PG: The biggest source of stress for me at YC was running HN

People were always like this. You just weren't able to see it, because you were in an offline "filter bubble" of peaceful and reasonable people. There have been countless civil wars in history after all.

No, what online media are doing is massive propaganda at scales and levels of insidiousness unlike ever imaginable before now. Cambridge analytica for instance targeted ads at people to maximize their outrage toward other citizens. Before advertisements were much easier to avoid or ignore and weren’t being used for outrage. Ads have to get clicks nowadays for revenue and in the past they just had to be associated with wide viewership. People click on what infuriates them more often than other content.

Long before the internet there were people generating enough outrage in a society to slaughter millions of people on flimsy or no basis. I don’t think this is anything new.

If anything, it offers a counterbalance: you can also communicate with groups of reasonable people not physically proximate to you.

Perhaps to some extent. There is always a baseline level of division and conflict. But I do believe there are things that can be done to amplify or suppress division in a society. I think we're leaning real hard on the amplification of division right now. None of this stuff has been around long enough to get an overall feeling on the effect it has on a society that has it versus a similar level society that does not, so it's hard to say for sure what the effect will be. I have a bad feeling about it though.

I think the difference is that even if there were unreasonable people, they usually weren't the majority because their reach was severely restricted outside their local area. Now the unreasonable people aren't limited to their geographic area, and can form mobs with members around the world in order to harass people.

One large difference is the Internet forces us to live with each other. Without the Internet it's easier to have two differing communities with different values and laws and so on, and they can both live and let live.

But now we have put all of the communities onto the same websites, and this is much more difficult.

Just because the medium is more diverse doesn’t mean it’s much different.

In 2009, the NYT started a series called “Disunion”, a day-by-day look back to the Civil War 150 years prior. Filled with sampled newspapers, opinion pieces, letters to the editor.

After a couple of months, it was quite clear how a country tore itself apart. They didnt need ads or FB, all they needed were the paper owners and the editors. They actually paused the series because (imo) the things said about Lincoln in 1859 and Obama in 2009 were quite similar.

Not in the postwar West, and that's the area where the change we're talking about is notable, so your point is actually an argument for the opposite conclusion.

People aren't the medium, and that's what we're talking about. Social media is a different kind of communication mechanism that has evolved extremely rapidly and has overrun all of the typical social systems we had in place.

We just aren't designed to handle this and it's bringing out the worst in us.

Iraq? Vietnam? Surely those count as slaughtering massive numbers of people on flimsy bases.

But yes that trend seems to be slowing down, which I'd attribute to the splintering of mass media. Are we actually becoming more divided, or are we just becoming more aware of divisions because we're all more connected?

Uh, the postwar west developed the modern techniques.

For a while the rationalist approach was dominant and media channels tended to reflect that ideology.

But with the creation of the 24/7 news cycle a whole new system to leverage the modern media tools that were created.

Eventually in the 1990s this trend came to a head with the creation of Fox news and the rest is frankly history.

But before that, for a short while, it did look like reason was overcoming superstition and ignorance.

Yes because before the internet there was never division - like actual separate water fountains, door that you had to go in based on the color of your skin, schools, redlining, and racial covenants.

So they found a great way to highlight what was going on in current events and canceled it? Now we’re left in the lurch.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23806806.

(Trying to prune the larger sub-subthreads.)

For sure those count. I mean domestically. Obviously we do things abroad that we would never tolerate at home, and that's one of the biggest problems with our society. Nonetheless the domestic situation has been stable for a long time, and if the foundation cracks there, it will be notable.

I read sneak's comment as being about wars, which are mostly foreign. What domestic events were you thinking of that fit that description?