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A Love Letter to People Who Believe in People

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377 points NaOH | 1 comments | 24 Apr 25 22:35 UTC | HN request time: 0.217s | source
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ChrisMarshallNY ◴[25 Apr 25 15:15 UTC] No.43794441[source]▶
I've always been a fan of enthusiasm. I find many people react badly to it, though; especially in tech. We have a lot of curmudgeons.
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1. Karrot_Kream ◴[25 Apr 25 19:54 UTC] No.43797918[source]▶
I think it's the curse of being online. Most IRL based social groups in every culture I've been in subconsciously filter out cynics. These folks often feel disenfranchised IRL and congregate online instead. Their presence crowds out non-cynics, who then leave. These online communities then reorganize around cynical baselines.

Apparently Threads had made a decision earlier on to deprioritize negative and charged political topics because of Meta's belief in this negative flywheel.

(I'd rather not go into a discussion about Meta itself in replies here because I find those discussions on HN to be highly unproductive, and I won't respond to comments regarding them.)

EDIT: r/Coronavirus on Reddit was a great place to observe evidence of this flywheel. My partner started using it when she felt really depressed during lockdown restrictions. All the content on the sub was about how the world was irreparably broken and how society as we know it was about to come to an end. Commenters were clamoring for humanity to be cleansed. Then news of the vaccines came out. At first nobody on the sub believed it would work. But when efficacy numbers were released, the tone of the sub changed quickly and the sub started having a lot fewer people posting to it.