful judgement is strange. And of course, even if they really were, why care?
> I wasn't there but like were they really trying to be mean spirited with it?
Flip genders and most likely people say things like this. Somehow men are just expected to deal with this but if it’s directed at a woman it’s all bad.
Nowadays there's the risk that someone will record you, put it on social media, it'll go big, and suddenly you have a large amount of people weighing in on your personal life without having any context. If that happens, it's likely to trickle back to you directly from other people seeing it or whatever.
The answer to this is to simply not pay attention to social media. There could be a mob on Twitter/X right now flaming me, and I wouldn't know about it or care, because I simply don't go there.
But members of your social circle (family members, friends, coworkers/bosses etc.) do pay attention, and when they do, they can make it your problem. You can ignore an Internet mob, but you can't ignore getting fired by your employer because they want to preserve optics.
I’ll jump in- why care? Because it sucks to have people taking pot shots at you. If it is just one, then sure, that isn’t so bad, but when you have a group doing it, it can become existential. You may not have seen this type of violence before but it is unsettling. A group of people can do low effort violence that feels fun and harmless to them (each taking a lazy swing at someone), but the cumulative effect can be beating up or killing someone. Getting yelled at, or having someone write threatening things to you, is not as bad as being punched or having a stone thrown, but it is still damaging to humans.
Not all hurtful and harmful behavior is violence and we need to maintain the distinction.
Don’t want to be the semantics guy but hurtful and harmful behaviour is by definition violence.
Evidently, you are in fact not "the semantics guy".
By whose definition?
The World Health Organization includes not just actual but also threatened physical force or power that results in injury, death or psychological harm
Story also mentions SF Giants sports commentators making jokes about this
I noticed how easy it is to frame something online when you’re viewing it out of context. I’ve seen myself getting it wrong from time to time, because a title was misleading, and I don’t know why after 30 years of internet I’m not way more skeptical.
"A really toxic part of online interactions is that it's very common for people to see a tiny snippet of another person's life and then project all of their own personal resentments onto them."
While also erasing everything that is real about that person's life, too.
I cringe whenever I hear someone angrily yell something like "You don't/can't know how I feel!", because unless the person making the accusation knows the accused very, very well, they could well be really stepping it. Nobody makes it through this life unscathed. Everybody loses people they love. Everybody gets kicked in the gut multiple times in life. Yes, everyone's personal life story, if you get specific enough, isn't exactly like someone else's. I won't claim to know exactly what it's like to be sexually abused, for instance. Wouldn't dream of it. Very serious issue. But I've had kicks to the gut that the one screaming that they may not have an exact analog for either.
I may not know how your exact gut punch feels. Maybe you've had noticeably more gut punches than I have. But everybody has had some sort of experience with them.
If one day a genie's magic spell made you see text pop ups above everyone's head with their traumas and abuses in life, and the emotional and physical burdens they're carrying today, you'd probably have a very hard time walking down the street.
Similarly, I really have a distaste for any variation of the "everyone's sheep" meme, especially when it's because they're not being active in some particular political way that the person flinging the meme around thinks they should be. If you could see those popups, maybe you'd understand why not everyone has a bunch of spare time to do whatever it is you think they should do to not be "sheep". Looking out on to a crowd of people and presuming they are "sheeple" reveals a lack of imagination and sympathy with people rather that the possession of a wise eye and strong understanding of the world.
Is there any benefit to social media? Just seems like a new form of cancer we have to deal with now along with everything else.
A place for those who would be marginalised by their own community, gay, religious apostates etc etc.
Communicating with relatives on the other side of the world.
Maintaining old friendships that would have died due to distance.
Somewhere to find like minded people.
Somewhere like hacker news (I count it as social media top) where I discovered great books, expanded my horizons and learnt that there were other ways at looking at the world.
Anyway, it's not all bad :)
There are social sharing functions and then there are algorithmic feedback loops that induce doomscrolling. Pretty sure it’s technically feasible to have one without the other.
The question to me is, with enough content and a powerful enough recommendation algorithm trained with enough eyeballs can short form videos be considered addictive in a clinical sense? If so what are the deleterious effects of the addiction? Should it be regulated?
I’m all for freedom, but we regulate drugs because we deem them bad for society.
You are describing old-school social-network designs that began to be marginalized already before Covid, not modern social media. The latter would prefer that you not forge or maintain authentic connections with other human beings, but rather doomscroll through endless-scroll content.
Keeping in touch with relatives or friends in much of the world has long since moved to chat apps like WhatsApp instead of an open social network.
You can do most of that with IRC. There's a distinction imo between static webpages / IRC / forums, and modern "social media".
I don't use social media much myself, but I feel that this is going in the direction of that infamous dropbox comment.
Homemade Dog videos. Not sure of anything else
I live alone, and have friends throughout the US.
Social media kept me from attempting suicide during COVID. It helps me feel loved and connected.
Yeah, there are faults, but condemning it wholeheartedly is like suggesting we should abolish ICE cars immediately.
And suggesting we abandon it as a comment on a social media platform is ironically self-unaware.
I always try to be specific and condemn addiction engineering.
Social media before algorithmic attention hacking wasn’t nearly as bad, might have been a net good.
The first thing the algorithm destroyed was the “social” part of social media. Then it set about destroying society and kids attention spans.
I think it's not even that there's a benefit to it, it's that a lot of traditional communities that had their own forums are now exclusively on Facebook groups. I'm in several groups for mountain biking, for cars, for 3D printing, and those communities just don't exist anywhere else online other than small pockets with very little activity. Discord is the other one that has captured a bunch, but it's mostly centered around gaming, memes and tech.
This is really toxic offline, too.
That seems to be a big part of it.
There's a widespread problem of anti-intellectualism and acting-out, including, in the US, by both right and left. Most of the learning feedback to that -- pointing out to people when they might be missing something or acting unfairly -- is ignored, except to attack those who point it out.
AFAICT, for various reasons, they're proud of being warriors for their beliefs, and anyone who sounds like they're saying anything differently is the enemy, and the only thing you do with an enemy is score points against them or hurt them, while trying not to concede anything that the enemy would claim as points or hurt you. It's a toxic recipe for society.
Coincidentally, recently I've decided even Fedi isn't safe from that (it's just different and fewer people doing ideological bully thinking), and have resigned myself that issues of substance can't be discussed there either. Maybe the only safe thing to post is cat pictures.
I think it's much less a problem with HN. Of course, over time you realize certain positions get downvotes that aren't flattering to the people doing it, and some annoying commenting behaviors, and not always all the integrity we'd like to see, which are relatively mild by social media standards. However, I'm also seeing occasional random individual actor extreme toxicity problems with HN. And I'm anticipating some related but different kind of problems from how AI-powered tools will be easily used with the corpus/firehose to play toxic games.
> There's a widespread problem of anti-intellectualism and acting-out, including, in the US, by both right and left.
As of 2026, it's disingenuous to both sides this issue, at least in the US
Giants fan here. Watched the game. Even when it was happening and before knowing any of this, I could tell that Kruk and Kuip were going too far. It was starting to get super uncomfortable.
For those who aren't Giants/baseball fans, Mike Krukow (the Giants' color commentator) is retiring at the end of this season. He and Duane Kuiper have been the Giants' primary TV broadcast team for something like 37 years and have been best friends since they were teammates in the early '80s.
Krukow's mind is still sharp, but he has inclusion body myositis, and it's becoming unsafe for him to be anywhere other than at home.
It's just an emotional situation all around. They both thought that they would probably continue broadcasting together for at least a few more years, and now they're not.
So they're pulling out all of their usual schticks -- including poking fun at the fans -- and taking them really, really far because they know it's the last time.
I'm sure they would agree they went a little too far with that one.
I had a co-worker who's dad is paraplegic, and they had a family van with hand controls, so that his dad could drive it. His dad was a big guy and his mom was tiny, but she could load and unload the wheelchair without a problem. My co-worker said that sometimes people would stare when his mom was pumping gas, while his dad sat in the drivers seat doing nothing. He said they had a bit of a routine where his mom would start washing the windows and his dad would point out spots she missed.
They totally did it to entertain themselves, but I'm sure it got a few people riled up thinking that the dad was a jerk.
If it was the other way around they would be saying what a hero he is lol.
Kinda off topic, but as a single Father I cant help but notice how much less of a support system Fathers get. When shit hits the fan its always people assuming the worst. A Fathers major support system is their Wives and Family. Good for him for having such a great Woman by his side... Im not complaining, just an observation
Yeah, it is complicated because we do live in a very misogynistic civilization with patriarchal privileges. It’s just often difficult not to overcompensate to counterbalance and resist these circumstances. Treat people as individuals instead of the archetypes.
As author wrote: we need to practice the benefit of the doubt. Or I like the “trust but verify” pattern
I'd argue making women do more labor by forcing them to write articles justifying their marriage is misogynistic as well. Its just in that case people see it as acceptable because they think it's fighting the patriarchy. But really the patriarchy is not disappearing because of this comments, it's just insulting a random woman based on nothing of substance. If someone tells a women to wear more clothing to protect herself from abuse that's considered sexist, I don't see how this is different. Everyone thinks it's for the best
We consider it 'misogynistic' because women have more difficulty engaging in certain pursuits (career and enterprise) while more easy engaging in others (child-rearing, family life). It's because of our own bias that career and enterprise is worth more than family life that we say the world as a whole is 'misogynistic' instead of the truth, which is that some areas of life, it's easier to be a woman and in others a man.
> If it was the other way around they would be saying what a hero he is lol.
I’m not so sure, I’m convinced people would not bat an eye. Or at least I don’t expect any positive compliments, only neutral or negative.
Viral clip in question: https://www.tiktok.com/@espnatbat/video/7688719334973230366
Article is about the impact of social media pile-ons (and has been getting praise within tech) so it is within scope for HN.
I started to notice a bit over a decade ago (about the same time as Cersei's walk of shame on GoT) that millennials as a generation were piling into naming and shaming people publicly as blindly appropriate punishment, without any consideration of what could go wrong and considering it their right and entitlement to do that. Any time a public figure gets into any kind of trouble, people demand to know all the details so they can satisfy their need to express outrage. It really is not healthy. Even if another person who was harmed comes out to express that they are satisfied with the outcome and the process that was followed, the crowd still wants to know all the details so they can feel angry.
I'm not sure this is unique to that generation. Tabloids have always been like that. It's just been "democratized" so anyone can start it.
Also I note that a lot of "legacy" pretexts for shaming are off the table. It's not done to shame people simply for being gay; that's now acceptable even in Conservative circles. So perhaps the total shame has just been redistributed, somewhat arbitrarily.
(And another thing: this has evolved shame resistant politicians just like antibiotic overuse evolved MRSA)
I think it's their frustration of other things they can't control - climate change, K-shaped economy, PFAS in everything, no healthcare, 7% and rising mortgages for $1.5 million 1000 sq ft built in 1965 shitboxes, corruption by politicians, suppressed elections, pedophile rings operating carte blanche while law enforcement casts a blind eye, presidential pardons for sale to the rich, clawbacks of longstanding LGBTQ and women's rights... culture wars against trans people to distract from class inequality.... and on and on.
Well, I can't make much progress on or change those things so let me distract myself checking out this shitbird who won't help his wife or hold the baby while she gets some nachos. I can be outraged at him because it's small and tangible compared to being outraged at structural inequality of our current economic reality or the looming climate crisis.
I can see where it comes from, but it is still highly dysfunctional, and a lot of millennials will use those arguments to defend that behavior.
I think it needs to be called out as being bad, and deconstructed properly, and that outrage needs to get redirected back onto the structural issues.
Which is another argument--that when people behave badly because of structural issues, that isn't an excuse.
I agree. If you feel previous social systems of justice and fairness have eroded, the only outlet that seems reasonable is "democratic" mob action.
for our parents generation, mortgage rates were 10%+
And the mean house sale price was under $96k (which is still under $250k, adjusted for inflation).
From roughly 1953 to 2000, the inflation-adjusted cost of the mean house was around $200k-$250k in today's dollars. Now it has nearly doubled, and mortgage rates are on the rise and headed back towards 10%.
TikTok threw up a big "login" popup that I couldn't skip, so here is a youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUwQmrEFf7E
Normally the comments on that video are something I could laugh along with, but reading them after the article is... sobering.
The interesting way is the way the pinned post primes people to attack without it being obvious. Basically, they use assumptive language - "is this just how it's always been. Modern marriage or traditional marriage?" assumes that this two minute clip shows this couple's entire relationship.
And that kind of language to "get discussion going" is well know to those aiming for views.
I'm Danish, but how is this terrible? I should show these people a video of my twins sleeping in a snow covered trolley outside the bar I was having a beer and a board game by the window at.
Danes being willing to leave their kids unattended outside, as good as it may be in practice, is a horrifying idea to people in the US at least, and is liable to get Child Protection Services called on you. Different culture.
In the US, CPS will go after you, even if you're just doing what's normal in our culture, as long as one single person doesn't like it.
Someone in my area was in her apartment doing dishes while her kid was playing in the playground in the apartment complex's common area in front of the unit. (https://fox40.com/news/local-news/sacramento-mother-faces-ch...) Someone called CPS and complained that she was inside, while her kid was outside. Even though most anyone would agree it was a nuisance call, they still charged her and opened a case, telling her that if her child is ever out of her direct sight, she'll be violation of the rule they just made up.
Nothing stops CPS from making up their own rules. There's even an effort to specify in each states' laws that parents letting children roam free isn't legally endangerment, but despite having such language in their laws, a mom was recently prosecuted in Virginia, for similarly letting her child roam within a gated common area. (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/virginia-mom-child-abuse-convic...)
virginia mom is discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49550174
Sad world to live in
When I first moved to Denmark, I marveled at the babies in unattended carriages parked outside the grocery stores.
You totally should do that, as long as you can't be doxxed. I would love to see the reactions from self-righteous Americans.
The only terrible thing is the food they're having.
In Copenhagen I was strongly adviced not to leave my bicycle unlocked outside, for quick visit at a grocery store. Everyone I know takes their bikes home overnight.
Living in Copenhagen, I do not recognize that. I live in a city apartment on Vesterbro. We have maybe a hundred bikes parked in the backyard, nobody I know brings his bike home for the night, unless it is a really fancy racing bike. But yes, I do lock my bike when ever I really away from it.
Those comments are pure vitriol juice, my god, and they just keep coming from all angles as to why that dude is an absolutely piece of shit on very little data. Incredible stuff, and a good lesson right there.
Probably from unmarried people anyway
That this is something that has to be told to adults is the saddest part of humanity. No one has grown up.
And she spells it out really well. But yeah.
> That this is something that has to be told to adults is the saddest part of humanity. No one has grown up.
It's worse, grown ass adults who taught me that this kind of reaction is wrong growing up are the same ones I see behaving this way now.
People are imperfect.
I'm not sure that we can brush away toxic behavior of people and social media as a simple "imperfection".
These can cause serious damage to the lives of ordinary people.
I can confirm the ergobaby is great.
Though the memory of owning one and knowing about different brands of baby carriers feels like it belongs to another lifetime now.
Almost anyone can be seen as a hero or a zero if the right 15 second clip is captured. We love it when our best moments hit social media, but everyone also piles on when we are caught at our worst (or what appears to be bad, even if it not).
It is amazing how many haters emerge like in this case, when there is so much more to the story.
I was thinking of this recently. I "dogsit" for many families and had one recently that wasn't great on leash. She would do this thing where she would lay down and try to eat something off the ground (sticks, garbage, animal/dog poop, dead mice, dead birds... whatever she could find). Much of it would likely make her sick and therefore I would have to quickly pull on the leash to prevent her from eating some random thing she found. Being an 80lbs dog, I had to tug quite hard to quickly get her away from whatever she had found. If someone saw me in that moment, they'd probably think I was a terrible dog owner. Without the context that I was actually trying to prevent harm, someone could take a video, post online with the caption "Identify this dog abuser!" and ruin my reputation.
Remember these types of videos happened every day and they would even show up on the news. People would lose their jobs over baseless videos.
I really hoped all that stopped and the fun has worn off.
The incredible thing is the husband came in for bashing not plausibly based on his actions in the video but based on mutating narrative.
Go from "X great, Y OK" to "X great, Y terrible".
Everyone loves to hate right away when they see something like this. It's a good practice to try to make up a story that gives an alternate, less vilifying explanation to what you're seeing. This is a great response from Erika. Thanks for sharing.
Not really, the same people will have endless empathy for cold blooded killer, who murdered her three children!
It is just good old misandry!
Quite a common thing to see online where strangers judge relationships off some small slice. You see it on reddit and relationship subs all the time.
Reddit is kind of a cult. "Ditch your loved ones so you can spend more time on reddit telling people to ditch their loved ones."
The internet feels like one those shitty religious villages were everyone is gossiping.
That's just humans; now there's a lot more of us and we have advanced gossip technology.
It’s making me sad that this article needed to exist in the first place. Just leave people alone.
That man has found a treasure of a woman!
This is the main takeaway from all this.
You never know what others are going through, or what is happening in a relationship between two people, even when you think you’re close to them. So the online masses making these judgements based on a short clip is kinda insane although it doesn’t surprise me.
David Foster Wallace's This is Water speech more relevant than ever.
Link to transcript and audio of the This Is Water commencement speech:
https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/
This got me:
> When I’ve cried reading the comments and the social media “explanations” of our marriage. The man people have been attacking was the one who consoled me. While strangers described how little he must care about me, he was helping me through the hurt their words have caused.
This should be required reading before you get your internet drivers license.
Universal context - or uni-context is an idea that could use some more attention.
The idea is universally we can all relate to the negative, but the good is rarely universal, but often local.
This is what drives social media or media in general to tend negative.
https://matthewevanseducation.substack.com/p/why-context-mat...
The real scandal is the prices on the menu she posted.
She’s a great writer.
A lot of people owe this family an apology. Here’s a sampling of some of the vile comments left on Reddit.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Fauxmoi/comments/1wpll52/clip_of_a_...
Some of them would read this and still complain. There's no use in trying to please some very unhappy and likely single people online.
If you sort by 'controversial', it only shows the sane replies.
I think some of them caught wind of their shit-posting and started deleting their comments. Hopefully they learn something.
https://archive.is/MlgWh
Wow, Reddit is horrible. Atrocious behavior. Leave your brains in the anteroom!
> Whoever sees this and it reminds them of their current relationship, DUMP HIM
> you can tell by the body language, lack of initiative, and lack of joy and welcome-ness for his woman and baby to be back, everything you need to know.
> There is a VERY good chance that when he realizes he went viral for being the *Poster Manchild* of taking your spouse for granted, of choosing to act like a parasitic blob
Modern Reddit provides a simulacrum of commentary. There are posts and people discusing these posts, but nobody understands or wants to know anything about the underlying topic. The lack of comprehension is crucial to the community.
Its unfortunate because it's not only one of the things that makes social media toxic, but it also makes it less and less like reality. Which in turn pushes away people who have more "normal" views, thereby making the community even more extreme over time. Ask a random person in the street and they might say they think he should help her, but they wouldn't come up with these detailed narratives about abuse and manipulation. That kind of reaction is characteristic of social media and the more I see it the less I want to spend time online with those kinds of people
The other end feeds into itself too. Someone who posts something like that also is over-exposed to content enforcing that narrative. When you see your 50th video of the day of (e.g.) a man behaving in a way you don't like, you eventually conclude that men are all bad, and your reactions begin to become more and more pronounced. You're not reacting to that man, you're reacting to every man!
> and lack of joy and welcome-ness for his woman and baby to be back
Damn, do these people really jump out of joy whenever their SO, parent, child, friend, or whoever comes back after a 10' chore?
Life is not a movie, “coming back” is a dozen-times-of-day occurrence, no one will cheer you back from the toilets.
I think it's also important to remember that these people are karma farming. When you can get 5k points for "man bad", who wouldn't?
Doubly reminded of that as I'm watching a DEFCON talk where he cites fake Internet points as a driving motivator. Which is my feeling too but yeah idk the whole thing is missing that "we're real people" thing.
Why someone even should explain yourself in this situation? It shows that something is broken in the society.
Part of being grounded and self aware is realizing you are not your thoughts and not everything you believe is true.
The brain does what it does in an attempt to help you, but not often it hits the mark, sometimes it takes a bit of a reminder to pause and unpack things more carefully.
Another important story hiding in there:
> Six weeks before my daughter was born, my employer of 13 years laid off my entire division. Ramses had just put up the down payment on a bigger home for our growing family. My unemployment meant he was facing the mortgage payments and managing a remodel on his own, while we prepared to welcome another child.
i thought that too, but that's not really a story, that's just normal for the US. in europe (most of the EU i am sure) and china and probably elsewhere it's illegal to lay someone off while they are pregnant. (exceptions exist, and if they apply insurance works also for the unemployed)
That women could take over remodeling!
All other things aside, 20 dollars for a can of beer!?
If you have reasons to want to limit how much most people drink at your venue, this would be a good way to do it.
More like a captive audience of people who have self selected for having disposable income that they don't mind being parted from.
This exorbitant price is actually for your own good!
What fresh hell is this? What is wrong with us?
And yet, tons of comments on Threads from women saying she's been gaslit or even that the husband must have threatened her with violence and forced her to write this.
You can't win with these people.
normal people -- employed, in a relationship, with chores and hobbies to occupy their free time -- simply do not participate in the gender war on the Internet. most are blissfully unaware that it's even happening. the womanosphere is a mirror image of its critically panned counterpart -- a refuge for the unhappy and/or mentally ill, an obnoxiously loud minority.
I guarantee you that every woman on Earth is aware of mistreatment due to her gender. Sexism is not a fantasy created online, as you assert.
you mean like having her family harassed by terminally online femcels over the deranged assumptions they'd made from a 10-second clip?
And every man as well (all the usual stereotypes, slurs, expectations non-stop), but men don’t complain, shrug, and carry on with our duties and hope she doesn’t get board and take half or more.
The conclusion was made from a 30s clip, and no amount of evidence can overturn that. New theories will be created to support the original conclusion to avoid any amount of critical self-reflection.
> My employer provided medical coverage would lapse before my daughter’s birth. I was at risk of not have medical insurance for the birth of our daughter
...
It’s great to see her setting a role model for others.
Algorithmic social media amplifies and promotes our basest, vilest impulses. Crowds were always worse than people, but now these "technologies" put that into turbo-overdrive, 5 billion people at a time, pushed and prodded by the engagement-maxxing machine. I don't see a bright future if we don't get a hand on this, and I don't see us getting a hand on this.
Hopefully AI slop kills it
Another side to the story is that I wonder how many of the reddit/tiktok posts pouring gasoline on the discourse were LLMs.
If only we truly knew how much divisive online content was generated from geopolitical adversaries…LLM or not.
I felt a great disturbance in Wokism, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
[flagged]
What I notice quite often is a sort of "LLM derangement syndrome" where people start flagging the most innocuous figures of speech and speech pattern as "clearly LLM".
Quite ironic when we are talking about an article which argues for extending the benefit of the doubt.
I thought the piece sounded like AI as well, so I ran it through Pangram, which reports it as 100% AI. Considering Pangram's extremely low false positive rate, I'm inclined to believe this was AI written.
Didn't have the same feel about the piece. But based on the parent comment, decided to also test it, using Pangram free "credits". For me it reported that only sections of it (30%) have been "touched" by an LLM. There is 60% of human written text.
Pangram does not report this as 100% LLM generated. Why do I use the word "touched" - because there are some specific details that must have come from some existing text and are not elsewhere.
How did I do the check? Please do check my results! I copied just the authored prose from the page, carefully removing any comments and site text that got mixed in. I did not have it analyze the "URL".
In looking at the details, a large part of the story is flagged as all human generated.
I've personally used LLMs when I've been very upset. I used it to rewrite / edit my rant into something with a more balanced tone. The modified text got what I wanted, my original rant would almost certainly not have.
So I do think this was a thought out piece that was largely written by a human who used an LLM as an "editor" to polish the writing. Someone took time to think about this and write it.
And? That doesn’t mean it’s not true.
Some people say that AI is glorified spellchecker and then they complain when it’s used like a glorified spellchecker.
These patterns aren't somehow alien to human speech. It's the quantity. In ChatGPT (and I think it must be ChatGPT specifically) the default writing voice tries for dramatic and profound by dramatically overusing these figures of speech, chaining them together one after another. But they're things most writers use occasionally, one paragraph in ten or twenty. If you're giving a TED Talk or some other elaborate, melodramatic persuasive public speaking role, you might use them one paragraph in four. ChatGPT uses them every other paragraph at least, sometimes multiple times in the same paragraph, so something like a negation comparator or a triplet is present in sentence after fatiguing sentence.
It's trained on the speech of online commenters like us; That's where it's getting these. I'm not gonna change just because Timmy the Zoomer has been with his LLM girlfriend for the past three years and occasionally I remind him of her. I'm not going to deliberately code switch into somebody who doesn't open a new tab to Google things as he talks about them. And you can take my bullet point lists from my cold, dead hands.
Thing is, it might be or it might not be. At some point you have to realize that some people need wheelchairs to move, some people need glasses to see, and some people need LLMs to write.
IMHO It's when you see someone who is paid to write/think using LLMs that you might make a value judgement.
I once knew a girl who wore prescription-free glasses b/c it made her feel smarter so she'd study longer. Not kidding. I made a value judgement about that. But she got the studying done. There's been other more prevalent cases of that on socials.
It might be worth letting some people write in any way they can.
I think we are approaching the point where collaboration with ai is going to be so ubiquitous that it becomes an unreasonable thing to criticize on its face.
Even before reading, I would assume a non-professional writer would lean on ai to try to figure out what points she wanted to hit and how to phrase things. The cost right now for that is the writing can be somewhat bland, but sometimes that isn't a big problem. Haven't we all seen enough incoherent ai slop to understand the value of editorial oversight by now?
I am working on a libretto in my free time, a hobby I've had for 15 years. Lyrics that would previously take me a week often take an evening. Nearly every suggested stanza and bar is rewritten by me still, but these models can be very helpful in explore the structure of beats to hit, imagery that may or may not land, rhyme and phonetic space etc. Maybe it's ai psychosis or cope but I think my current project is a leap beyond my last two plays. Isn't that what matters for creative expression at the end of the day?
Plaease don't spoil threads with comments like this. The writing doesn't come up as LLM-authored according to the tools we use (polished, perhaps, but not generated).
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49858463 and marked it off topic.
Who cares? She isn't a public figure, and she never asked to be. She has some thoughts she wants to put out there after going viral due to nothing she did.
Everything is LLM if you want it to be
i suspect in some time people might begin to flag every bit of text they see online as "LLM sounding", even if it's very clearly not
Yup. The real risk with AI is not that something could be fake, rather that nothing can be trusted to be true