> So I blocked a few people and wrote a quick post:
When I read the Mastodon thread, this jumped out at me as well. A couple of the guys who raised the point clarified that they fully agreed that the removal of “groping” was a good thing, but by that point, the author wouldn’t be able to see the clarification.
I’m really torn on this. I fully support people’s choices to set boundaries and block abusive behavior. At the same time, “I disagree with you so I’m going to insta-block you and not even give you a chance to clarify” seems at the heart of the brokenness of online discourse.
But having seen what some of the women in my life go through re: abusive behavior online, I also understand the hair trigger.
I don’t know what the right balance is, and it’s likely very personal and contextual, but I’ve personally started to only engage with conversations if I’m willing to deal with all of the likely categories of response (barring obvious abuse). Disagree=block seems to increase polarization and seems counterproductive in the long run. It also seems like a good way to reinforce my own blind spots, even if it turns out that I’m “right” some of the time.
> insta-block [...] seems at the heart of the brokenness of online discourse.
> having seen what some of the women in my life go through re: abusive behavior online, I also understand the hair trigger
Even from your own words, it sounds like the heart is not in the reaction, but what people are reacting to.
I am moderately mouthy on social media. I get a much, much smaller level of pushback than similar women do. When I do, the level of respect is higher, and I almost never get my credentials questioned. But I regularly see women with much stronger credentials get those inspected and/or dismissed. Just yesterday I saw a woman with a relevant PhD getting talked down to by some random guy. And then when she made a separate post about her frustration with reply guys and how she was thinking about leaving Mastodon, some different random dude told her to "get a live".
Historically, we spent thousands of years keeping women in "their place". That was partly legal, but mostly social. We've solved the legal stuff in the US, but only recently. (E.g., states only started to outlaw marital rape in the 1970s, and it wasn't fully outlawed until 1992.) It should be no surprise to anybody that the social mechanisms did not magically evaporate the moment we passed some laws. And I think one of those social mechanisms is the disproportionate negativity women get from men when they are not in "their place". When they have the audacity to act like they know things and have valid opinions just like men do.
If you want to read more on this, Manne's "Down Girl: the logic of misogyny" is a very careful examination of the mechanisms and their effects. If you're looking for "the heart", I think that's a good place to continue your search.
Sorry, but how is anything of what you've said an example of "putting women 'in their place'"? Do men not have their credentials questioned or their opinion dismissed online, or is it misogyny purely because it's men doing it to women?
As I already said, it happens to women disproportionately. If you'd like to learn more about when exactly it's misogyny, again, read Manne's book, the heart of which is precisely defining the term.
I personally arrived at my conclusion through, as I explained, long observation of social media. If you'd like to understand the contents of a book, well, there's a common solution for that.
I don’t question the disproportionate impact of bad behavior towards women.
> Even from your own words, it sounds like the heart is not in the reaction, but what people are reacting to.
My point was that more broadly speaking, online discourse is fundamentally broken in most popular social spaces. Most people have abandoned discourse and refuse to have hard conversations. I’d argue that in most cases, this is counterproductive behavior. I’m also not saying this is the only thing broken - there are a myriad of systemic factors, and degrees and kinds of brokenness. Bad behavior towards women is also at the toxic core in my view. I don’t see this as either/or.
Dialogue is all we have available to change minds, and this broad erosion of communication is deeply worrisome. I’ve been beating this drum for some time.
When I first read the thread, I didn’t realize the author was a woman. The point of my comment was that:
1. I, too, noticed the pattern the parent comment mentioned
2. While I really dislike what online discourse has become, I have empathy for the author and can understand why especially women get sick of the bullshit and just block people
And that was my point about how personal and contextual decisions about these interactions are. That in this situation, I get it, but that it highlights the brokenness of the web. For what it’s worth, I’m increasingly convinced that the best move is to stop playing the social media game entirely.
I appreciate the book recommendation. As a person who views misogyny as a major problem and unacceptable behavior, and has spent a decent amount of time exploring the subject, do you have an elevator pitch for the insights in the book? I add to my (long) reading list cautiously, and I guess my question is: if I’m already fully convinced that this is a problem and take it seriously, will I still find value in reading?
> Most people have abandoned discourse and given up on having hard conversations.
I agree that the lack of hard conversations is a problem, although I'm not sure how much people have given it up versus just never did it at all with strangers, whom computers now thrust them in virtual proximity to. But again, I don't think the problem is with the people blocking. I think it's with the propagandists and the purposeful jerks. I think blocking is a fine response to encountering somebody who is not only uninterested in reason, but will be a pain in the ass as they try to silence any opposition to their views. Life's too short to waste time on the "change my mind" crowd. [1]
> do you have an elevator pitch for the insights in the book?
I think the book's value is mainly to people of an analytical bent. Her goal is partly what philosophers call ameliorative, meaning she's trying to sort through the many things that get called "misogyny" and come up with a productive definition for it. As part of that, she gives both a useful theoretical structure (especially valuable to me is her framing of misogyny as the enforcement arm of sexism, as well as her look at who is "owed" what and how people behave when those expectations are violated) and a lot of nuanced examinations of examples. I had no problem spotting open misogyny, but there were a lot of more subtle, stochastic examples that I only saw as a pattern after reading her book.
> Life's too short to waste time on the "change my mind" crowd.
I held this view for a long time, but anecdotally, people who disagree with me in person are generally willing to have a good faith conversation about it. I rarely encounter the "change my mind" (with no intention of doing so) type of individual outside of popular social media platforms, and don't think the attitude is as prevalent as Twitter/Facebook/Reddit/etc would lead us to believe. Over time I've come to believe that there are really two versions of this crowd:
- People who generally mean well but are aligned with groups that propagate questionable or bad ideas. These people will change their mind, or at least expand their understanding of other views, but are often discarded as hopeless due to their association with that crowd.
- People who do not mean well, do not engage in good faith, and intentionally foment discord. I believe this is a small percentage who have been enabled by the megaphone that is the Internet, and their bad behavior locks the first group into a dangerous situation.
I generally won't engage with this latter group, but I do think there's value/importance in leaving behind well-reasoned arguments for people from group 1 who find discussion threads later. I generally don't believe I'll change the mind of the person writing the comment in that moment, but think the comment is still important for the reasonable-but-unsure people who encounter it later, for the future training of LLMs, etc. In the marketplace of ideas, I think continuing to spread good ones is important.
I may be too idealistic/optimistic, but I tend to think "life's too short" will turn into "the world is no longer livable" if taken to the extreme. I'm not preaching that others should do the same, and I don't really know what the right answer is or if taking this stance is helping. I still think quitting social media is probably the best solution, but I don't think it's a solution many people are willing to consider.
Thanks for sharing the additional info about the book. This does sound interesting/useful.
Sorry if I wasn't clear. The "'change my mind' crowd" I'm referring to is absolutely your group 3, or what I referred to as "the propagandists and the purposeful jerks". They're people acting the same way that Sartre was criticizing here: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7870768-never-believe-that-...
And I'll note that he was writing well before on-line discussion. The problems run deeper.
Yes, to the extent that you can use a bad-faith actor to show something to a broader crowd, they can be useful. I do plenty of that here. But a) on social media, that's rarely the case, in that few see arguments down in the reply chains, b) any actual points they have will get discussed by more persuadable interlocutors, and c) one can find and address those points without platforming or elevating the jerks in question.
So if you want to engage with the jerks as part of your own personal quest, go for it. I sometimes do. But I say again that blocking bad-faith actors is not, as you claim, the heart of why discourse is broken online, and that people who have a block-on-site strategy are making good and reasonable choices, especially when they are the regular target of historical inequities that you and I don't face.
> And I'll note that he was writing well before on-line discussion. The problems run deeper.
I don't question that. My point was that the Internet magnifies it. It's far easier to encounter that type of individual now than at any other point in history.
> But I say again that blocking bad-faith actors is not, as you claim, the heart of why discourse is broken online
To be clear, this was not my claim, and I should have made that more clear. My point was that the instinct to block and the default assumption of bad faith is at the heart of the problems (and as I acknowledged, it's just one of many). My point was that people block other people without even considering whether the question was in good/bad faith, and assume bad faith based on the existence of any disagreement. You can find this happening from all ideological viewpoints across social media. When it's antisemitism, it's obviously bad behavior.
It's why places like HN still have pockets of decent discussion. Assuming good faith is encoded into the rules, which often reveals that disagreements are caused by an incomplete understanding of the other, rather than actual bad behavior. I couldn't have raised the points I raised in this thread on a place like Twitter without getting lambasted by people claiming I hate women, or support groping, or somesuch.
I'm all for blocking bad-faith actors and I do my flagging duty here when needed.
When I read the Mastodon thread, this jumped out at me as well. A couple of the guys who raised the point clarified that they fully agreed that the removal of “groping” was a good thing, but by that point, the author wouldn’t be able to see the clarification.
I’m really torn on this. I fully support people’s choices to set boundaries and block abusive behavior. At the same time, “I disagree with you so I’m going to insta-block you and not even give you a chance to clarify” seems at the heart of the brokenness of online discourse.
But having seen what some of the women in my life go through re: abusive behavior online, I also understand the hair trigger.
I don’t know what the right balance is, and it’s likely very personal and contextual, but I’ve personally started to only engage with conversations if I’m willing to deal with all of the likely categories of response (barring obvious abuse). Disagree=block seems to increase polarization and seems counterproductive in the long run. It also seems like a good way to reinforce my own blind spots, even if it turns out that I’m “right” some of the time.