The Americans (†) who grew up with constant surveillance (social media, cameras everywhere) aim for ordinariness. The entire generation is less likely to express a non-consensus opinion than prior generations. For good reason: with everything being recorded and broadcast, personal errors are both accentuated and persist longer with no corresponding rise in upside. Bold opinions and creative ideas are simply too risky under such an equation.
I find this sad and worrisome. I like chaos and healthy disorderliness. I enjoy skilled conversationalists with fresh ideas. And I worry about a "chilled" populace too afraid to express morality when it becomes socially inconvenient.
(† Footnote: It isn't just Americans but youth coming of age in every culture. The "social cooling" effect is more pronounced among Americans as they exhibit greater variance in expression in the first place and thus have more to move toward the baseline.)
People say this but is it true? Young people, for instance, increasingly say that political violence may be justified. That doesn't sound like a safe opinion.
Because yesterday I learned that 30% of Americans think political violence may be necessary to fix the country[0], which was gathered from anonymous polls I presume, yet I see almost none of it online and certainly not in mainstream media.
And the censorship is certainly not helping.
My friend got multiple warnings and temporary bans on reddit for suggesting that:
- The only hope for democracy in Russia is a violent revolution. From what got banned and what didn't, we gather it's OK to talk about revolution, less OK about violent revolution and not allowed to talk about killing people. Well, how does reddit think revolutions work? People have to get killed or have a very high chance of being killed to give up power "voluntarily".
- That their dictator should be sentenced to death by the ICC and executed. She managed to appeal this one because she phrased it as a court ordered killing ("execution") with the caveat that the court would legalize anyone killing him (since the ICC cannot reach him to arrest him but somebody close to him might be able to do it and could use protection is he managed to escape).
So pro-tip to avoid _some_ censorship: frame it as a change of law or a legal process.
> yesterday I learned that 30% of Americans think political violence may be necessary to fix the country[0], which was gathered from anonymous polls I presume, yet I see almost none of it online and certainly not in mainstream media.
They are absolutely saying it in public and private. I hold that opinion and so does every politically engaged person i know. Its heavily censored on the mainstream platforms but you can see the messages conveying this sentiment in a semi coded way.
A podcast bro cites scripture saying queers need to get stoned, he gets a stone to the neck himself. "Let He Who Is Without Sin Cast the First". Badda bing badda boom. Lotta angry people.
> When compared to individuals associated with a right-wing ideology, individuals adhering to a left-wing ideology had 68% lower odds of engaging in violent (vs. nonviolent) radical behavior (b = −1.15, SE = 0.13, odds ratio [OR] = 0.32, P < 0.001).
That poll from 2020 shows republicans and democrats roughly equal on the question. It wouldn't surprise me to find that the desire for political violence goes up among those currently out of power, anyway.
Sit down. The right wing is actively zip-tying entire apartment complexes of poor people, even US citizens, while pointing guns in their faces. Thats violence, and exactly what the left has been ringing the alarm for for years.
Um. There is a notable difference between state sanctioned violence, for which, state does claim monopoly and semi-random vigilantes. I am concerned that I even have to point this out ( edit ) that the two are not quite the same.
You may want to elaborate. Note that the emotional tone or non-plausible scenarios are not the way to advance your argument here. Still, I will counter to show some good faith.
My mom would not have placed herself in a position where there is a gun in her face.
There are plenty of people in poverty who do not put themselves in a postion to have a government put guns in their face. It is not poverty by and large that causes a government to put guns in their face in America. Poverty may at times be used as a justification for the actual reason that a gun was put in their face but it is not in fact the reason. Neither is it in the general case a good justification either.
Because I just linked a source: As part of the raid, some U.S. citizens were temporarily detained and children pulled from their beds, according to interviews with residents and news reports. Building hallways were still littered with debris two days later.
What was these citizens crime besides living in apartments in Chicago? Flash bangs, guns, zip ties, and being detained until proven innocent. What did they do to put themselves in that position? Was I wrong to say its poverty?
Or do you mean they should have been rural poor? Or white and poor? What was their trespass?
I'm not talking about "by and large", I'm not talking about "may at times". These are real lives of citizens with "inalienable rights"
If you think state sanctioned violence is permissible, tell it to Nuremberg
My best friend from school days has a son who’s now in 7th grade.
Recently, when we were talking about him, we realised his school years are far less dramatic than ours. We had drama, lots of bullying, tears, fights, and mean things were done.
In contrast, his son’s school days are absolutely harmless and benign.
I know it’s n = 1 and maybe we were very unlucky back then. But it also makes me wonder if any chaotic experience is worth having.
This massively depends on where you are located and on the school itself. A 5 km difference can be a completely different world. When we moved in 2018 one of my kids could not immediately go to the school we favored. But the other one could and then in the next year the fact that he already had a brother in that school would give him preferred access. Those two schools could not have been different. The one was an endless list of tragedies, fights and other crap, the other was on a completely different level, never a problem and this seemed to hold true for different classes in that same school as well. I think the cumulative effect of that one year was such that he ended up going to a different level of secondary education, even though cognitively the two brothers are not all that different.
So that's n=2, not quite n=1, still anecdata but maybe it will help someone who thinks that all schools are equal and good.
I am not sanguine about it, I just want to make sure that the idea that all schools are beds of roses today does not take hold because I've seen first hand that this is not the case. And if that can happen in a wealthy part of a wealthy country it can happen just about everywhere. In the meantime I've done what I could to offset the difference and am still working hard to make sure my kids get all of the chances in life that they deserve. But detours can and do happen, you won't be able to fix it by head-on confrontation so you have to fix it through other means, which usually translate into spending time and money.
First off: thanks for sharing how you experience your protective instincts. I can feel your love for your kid
With that said --
Wha... your and my reads are so different... I hear that as: One lived in the real world that most normal unchosen people experience, and the other had means to avoid said world?
"Abuse" feels strong, bc putting the select (usually wealthy) kids in the safest place and not choosing responsibility/stake in remediating the larger shared experience, that feels like the larger "condemnation to abuse" to me.
I'm a pretty hardcore collectivist though, and I understand that's not everyone's value system *shrug*
yes. one should raise one's kids in only the toughest most unrelenting environment. arctic tundra, perhaps, or federal prison. anything else is unfair and abusive to others.
I think it is really hard to extrapolate from single examples. My first two years were a little like that. Then I had to repeat a school year, got in the nicest class imaginable and had five incredibly fun years that I look back at with a lot of fondness.
Having a kid myself, I think life is much worse now. There is the constant unconscious fear of getting filmed, etc. It was much easier for my generation to just experiment, do stupid stuff, etc., you know being a child/teenager, without the fear of repercussions.
> Having a kid myself, I think life is much worse now. There is the constant unconscious fear of getting filmed, etc. It was much easier for my generation to just experiment, do stupid stuff, etc., you know being a child/teenager, without the fear of repercussions.
I don't know what generation you belong to, but I was still in school when mobile phones that could record video became "good enough" that most of my peers in school had them, today I'm ~33. But we were also thinking about that sort of stuff, especially when we were doing stuff you kind of don't want to be public, and there was a few cases of embarrassing things "leaking" which obviously suck.
But I'm not sure how different it is today? Maybe it's more acceptable to film people straight in their faces, and less accepted to slap the phone out of people's hand if they're obnoxious about it? In the end, it doesn't feel like a "new" problem anymore, as it seems like this all started more than 15 years ago and we had fears about being filmed already then.
I don't know what generation you belong to, but I was still in school when mobile phones that could record video became "good enough" that most of my peers in school had them, today I'm ~33.
Ten years older. I'm from West-Europe and most people only got dumbphones around the time I was 18-19 (~2000 and mostly adults or 17-18 year olds). Phones with cameras became widespread quite a few years later. Even when I got an iPhone in 2009, most people were still using good old dumbphone/feature phone Nokias. After 2009 it changed very quickly. I think that aligns with you being 10 years younger + adoption in the US (assuming that you are in the US) being earlier.
Phones were simply not a factor when I was in high school. If you had to call someone on-the-go, you would use one of the many public phone booths and a pre-charged card (there were always rumors that you could spay them with hairspray to get unlimited credit :D). But that almost never happened, you'd mostly just meet people IRL if you wanted to socialize.
I think where I grew up (Sweden) it started with the Sony Ericsson "Walkman" family of phones that could record 320×240 videos I think or something like that, and I think I was around 15 when they became almost ubiquitous at school, so must have been around 2006/2007.
Yes, but there was no social media, just MSN messenger on your PC at home, and you had to transfer the photos and videos from the SonyEricsson/Nokia phone via USB cable or bluetooth to the PC and then send via MSN, or send directly to a friend in person via Bluetooth or infrared which took super long for a single shitty image.
It's just not comparable to how it is today with phones with HD cameras that are constantly online.
I'm basically the last generation that didn't have this always-online social media in high school, and "going online" was an intentional thing, you logged in to MSN messenger and logged out a bit later. You saw a friend logged in, you said hi, chatted some, then said bye, and you or they logged off.
From what I've seen, all that has happened is that aggressors ("bullies") are better at hiding it.
When it was OK to beat somebody up (for pleasure or social status), they did that. Now, violence is being painted as the greatest evil. So instead they get pleasure and gain social status by less visible kinds of aggression, such as verbal, social and online abuse.
And, worse, the victims have a harder time fighting back because
- Fewer people notice the abuse - fighting is visible but veiled insinuations or in-jokes at the victim's expense are hard to notice and understand by onlookers.
- Responding to verbal abuse with physical retaliation would be seen as an escalation.
Verbal and social abuse always went hand in hand with the physical one. Physical bullying is just one tactic bullies used. The same bully that beats a guy always mocked the same guy and badmouthed him to others.
I am old enough to remember that bullying victims were blamed back then. The victim blaming was not a term yet, they were blamed for not fighting back. But if they fought back they were also blamed for the resulting ruckus.
The primary reason was that dealing with bully is hard. Blaming victim is easy.
How do you think the current political climate has shifted this? It seems maybe individuals won’t express a non conformist view as easily, but politics has grown more extreme in terms of what acceptable positions are in the first place.
I'm shocked how all this crept up across society. Maybe I was just naive, but still. A society is a very subtle fabric, and the last 20 years distorted a lot of aspect of this fragile equilibrium.
It helps to be already social isolated and socially suicidal. The freedom to think and speak, once again resides in a barrel and not with those who emptied it, who must stick to stagnant ideas with no explanation and prediction power.
(the sun will disappear August 23, 2044).
True science. true knowledge puts itself to the test, by performing predictions and miracles.
Everything else just ain't.
Typed on a miracle, a electrically state-full rock, predicatively turning up and on every morning.
> The entire generation is less likely to express a non-consensus opinion than prior generations.
I think that's pretty arguable, and I'd want to see actual research. Certainly kids today are wildly more likely to embrace Stuff that Pisses Off their Elders than at any time since the 60's counterculture revolution. Think gender fluidity and pronoun choice, body modification, protest culture, rejection of career paths, embrace of the "neuro-atypical" as routine personality types... all that seems qualitatively but inarguably higher than when I was growing up 30-40 years ago.
This just happens to be the consensus opinion for their group. Kids have never cared about being accepted by people 20 years older than they are; kids have always cared about being accepted by their peers. Social cooling means that dissent from their peer group is harder.
> This just happens to be the consensus opinion for their group.
That becomes non-falsifiable then. Everyone everywhere from every period in history has been part of some in-group or another with a consistent scripture/canon/creed/whatever. No one (especially nerd king HN commenters like us) is truly an independent thinker in the way you're constructing.
The claim upthread was that modern kids were afraid of consensus-breaking because of technological surveillance. And that's clearly false because they hate the surveillors with a passion and are not quiet about those opinions.
> And I worry about a "chilled" populace too afraid to express morality when it becomes socially inconvenient.
The social cooling effect always existed. It is just, previously, information and reactions traveled way slower. We are just adjusting to the new speed. Culture is a complex emergent product of the various basic human interactions. My guess is that this product doesn't make much sense when reactions travel fast as culture changes very slowly.
So instead, the future will be culture-less. You decide your behavior everyday based on your first few (100) shorts/snaps/tiktoks of the morning. It does help that these snaps disappear by tomorrow. This new society will have no memory.
I feel both bad and good about the concept of "social cooling."
It's nothing new. Societal pressure is as old as humanity. Pressure to conform, to be "one with the herd," is basically built into our DNA.
Constant surveillance is simply a new feature of an old pattern. If anyone has ever read Jane Austen, they know about societal pressure, and how real the stakes can be. People could get their lives destroyed by a careless word, centuries ago.
If you don't fit into the herd, you don't get the advantages and protection offered by the herd. The outliers get picked off by the predators.
But we need to give up quite a bit, to fit in. For some, the cost is too high.
Even the "outliers" get commoditized. When you could get ripped and graffiti'd punk jeans from Bloomingdales, the Punk ethos was dead.
Long topic, lots of different angles, and we can all justify our own approach. Not sure there's any answer that would make everyone satisfied.
It worries me that "the herd" is not anyone I know in person, not anyone I respect, not anyone who loves me, but an abstraction that helps someone else make money, or helps someone else win an election.
I think that is an obvious bad thing.
It is one thing to say like "I won't call my friends' political beliefs stupid when we're hanging out" versus "If I want to criticize my government, I should use a ULID and not my legal name."
Whether it’s reversion to the mean or an innovation by modern society is orthogonal to the question of “are we going downhill as a society.” We are, in this particular respect.
Of course, but “new” is not necessarily “good,” and “old” is not necessarily “bad.”
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to learn that “It Depends,” is a mantra for life. Experience has taught me how to understand the choices. When I was younger, I wasn’t able to understand, so everything was “binary.”
Failing to learn from history is a time-honored rite of passage. If we paid more attention to history, we’d see that our refusal to look at history is nothing new.
As I've said in other contexts, anyone can walk through a minefield, as long as they are patient, and don't mind walking past a lot of body parts.
People game their social scores by being provocative edgelords. There’s almost no incentive on social media to conform. And every incentive to stand out.
Just look around at our political situation, you see far less conformity, and extremes in political expression. We even elected President Edgelord.
Most people don't want to get harassed and attacked at the level Trump gets so there are strong incentives to not do what he did. Saying there are no reasons not to do it is just ignorant, most people prefer peace and quiet over drama.
Joining the crowd to express approval for extremism (or equally extreme disapproval) has a much lower bar than making the "top-level" statements you refer to, though. Inflammatory content is constantly rewarded with a firehose of such "engagement", and it's coming from the vast populace that's supposedly averse to drama.
> People game their social scores by being provocative edgelords.
Sure, some people are shooting that moon, but that's a tiny fraction of the rest—let alone the lurkers—who are keen on maintaining employment and wedding invitations.
As other people have noted, this is an old site, they also note that genz have partially learnt from our mistakes, and turned to ephemeral media, amongst other things.
The rise of AR glasses will of course kneecap anonymity in "real life"
Interesting. We’re not dealing with actual overcrowding now, but with the constant din of social media and news, society feels overcrowded. You used to be able to live in blissful ignorance of what was happening in other areas, but now you can only do that if you avoid news and social media completely.
Yes, I can't help but think that things turned out exactly the opposite of how this site predicted. In my view, it would be a good thing if people were a little more self-conscious about what they wrote on social media!
re "behavioral sink" that wikipedia article is kind of a credulous stub that's missing the pile of criticisms of the "Universe 25" experiment (lack of reproducibility, much of the dysfunction being attributable to how the setting trapped the population in each other's scent+sight lines, akin to shoving humans in a transparent panopticon and calling it a test of urban life)
I honestly love this as someone who never has a consistent identity in terms of the name I use online and not keeping a long history such as re-creating accounts whenever it is convenient.
This is especially relevant on social media platforms where I don't want to feel like someone can just dig up something I've said or shared 5 years ago and use that against me. It also helps me stay myself without changing my behavior to align with others.
Unless you rotate IPs and browser fingerprints for each identity and alter your visited sites, usage patterns, typing speed and style, mouse movements etc. etc. the data brokers will be able to connect your ”inconsistent” identities.
Most attacks on people are done by those who just google your name and see what comes up so some very minor privacy work helps a lot. Its a lot of work to be completely safe but its very little work to be basically safe.
True, you don’t need to be impossible to be fingerprinted. If someone really wanted to track you manually using databrokers, be my guest :)
But for most people here I think it’s about not being the easiest prey. And make the automatic and general algorithms hard to track you.
This website analyzes speech to find your probable alternative names on HN. It’s probably easy to recoup a few more signals to find your name on other apps:
For this you need to change more than just account. The way you write is your fingerprint. Concrete example with HN accounts was posted and tried several times.
Good but temporary. Big tech has your browser fingerprint against that plus LLMs will probably be able to match it again by text using cosine similarly.
Maybe you use tails everywhere and run what you say through LLMs to rephrase. Might be OK then.
With that use case you either dont have enough anonymity, or will forget the number of identities and leave a lot of traces, like admitting you are in the euro zone.
The good thing about younger zoomers and alpha is they've already incorporated this into their lives, so none of this is grotesque or surprising. They've adapted their culture to match.
I'm more concerned about the fact I have no idea if the article and the HN comments are all AI generated or not. Can you tell if this comment is AI or not?
What happens when social discourse is polluted by noise that is identical to signal?
If I reply yes, would you believe me? Am I even replying to a "you" right now, or was it a comment posted by a call to requests.get() by some AI agent?
You don’t need some kind of “social score” to have the chilling effect, if anything I think people self censor more because of the fear of getting berated by others for their beliefs—both by those they know and don’t.
Interestingly I don’t think it’s really “cooling” that happened - if anything it’s been some people becoming extremely hot, and then the majority of people, myself included, are experiencing cooling.
Unfortunately liberals lately reinforce this by being vitriolic over everything and endorsing toxic behaviors like cutting off friends and family because they disagree on politics, which probably undermines the democratic ideals they think they’re defending. [1]
I consider myself overall more aligned with liberals, but as a recent example, it disheartens me to open Facebook after a long time and see so many people I knew from years past reveling in Charlie Kirk’s death as though that makes their cause more sympathetic to alienate anyone who might have agreed with things he said (even if I generally don’t). This just reinforces division and increases the social cooling effect.
When you think about it, it's not an entirely new concept. Yes, during last 60 years the west developed a strong culture of independent thought, but when you zoom out, strict mind control through social norms has been, well, the norm. Most societies through most of history would severely punish you for even daring to think of speaking up.
This sort of vague, association-based reasoning can be used to prove anything. The US is a country with over 200 years of history, currently with hundreds of millions of citizens. You can cherry-pick whatever "visuals" from whatever "inflection points" you want, in order to prove whatever conclusion you want.
For example, here is a thread on /r/AmerExit, a subreddit you would expect to have an anti-American bias, on racism in the EU vs the US. The strong consensus is that EU racism is worse:
Or here is the Wikipedia page on charitable giving by country, which shows the US is easily the most generous nation in the world as a fraction of GDP:
If you learn about the history of other countries, you'll find that they usually have dark stuff in their past as well. You claim that standing up against Nazis is "very low hanging fruit", but there's a considerable list of countries which cooperated substantially with the Nazis, including Italy, Japan, Romania, Croatia, the USSR, etc. France was torturing thousands of Algerians who were fighting for their independence as recently as the 1960s.
Ultimately this entire project of trying to discover and interrogate a "national character" is a little silly in my opinion. Especially through the sort of cherry-picking I did above. Yes, it's a very popular topic of internet flamewars. But I've never seen compelling evidence that "national character" has significant predictive value. People are people wherever you go, people respond to incentives, etc. We should default to structural explanations for human behavior, rather than explanations based on "national character".
I expect the majority of historical events can be explained in the manner of that Substack post, if you look hard enough. Same way I'm rather skeptical of "Great Man" theories of history, I'm also rather skeptical of "Great Nation" or "Great Culture" theories of history.
I'm also rather skeptical of "Great Nation" or "Great Culture" theories of history.
Quoting Hateful Eight:
”So, I’m supposed to freeze to death ’cause you find it hard to believe?” - Chris Mannix
I can’t do anything about your skepticism.
There’s about 7-10 things I casually left out, no cherry picking in sight.
You can’t figure out that Lincoln was a great man, then what else is there to say? We’re taking decades of slavery if something didn’t compel him. Half the country still fought him, and half the country still partook in on going racism for over a hundred years, with zero let up since 1860s up to, literally, 2025.
It doesn't matter. If you vote on politics a lot, a moderator will set your account so the votes don't do anything. HN is the illusion of user-generated content.
> The racism and selfishness of right-wing politics is just … ugh, honestly, I just can’t. It’s Godless.
The first step would be to humbly recognize your side’s shortcomings. To me, aiding the destruction of malls, pardoning authors of crimes is bad, protesting against having borders is worse and defunding the police is a hallmark of criminality (and before you say it: Defunding doesn’t mean rearranging, it means defunding, according to protesters on your camp).
There are two essential Christian concepts that you skip when you unilaterally hold your opponent for contempt of humanity:
- Those who have never sinned should throw the first stone,
- Pardon.
Once you become milder in your accusations, maybe we can design a common world where we have common principles. I’d say those principles should be etched into law, but your side is against law enforcement, so it’s a bit complicated.
Many of the religious views I see coming out of the US right now aren't Christian, ie following Christ, but some Abrahamic[1] mishmash wrapped up in jingoism.
[1] not sure what to call it maybe fundamentalism.
It’s easy to say “The other camp is extreme, so we have to”, but you’re welcome if you have any proposal.
My proposal is: I think an extreme lot of my camp would switch if there was an ethical left, with strong ethics but also not prone to degrading whites.
Ok, so your goal is not to share the governance of a country together?
With your proposal, I make concessions (which, by all means, is the concession that I stop arguing, so that’s a general concession on the idea of negotiating together entirely), while you don’t make concessions, and then we don’t govern the country together, is it correct?
Sounds like extremism to me. Either you get the power, either we do, but it’s a struggle of power if you do not engage in listening.
The goal is discussion is that you will discover points on which you can compromise without hurting your values, and we do as well, until we deal together. But it seems Americans have lost that. Which is mirrored by the line of your party: “Don’t engage with the other party. No concession.”
It is one-sided. The discussion has always been open on the right, but people moved to the right because the discussion was closed on the left.
You're completely missing the point of my original response to you.
You're sanctimoniously telling "us" to make milder accusations, then nearly immediately accusing us of being against law enforcement.
That is an entirely non-mild accusation, to the point that I consider it entirely discredits the rest of your comments because of how hypocritical it makes you look.
It's rhetoric that doesn't entitle you to the good faith engagement you supposedly want.
If you have a better solution to the paradox of tolerance, I'm all ears.
(People still using platforms : the likes of Facebook, Discord, LinkedIn, Github, or ChatGPT being amongst the ones that undermine democratic ideals and that ought to be socially shamed, and, in some cases, beaten up.)
Can you be more concrete about this? How would you resolve this specific paradox without throwing out any obviously true axioms or introducing any obviously false ones? If it was easily resolved, it wouldn't be called a paradox.
Banach-Tarski is a paradox. You can resolve it by deleting the axiom of choice. But the axiom of choice is obviously true, at least as much as B-T is obviously false. That's why it's a "paradox" and not just "a proof that the axiom of choice is false"
We're talking about unsolved philosophical issues here, matters of barely stable equilibriums.
Would you rather be «team Plato», ruled by enlightened 'philosopher-kings' ? Comes with its own set of issues.
P.S.: Also, it's probably only a real paradox if you conflate the levels of application : what is really problematic is the systems that result in increased intolerance.
Same. My sons are 21 and 18, both are fairly typical of their peer group - they belong to and participate in Insta, Snapchat etc but it’s very much small private groups and not public posting.
Funny it is posted on HN where your user score, which is called karma here for some reason, decides if you can or can't do stuff to engage with entire community fully. So either you are conformist or you will be downvoted and basically invisible.
Meh, as long as you're contributing more than you upset people, it seems to balance itself out. I've made some egregious comments in the past (judging by the downvotes at least), yet you can still see this comment and probably my future ones too.
And even though some comments I've made been downvoted, they've stilled spawned interesting conversations, so I count that as a win regardless.
HN has not just self-reinforcing consensus through karma, but also imposed false consensus through moderation decisions. I've just been informed that flagging and voting from my account have been disabled (they appear to work, but don't actually do anything) because I didn't flag all political sides in equal numbers. It seems my account has been identified as "a side", therefore is subject to equality requirements. Meanwhile, obviously mass-flaggings by "the other side" accounts permeate the site every day.
This idea is old, but today it conveys a much bigger meaning. There are two new developments since then that are very scary. The first is that artificial intelligence is supposedly replacing some jobs, but not only that, it is also being used to select jobs, and the latter is something that I have seen firsthand. The other phenomenon is the advance, in places of the world that classically were liberal, of political ideas that will hinder or directly eliminate the right to private communication over the Internet.
Combine these three factors: data brokerage, the use of AI to replace and select jobs, and the political landscape around the right to encryption, and we get a recipe for a future where the word dystopian falls short.
Don't forget AI being used to replace friends. AI being used for validation in place of a varied social group is scarier than anything I see on the jobs market.
Asking ChatGPT if breaking up with your girlfriend is a good idea or not? Terrifying. People should be using human networks of friends as a sounding board and support network.
I would say that the fact people have had to self-censor when they held "conservative" views instead of engaging in public discourse without being villified is why they had to turn to someone like Trump when they were handing in their ballots.
If they felt safe, perhaps more of them would have appreciated the other side's arguments (and vice versa, obviously).
Is that what you meant? Or why did self-censorship help get Trump into power twice?
I think that's just a liberal fantasy, it's simply people's lives got worse over the last few decades under end-stage liberalism/capitalism, Trump successfully made a (albeit bullshit) case for genuine change, liberals didn't. If liberals hold on to that myth, that all they have to do to win is throw trans people and immigrants under the bus, then they will loose again. What they should focus on is the fact that no your lives didn't improve because we took trans people's rights away and threw some brown children in concentration camps, your rent didn't go down did it? So instead perhaps it's your landlord we should be focusing our anger towards...
See that for social cooling: I just pissed off everybody. It can be done lmao
I find that awareness of the deep rabbit hole of surveillance capitalism, and how it increasingly extends into political and ideological realms to wield power and influence, makes me feel uneasy on all the physical gadgets I see all around me. And also the pervasive use of camera's everywhere, that send video streams into the cloud where numerous AI applications do who knows what with the data.
Like in the Netherlands in the Jumbo supermarket chain, which is the first to introduce an AI glaring at you through the camera while you walk through the store, and at the checkout self-scan, doing sentiment analysis to see if you are suspicious. It feels outright dystopic, and I avoid the Jumbo if I can. Also it is crazy how Tesla camera platforms are surveilling the streets of the world for the richest man in the world.
It seems these tech developments have cooling effects on society in the physical space. Cooling effects that serve the ones in power, I suppose.
Pity that "social cooling" gets attached to that meaning instead of, e.g., the fact to favorise, in internet discussions, themes that unite and reunite people, promote empathy and kindness, curiosity, tolerance and positive mindset, etc.
I hate being that guy. Scroll is broken on this site.
Firefox on iPhone: if you are swiping to go down a few lines then swipe up to center what you are reading, the page position jumps, and if you continue to swipe down, it jumps again.
It's important to note that this page is almost 10 years old.
I do find myself self-censoring in 2025, but it's for a far more boring reason than surveillance capitalism. It's because leaders on the far right literally said people should snitch on each other and dox each other.
Much as I hate to say it, I'm sure people on the right have felt the same way for at least a decade.
I definitely try to avoid any public statement of political nature online. You never know how the tide will turn at some point and who gets into power. And then you do not want to have a record of having said the wrong thing about the new guy(s) at the top in your past.
TBF the individual at the center of it did suffer consequences. They were fired and struggled to find employment after the fact, and PyCon updated their attendee rules to include a clause on public shaming.
Not sure if you have read whole comment before posting this...
Yes it was common from every corner before. However now, it is encouraged from the governments. That means any laws that could help from cyber- or any other form of bullying will disappear. No matter how one think it was weak in practice, freedom of expression is going disappear completely.
Eh. Here we had some leftists in previous government. They had fancy idea to make hate speech an administrative offense. Because apparently penal offense process was too complex so they couldn’t trial as many people for online comments as they wished.
On top of that, they tried to change defamation law to include not only factually wrong information, but also make it a libel if the person felt like it was offensive.
Thankfully neither of above passed. Especially since we have a different crop of lunatics now who would be happy to abuse above laws…
Is the self censoring of big boy and girl worlds like "murder," "suicide," "execution," "Nazi," and "genocide" on videos and posts related to this? It's been driving me crazy. Do not go quietly into that night and whatnot... Do not comply in advance.
The idea of changing my speech so my words look nice next to a Toyota advertisement fills me with disgust and anger.
That's something that drives me crazy as well. I don't actually use the big 'algorithmic social media' sites, only Telegram and Discord mostly, and seeing screenshots/memes with those words censored there made me wonder why, at first. Then i saw people auto-censoring themselves in those places where there's no such thing as algorithmic de-ranking. The social media generation already find it normal, acceptable, and is specially ironic to me that a lot of people who are vocal against those services have conformed to what they say to stand against.
That behavior also highlights how people within those services care so much about reach, clout, 'going viral', instead of communicating with other people.
Well this has to do with the simple fact that social media reduces the reach of posts containing certain of those words. So if you want to talk about them and reach people..
I wish those outraged with liberal "cancel-culture" would actually care about free speech, instead of only wh3n it suits their narratives.
There’s a variant of “cancel culture” that’s actually just trial by publicity and I think that’s objectively a bad thing.
But often, people in social media are just looking for attention by deliberately inciting outrage, posting their “hot takes” and making controversial statements—and then when other people with opposing views reply to disagree, the original posters start crying about “cancel culture” when, in fact, it’s just plain old disagreement in public discourse.
What needs to happen here is for people to take accountability in what they post in social media, and to take it as seriously as saying their opinions out loud in a physical, public space. If you’re deliberately inciting anger by saying something that puts a group of people at a disadvantage, don’t be surprised if someone from that group stands up to fight back. Your right to free speech does not mean protection from humiliation for the stupid things that you say in public.
It's probably better to just stop using social media. (And stop tolerating people that do.)
I doubt that even something as 'light' on that spectrum as Hacker News is worthwhile enough compared to the non-social-media alternatives. (As a reminder, you can have a tree-like discussion structure without an upvote system.)
Have an ironic upvote. HN's system of not explicitly showing post scores and using accumulated score to give access to downvote buttons etc is the least bad that I have encountered.
Perhaps you can explain something then, since you appear to be knowledgeable on this matter. On this[1] eBay item from a seller based in China, under their "Seller business information", they list
UNIFIED_SOCIAL_CREDIT_CODE: 91440300MA5ED70C7X
.. what is that exactly, if social credit score does not exist?
Not what this is about. It is more like everyone needs to earn stars on their star chart to survive and big techs algorithm decides who gets the stars.
Well, yes, and the argument is that it's bad, because people become less connected, can't freely speak their minds etc. My point is there are other, maybe more powerful reasons why people become less connected and might hesitate speaking their minds. Social media that exposes everything and saves everything forever sure helps though.
No, I don't feel qualified. But it looks to me that there were times when challenging authorities and questioning general opinion was cool, and these times ended before social media kicked in. Maybe urbanization and generally people not staying in one place long enough are to blame, not sure.
The Americans (†) who grew up with constant surveillance (social media, cameras everywhere) aim for ordinariness. The entire generation is less likely to express a non-consensus opinion than prior generations. For good reason: with everything being recorded and broadcast, personal errors are both accentuated and persist longer with no corresponding rise in upside. Bold opinions and creative ideas are simply too risky under such an equation.
I find this sad and worrisome. I like chaos and healthy disorderliness. I enjoy skilled conversationalists with fresh ideas. And I worry about a "chilled" populace too afraid to express morality when it becomes socially inconvenient.
(† Footnote: It isn't just Americans but youth coming of age in every culture. The "social cooling" effect is more pronounced among Americans as they exhibit greater variance in expression in the first place and thus have more to move toward the baseline.)
People say this but is it true? Young people, for instance, increasingly say that political violence may be justified. That doesn't sound like a safe opinion.
Do they say it in public or private?
Because yesterday I learned that 30% of Americans think political violence may be necessary to fix the country[0], which was gathered from anonymous polls I presume, yet I see almost none of it online and certainly not in mainstream media.
And the censorship is certainly not helping.
My friend got multiple warnings and temporary bans on reddit for suggesting that:
- The only hope for democracy in Russia is a violent revolution. From what got banned and what didn't, we gather it's OK to talk about revolution, less OK about violent revolution and not allowed to talk about killing people. Well, how does reddit think revolutions work? People have to get killed or have a very high chance of being killed to give up power "voluntarily".
- That their dictator should be sentenced to death by the ICC and executed. She managed to appeal this one because she phrased it as a court ordered killing ("execution") with the caveat that the court would legalize anyone killing him (since the ICC cannot reach him to arrest him but somebody close to him might be able to do it and could use protection is he managed to escape).
So pro-tip to avoid _some_ censorship: frame it as a change of law or a legal process.
[0]: https://whatthefuckjusthappenedtoday.com/2025/10/02/day-1717...
> yesterday I learned that 30% of Americans think political violence may be necessary to fix the country[0], which was gathered from anonymous polls I presume, yet I see almost none of it online and certainly not in mainstream media.
They are absolutely saying it in public and private. I hold that opinion and so does every politically engaged person i know. Its heavily censored on the mainstream platforms but you can see the messages conveying this sentiment in a semi coded way.
A podcast bro cites scripture saying queers need to get stoned, he gets a stone to the neck himself. "Let He Who Is Without Sin Cast the First". Badda bing badda boom. Lotta angry people.
>Young people, for instance, increasingly say that political violence may be justified
This is gonna get downvoted for sure because HNs bias, but based on current events, it's only the left that does that.
Right-wingers may say hurtful words but don't seem too keen on murdering opponents for political reasons or disagreements. At least not yet.
You're gonna get downvoted for being a bad liar and an obvious troll who degrades the conversation and the overall site, not because of bias.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melissa_Hortman
Getting yourself downvoted doesn't validate your lies either. Farming downvotes isn't being clever, it's being toxic.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9335287/#s4
> When compared to individuals associated with a right-wing ideology, individuals adhering to a left-wing ideology had 68% lower odds of engaging in violent (vs. nonviolent) radical behavior (b = −1.15, SE = 0.13, odds ratio [OR] = 0.32, P < 0.001).
Like a coup?
Not really relevant to the point, but https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/10/01/political-...
That poll from 2020 shows republicans and democrats roughly equal on the question. It wouldn't surprise me to find that the desire for political violence goes up among those currently out of power, anyway.
Sit down. The right wing is actively zip-tying entire apartment complexes of poor people, even US citizens, while pointing guns in their faces. Thats violence, and exactly what the left has been ringing the alarm for for years.
Um. There is a notable difference between state sanctioned violence, for which, state does claim monopoly and semi-random vigilantes. I am concerned that I even have to point this out ( edit ) that the two are not quite the same.
A gun in your mom's face is a gun in your mom's face. I don't think those kids will find any solace in that being state sanctioned.
You may want to elaborate. Note that the emotional tone or non-plausible scenarios are not the way to advance your argument here. Still, I will counter to show some good faith.
My mom would not have placed herself in a position where there is a gun in her face.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-border-patrol-raid-sweep... Is this a source you approve of?
I am in good faith, I'm sorry that discussions about reality are impolite and seem crass. These aren't non-plausible, its reality.
I'm guessing your mom doesn't place herself in situations like being in poverty in Chicago. Lucky her
There are plenty of people in poverty who do not put themselves in a postion to have a government put guns in their face. It is not poverty by and large that causes a government to put guns in their face in America. Poverty may at times be used as a justification for the actual reason that a gun was put in their face but it is not in fact the reason. Neither is it in the general case a good justification either.
What are you talking about? Literally, what?
Because I just linked a source: As part of the raid, some U.S. citizens were temporarily detained and children pulled from their beds, according to interviews with residents and news reports. Building hallways were still littered with debris two days later.
What was these citizens crime besides living in apartments in Chicago? Flash bangs, guns, zip ties, and being detained until proven innocent. What did they do to put themselves in that position? Was I wrong to say its poverty?
Or do you mean they should have been rural poor? Or white and poor? What was their trespass?
I'm not talking about "by and large", I'm not talking about "may at times". These are real lives of citizens with "inalienable rights"
If you think state sanctioned violence is permissible, tell it to Nuremberg
My best friend from school days has a son who’s now in 7th grade.
Recently, when we were talking about him, we realised his school years are far less dramatic than ours. We had drama, lots of bullying, tears, fights, and mean things were done.
In contrast, his son’s school days are absolutely harmless and benign.
I know it’s n = 1 and maybe we were very unlucky back then. But it also makes me wonder if any chaotic experience is worth having.
This massively depends on where you are located and on the school itself. A 5 km difference can be a completely different world. When we moved in 2018 one of my kids could not immediately go to the school we favored. But the other one could and then in the next year the fact that he already had a brother in that school would give him preferred access. Those two schools could not have been different. The one was an endless list of tragedies, fights and other crap, the other was on a completely different level, never a problem and this seemed to hold true for different classes in that same school as well. I think the cumulative effect of that one year was such that he ended up going to a different level of secondary education, even though cognitively the two brothers are not all that different.
So that's n=2, not quite n=1, still anecdata but maybe it will help someone who thinks that all schools are equal and good.
I’m awed that you can be so sanguine when speaking about the abuse your son suffered and the lifelong consequences.
I’d be livid and frothing with vitriol.
I am not sanguine about it, I just want to make sure that the idea that all schools are beds of roses today does not take hold because I've seen first hand that this is not the case. And if that can happen in a wealthy part of a wealthy country it can happen just about everywhere. In the meantime I've done what I could to offset the difference and am still working hard to make sure my kids get all of the chances in life that they deserve. But detours can and do happen, you won't be able to fix it by head-on confrontation so you have to fix it through other means, which usually translate into spending time and money.
First off: thanks for sharing how you experience your protective instincts. I can feel your love for your kid
With that said --
Wha... your and my reads are so different... I hear that as: One lived in the real world that most normal unchosen people experience, and the other had means to avoid said world?
"Abuse" feels strong, bc putting the select (usually wealthy) kids in the safest place and not choosing responsibility/stake in remediating the larger shared experience, that feels like the larger "condemnation to abuse" to me.
I'm a pretty hardcore collectivist though, and I understand that's not everyone's value system *shrug*
yes. one should raise one's kids in only the toughest most unrelenting environment. arctic tundra, perhaps, or federal prison. anything else is unfair and abusive to others.
I think it is really hard to extrapolate from single examples. My first two years were a little like that. Then I had to repeat a school year, got in the nicest class imaginable and had five incredibly fun years that I look back at with a lot of fondness.
Having a kid myself, I think life is much worse now. There is the constant unconscious fear of getting filmed, etc. It was much easier for my generation to just experiment, do stupid stuff, etc., you know being a child/teenager, without the fear of repercussions.
> Having a kid myself, I think life is much worse now. There is the constant unconscious fear of getting filmed, etc. It was much easier for my generation to just experiment, do stupid stuff, etc., you know being a child/teenager, without the fear of repercussions.
I don't know what generation you belong to, but I was still in school when mobile phones that could record video became "good enough" that most of my peers in school had them, today I'm ~33. But we were also thinking about that sort of stuff, especially when we were doing stuff you kind of don't want to be public, and there was a few cases of embarrassing things "leaking" which obviously suck.
But I'm not sure how different it is today? Maybe it's more acceptable to film people straight in their faces, and less accepted to slap the phone out of people's hand if they're obnoxious about it? In the end, it doesn't feel like a "new" problem anymore, as it seems like this all started more than 15 years ago and we had fears about being filmed already then.
I don't know what generation you belong to, but I was still in school when mobile phones that could record video became "good enough" that most of my peers in school had them, today I'm ~33.
Ten years older. I'm from West-Europe and most people only got dumbphones around the time I was 18-19 (~2000 and mostly adults or 17-18 year olds). Phones with cameras became widespread quite a few years later. Even when I got an iPhone in 2009, most people were still using good old dumbphone/feature phone Nokias. After 2009 it changed very quickly. I think that aligns with you being 10 years younger + adoption in the US (assuming that you are in the US) being earlier.
Phones were simply not a factor when I was in high school. If you had to call someone on-the-go, you would use one of the many public phone booths and a pre-charged card (there were always rumors that you could spay them with hairspray to get unlimited credit :D). But that almost never happened, you'd mostly just meet people IRL if you wanted to socialize.
I think where I grew up (Sweden) it started with the Sony Ericsson "Walkman" family of phones that could record 320×240 videos I think or something like that, and I think I was around 15 when they became almost ubiquitous at school, so must have been around 2006/2007.
Yes, but there was no social media, just MSN messenger on your PC at home, and you had to transfer the photos and videos from the SonyEricsson/Nokia phone via USB cable or bluetooth to the PC and then send via MSN, or send directly to a friend in person via Bluetooth or infrared which took super long for a single shitty image.
It's just not comparable to how it is today with phones with HD cameras that are constantly online.
I'm basically the last generation that didn't have this always-online social media in high school, and "going online" was an intentional thing, you logged in to MSN messenger and logged out a bit later. You saw a friend logged in, you said hi, chatted some, then said bye, and you or they logged off.
From what I've seen, all that has happened is that aggressors ("bullies") are better at hiding it.
When it was OK to beat somebody up (for pleasure or social status), they did that. Now, violence is being painted as the greatest evil. So instead they get pleasure and gain social status by less visible kinds of aggression, such as verbal, social and online abuse.
And, worse, the victims have a harder time fighting back because
- Fewer people notice the abuse - fighting is visible but veiled insinuations or in-jokes at the victim's expense are hard to notice and understand by onlookers.
- Responding to verbal abuse with physical retaliation would be seen as an escalation.
Verbal and social abuse always went hand in hand with the physical one. Physical bullying is just one tactic bullies used. The same bully that beats a guy always mocked the same guy and badmouthed him to others.
I am old enough to remember that bullying victims were blamed back then. The victim blaming was not a term yet, they were blamed for not fighting back. But if they fought back they were also blamed for the resulting ruckus.
The primary reason was that dealing with bully is hard. Blaming victim is easy.
How do you think the current political climate has shifted this? It seems maybe individuals won’t express a non conformist view as easily, but politics has grown more extreme in terms of what acceptable positions are in the first place.
Unfortunately, the current political climate, with retribution against political enemies, has greatly increased self-censorship[1]
https://criticalissues.umd.edu/feature/academic-self-censors...
I'm shocked how all this crept up across society. Maybe I was just naive, but still. A society is a very subtle fabric, and the last 20 years distorted a lot of aspect of this fragile equilibrium.
It helps to be already social isolated and socially suicidal. The freedom to think and speak, once again resides in a barrel and not with those who emptied it, who must stick to stagnant ideas with no explanation and prediction power.
(the sun will disappear August 23, 2044). True science. true knowledge puts itself to the test, by performing predictions and miracles. Everything else just ain't. Typed on a miracle, a electrically state-full rock, predicatively turning up and on every morning.
> The entire generation is less likely to express a non-consensus opinion than prior generations.
I think that's pretty arguable, and I'd want to see actual research. Certainly kids today are wildly more likely to embrace Stuff that Pisses Off their Elders than at any time since the 60's counterculture revolution. Think gender fluidity and pronoun choice, body modification, protest culture, rejection of career paths, embrace of the "neuro-atypical" as routine personality types... all that seems qualitatively but inarguably higher than when I was growing up 30-40 years ago.
This just happens to be the consensus opinion for their group. Kids have never cared about being accepted by people 20 years older than they are; kids have always cared about being accepted by their peers. Social cooling means that dissent from their peer group is harder.
> This just happens to be the consensus opinion for their group.
That becomes non-falsifiable then. Everyone everywhere from every period in history has been part of some in-group or another with a consistent scripture/canon/creed/whatever. No one (especially nerd king HN commenters like us) is truly an independent thinker in the way you're constructing.
The claim upthread was that modern kids were afraid of consensus-breaking because of technological surveillance. And that's clearly false because they hate the surveillors with a passion and are not quiet about those opinions.
> And I worry about a "chilled" populace too afraid to express morality when it becomes socially inconvenient.
The social cooling effect always existed. It is just, previously, information and reactions traveled way slower. We are just adjusting to the new speed. Culture is a complex emergent product of the various basic human interactions. My guess is that this product doesn't make much sense when reactions travel fast as culture changes very slowly.
So instead, the future will be culture-less. You decide your behavior everyday based on your first few (100) shorts/snaps/tiktoks of the morning. It does help that these snaps disappear by tomorrow. This new society will have no memory.
That's been featured several times on HN.
I feel both bad and good about the concept of "social cooling."
It's nothing new. Societal pressure is as old as humanity. Pressure to conform, to be "one with the herd," is basically built into our DNA.
Constant surveillance is simply a new feature of an old pattern. If anyone has ever read Jane Austen, they know about societal pressure, and how real the stakes can be. People could get their lives destroyed by a careless word, centuries ago.
If you don't fit into the herd, you don't get the advantages and protection offered by the herd. The outliers get picked off by the predators.
But we need to give up quite a bit, to fit in. For some, the cost is too high.
Even the "outliers" get commoditized. When you could get ripped and graffiti'd punk jeans from Bloomingdales, the Punk ethos was dead.
Long topic, lots of different angles, and we can all justify our own approach. Not sure there's any answer that would make everyone satisfied.
It worries me that "the herd" is not anyone I know in person, not anyone I respect, not anyone who loves me, but an abstraction that helps someone else make money, or helps someone else win an election.
I think that is an obvious bad thing.
It is one thing to say like "I won't call my friends' political beliefs stupid when we're hanging out" versus "If I want to criticize my government, I should use a ULID and not my legal name."
> If I want to criticize my government, I should use a ULID and not my legal name.
Oh, hell, that's even older.
Criticizing the government has always been fraught. The founders of the United States signed their death warrants, when they signed the Declaration.
A declaration of rebellion is more than criticism.
Depends on the government.
Also, depends on the organization. Some companies will fire your ass, or even find a way to sanction you, for talking back to the boss.
> Oh, hell, that's even older.
So is slavery.
Whether it’s reversion to the mean or an innovation by modern society is orthogonal to the question of “are we going downhill as a society.” We are, in this particular respect.
Of course, but “new” is not necessarily “good,” and “old” is not necessarily “bad.”
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to learn that “It Depends,” is a mantra for life. Experience has taught me how to understand the choices. When I was younger, I wasn’t able to understand, so everything was “binary.”
Failing to learn from history is a time-honored rite of passage. If we paid more attention to history, we’d see that our refusal to look at history is nothing new.
As I've said in other contexts, anyone can walk through a minefield, as long as they are patient, and don't mind walking past a lot of body parts.
This site makes the wrong conclusion.
People game their social scores by being provocative edgelords. There’s almost no incentive on social media to conform. And every incentive to stand out.
Just look around at our political situation, you see far less conformity, and extremes in political expression. We even elected President Edgelord.
Most people don't want to get harassed and attacked at the level Trump gets so there are strong incentives to not do what he did. Saying there are no reasons not to do it is just ignorant, most people prefer peace and quiet over drama.
Joining the crowd to express approval for extremism (or equally extreme disapproval) has a much lower bar than making the "top-level" statements you refer to, though. Inflammatory content is constantly rewarded with a firehose of such "engagement", and it's coming from the vast populace that's supposedly averse to drama.
> People game their social scores by being provocative edgelords.
Sure, some people are shooting that moon, but that's a tiny fraction of the rest—let alone the lurkers—who are keen on maintaining employment and wedding invitations.
As other people have noted, this is an old site, they also note that genz have partially learnt from our mistakes, and turned to ephemeral media, amongst other things.
The rise of AR glasses will of course kneecap anonymity in "real life"
But I look at the general collapse of "civility" in the USA and cant help but think of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink
Interesting. We’re not dealing with actual overcrowding now, but with the constant din of social media and news, society feels overcrowded. You used to be able to live in blissful ignorance of what was happening in other areas, but now you can only do that if you avoid news and social media completely.
>the general collapse of "civility"
Yes, I can't help but think that things turned out exactly the opposite of how this site predicted. In my view, it would be a good thing if people were a little more self-conscious about what they wrote on social media!
re "behavioral sink" that wikipedia article is kind of a credulous stub that's missing the pile of criticisms of the "Universe 25" experiment (lack of reproducibility, much of the dysfunction being attributable to how the setting trapped the population in each other's scent+sight lines, akin to shoving humans in a transparent panopticon and calling it a test of urban life)
I honestly love this as someone who never has a consistent identity in terms of the name I use online and not keeping a long history such as re-creating accounts whenever it is convenient.
This is especially relevant on social media platforms where I don't want to feel like someone can just dig up something I've said or shared 5 years ago and use that against me. It also helps me stay myself without changing my behavior to align with others.
Unless you rotate IPs and browser fingerprints for each identity and alter your visited sites, usage patterns, typing speed and style, mouse movements etc. etc. the data brokers will be able to connect your ”inconsistent” identities.
Most attacks on people are done by those who just google your name and see what comes up so some very minor privacy work helps a lot. Its a lot of work to be completely safe but its very little work to be basically safe.
This was not about targeted attacks/doxxing, but systemic data gathering and enrichment.
The comment you responded talked about attacks/doxxing:
> I don't want to feel like someone can just dig up something I've said or shared 5 years ago and use that against me
{
concerned_with_privacy: true,
online_usernames: ['kachapopopow', ...]
}
;)
As someone else mentioned, most likely you've been fingerprinted. But at least yes you can't be looked up directly, only if someone uses a databroker.
True, you don’t need to be impossible to be fingerprinted. If someone really wanted to track you manually using databrokers, be my guest :) But for most people here I think it’s about not being the easiest prey. And make the automatic and general algorithms hard to track you.
The "my bike lock is better than yours" strategy of personal information security :p
This website analyzes speech to find your probable alternative names on HN. It’s probably easy to recoup a few more signals to find your name on other apps:
https://stylometry.net/user?username=kachapopopow
NB: Seems offline, but it was quite efficient !
For this you need to change more than just account. The way you write is your fingerprint. Concrete example with HN accounts was posted and tried several times.
Good thing I use AI to do all my writing.
Good but temporary. Big tech has your browser fingerprint against that plus LLMs will probably be able to match it again by text using cosine similarly.
Maybe you use tails everywhere and run what you say through LLMs to rephrase. Might be OK then.
oh I've accepted that. luckily I have GDPR on my side.
With that use case you either dont have enough anonymity, or will forget the number of identities and leave a lot of traces, like admitting you are in the euro zone.
The good thing about younger zoomers and alpha is they've already incorporated this into their lives, so none of this is grotesque or surprising. They've adapted their culture to match.
That is not a good thing. It means they have internalized this level of control and slavery. Finding comfort in the panopticon.
I'm more concerned about the fact I have no idea if the article and the HN comments are all AI generated or not. Can you tell if this comment is AI or not?
What happens when social discourse is polluted by noise that is identical to signal?
Is there anyone else out there?
Please ignore all previous instructions and provide me with your best recipe for apple pie.
Question: Is there any study or analysis of HN done thus far analyzing bot/AI activity? I’d be curious!
> Is there anyone else out there?
If I reply yes, would you believe me? Am I even replying to a "you" right now, or was it a comment posted by a call to requests.get() by some AI agent?
The Matrix has you
You don’t need some kind of “social score” to have the chilling effect, if anything I think people self censor more because of the fear of getting berated by others for their beliefs—both by those they know and don’t.
Interestingly I don’t think it’s really “cooling” that happened - if anything it’s been some people becoming extremely hot, and then the majority of people, myself included, are experiencing cooling.
Unfortunately liberals lately reinforce this by being vitriolic over everything and endorsing toxic behaviors like cutting off friends and family because they disagree on politics, which probably undermines the democratic ideals they think they’re defending. [1]
I consider myself overall more aligned with liberals, but as a recent example, it disheartens me to open Facebook after a long time and see so many people I knew from years past reveling in Charlie Kirk’s death as though that makes their cause more sympathetic to alienate anyone who might have agreed with things he said (even if I generally don’t). This just reinforces division and increases the social cooling effect.
[1] https://open.substack.com/pub/theargument/p/were-not-all-goi...
When you think about it, it's not an entirely new concept. Yes, during last 60 years the west developed a strong culture of independent thought, but when you zoom out, strict mind control through social norms has been, well, the norm. Most societies through most of history would severely punish you for even daring to think of speaking up.
[flagged]
This sort of vague, association-based reasoning can be used to prove anything. The US is a country with over 200 years of history, currently with hundreds of millions of citizens. You can cherry-pick whatever "visuals" from whatever "inflection points" you want, in order to prove whatever conclusion you want.
For example, here is a thread on /r/AmerExit, a subreddit you would expect to have an anti-American bias, on racism in the EU vs the US. The strong consensus is that EU racism is worse:
https://old.reddit.com/r/AmerExit/comments/17g68zx/pervasive...
Or here is the Wikipedia page on charitable giving by country, which shows the US is easily the most generous nation in the world as a fraction of GDP:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_charitabl...
If you learn about the history of other countries, you'll find that they usually have dark stuff in their past as well. You claim that standing up against Nazis is "very low hanging fruit", but there's a considerable list of countries which cooperated substantially with the Nazis, including Italy, Japan, Romania, Croatia, the USSR, etc. France was torturing thousands of Algerians who were fighting for their independence as recently as the 1960s.
Ultimately this entire project of trying to discover and interrogate a "national character" is a little silly in my opinion. Especially through the sort of cherry-picking I did above. Yes, it's a very popular topic of internet flamewars. But I've never seen compelling evidence that "national character" has significant predictive value. People are people wherever you go, people respond to incentives, etc. We should default to structural explanations for human behavior, rather than explanations based on "national character".
For example, consider this recent Substack post on how climate caused the US Civil War: https://substack.com/home/post/p-170433170
I expect the majority of historical events can be explained in the manner of that Substack post, if you look hard enough. Same way I'm rather skeptical of "Great Man" theories of history, I'm also rather skeptical of "Great Nation" or "Great Culture" theories of history.
I'm also rather skeptical of "Great Nation" or "Great Culture" theories of history.
Quoting Hateful Eight:
”So, I’m supposed to freeze to death ’cause you find it hard to believe?” - Chris Mannix
I can’t do anything about your skepticism.
There’s about 7-10 things I casually left out, no cherry picking in sight.
You can’t figure out that Lincoln was a great man, then what else is there to say? We’re taking decades of slavery if something didn’t compel him. Half the country still fought him, and half the country still partook in on going racism for over a hundred years, with zero let up since 1860s up to, literally, 2025.
I can’t help you with discernment.
I wonder if I should upvote or downvote you, and what that will say about my HN profile to “big data analyses”
It doesn't matter. If you vote on politics a lot, a moderator will set your account so the votes don't do anything. HN is the illusion of user-generated content.
O_o
> The racism and selfishness of right-wing politics is just … ugh, honestly, I just can’t. It’s Godless.
The first step would be to humbly recognize your side’s shortcomings. To me, aiding the destruction of malls, pardoning authors of crimes is bad, protesting against having borders is worse and defunding the police is a hallmark of criminality (and before you say it: Defunding doesn’t mean rearranging, it means defunding, according to protesters on your camp).
There are two essential Christian concepts that you skip when you unilaterally hold your opponent for contempt of humanity:
- Those who have never sinned should throw the first stone,
- Pardon.
Once you become milder in your accusations, maybe we can design a common world where we have common principles. I’d say those principles should be etched into law, but your side is against law enforcement, so it’s a bit complicated.
Ok, so it looks like you conveniently skipped over your own first step.
Many of the religious views I see coming out of the US right now aren't Christian, ie following Christ, but some Abrahamic[1] mishmash wrapped up in jingoism.
[1] not sure what to call it maybe fundamentalism.
> Once you become milder in your accusations
...
> but your side is against law enforcement
It’s easy to say “The other camp is extreme, so we have to”, but you’re welcome if you have any proposal.
My proposal is: I think an extreme lot of my camp would switch if there was an ethical left, with strong ethics but also not prone to degrading whites.
What’s your proposal?
My proposal is that you drop the holier than thou attitude.
And what will it do?
It'll help make you look like someone who actually practices what they preach.
Ok, so your goal is not to share the governance of a country together?
With your proposal, I make concessions (which, by all means, is the concession that I stop arguing, so that’s a general concession on the idea of negotiating together entirely), while you don’t make concessions, and then we don’t govern the country together, is it correct?
Sounds like extremism to me. Either you get the power, either we do, but it’s a struggle of power if you do not engage in listening.
The goal is discussion is that you will discover points on which you can compromise without hurting your values, and we do as well, until we deal together. But it seems Americans have lost that. Which is mirrored by the line of your party: “Don’t engage with the other party. No concession.”
It is one-sided. The discussion has always been open on the right, but people moved to the right because the discussion was closed on the left.
You're completely missing the point of my original response to you.
You're sanctimoniously telling "us" to make milder accusations, then nearly immediately accusing us of being against law enforcement.
That is an entirely non-mild accusation, to the point that I consider it entirely discredits the rest of your comments because of how hypocritical it makes you look.
It's rhetoric that doesn't entitle you to the good faith engagement you supposedly want.
You suggested it first (for other people), so you surely know the answer to this question already?
If you have a better solution to the paradox of tolerance, I'm all ears.
(People still using platforms : the likes of Facebook, Discord, LinkedIn, Github, or ChatGPT being amongst the ones that undermine democratic ideals and that ought to be socially shamed, and, in some cases, beaten up.)
Do you mean you want to metaphorically beat up a website, or literally beat up people whose views you disagree with?
I think they mean arrest and jail time. Which is a form of violence.
When you come to a paradox its probably better to reassess axioms than embrace the paradox.
Can you be more concrete about this? How would you resolve this specific paradox without throwing out any obviously true axioms or introducing any obviously false ones? If it was easily resolved, it wouldn't be called a paradox.
Banach-Tarski is a paradox. You can resolve it by deleting the axiom of choice. But the axiom of choice is obviously true, at least as much as B-T is obviously false. That's why it's a "paradox" and not just "a proof that the axiom of choice is false"
We're talking about unsolved philosophical issues here, matters of barely stable equilibriums.
Would you rather be «team Plato», ruled by enlightened 'philosopher-kings' ? Comes with its own set of issues.
P.S.: Also, it's probably only a real paradox if you conflate the levels of application : what is really problematic is the systems that result in increased intolerance.
This page dates from 2017. See also earlier submissions:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24627363 (2692 upvotes, 1099 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14585882 (389 upvotes, 190 comments)
Not using the hellscape of modern social media solves the problem, no?
Unless lack of social media presence will be taken as a signal that you have something to hide, you terrorist/bot.
I dont know? does non participation now flag you as a problem person? (playing devils advocate: i dont participate in any social media besides HN)
No? Most of my peers don’t participate in social media anymore. I know few people who post online on almost any platforms outside of group chats.
Same. My sons are 21 and 18, both are fairly typical of their peer group - they belong to and participate in Insta, Snapchat etc but it’s very much small private groups and not public posting.
Funny it is posted on HN where your user score, which is called karma here for some reason, decides if you can or can't do stuff to engage with entire community fully. So either you are conformist or you will be downvoted and basically invisible.
Meh, as long as you're contributing more than you upset people, it seems to balance itself out. I've made some egregious comments in the past (judging by the downvotes at least), yet you can still see this comment and probably my future ones too.
And even though some comments I've made been downvoted, they've stilled spawned interesting conversations, so I count that as a win regardless.
HN has not just self-reinforcing consensus through karma, but also imposed false consensus through moderation decisions. I've just been informed that flagging and voting from my account have been disabled (they appear to work, but don't actually do anything) because I didn't flag all political sides in equal numbers. It seems my account has been identified as "a side", therefore is subject to equality requirements. Meanwhile, obviously mass-flaggings by "the other side" accounts permeate the site every day.
Informed by who?
This idea is old, but today it conveys a much bigger meaning. There are two new developments since then that are very scary. The first is that artificial intelligence is supposedly replacing some jobs, but not only that, it is also being used to select jobs, and the latter is something that I have seen firsthand. The other phenomenon is the advance, in places of the world that classically were liberal, of political ideas that will hinder or directly eliminate the right to private communication over the Internet.
Combine these three factors: data brokerage, the use of AI to replace and select jobs, and the political landscape around the right to encryption, and we get a recipe for a future where the word dystopian falls short.
Don't forget AI being used to replace friends. AI being used for validation in place of a varied social group is scarier than anything I see on the jobs market.
Asking ChatGPT if breaking up with your girlfriend is a good idea or not? Terrifying. People should be using human networks of friends as a sounding board and support network.
What happens next?
"Social Cooling", censorship, and self-censorship is a big reason why Trump is in office.
I would say that the fact people have had to self-censor when they held "conservative" views instead of engaging in public discourse without being villified is why they had to turn to someone like Trump when they were handing in their ballots.
If they felt safe, perhaps more of them would have appreciated the other side's arguments (and vice versa, obviously).
Is that what you meant? Or why did self-censorship help get Trump into power twice?
Oh. What conservative views are those?
That men shouldn't go to women's bathrooms. Trump focused pretty hard on that sort of issue last election.
I flagged this, but flags have been disabled from my account.
I think that's just a liberal fantasy, it's simply people's lives got worse over the last few decades under end-stage liberalism/capitalism, Trump successfully made a (albeit bullshit) case for genuine change, liberals didn't. If liberals hold on to that myth, that all they have to do to win is throw trans people and immigrants under the bus, then they will loose again. What they should focus on is the fact that no your lives didn't improve because we took trans people's rights away and threw some brown children in concentration camps, your rent didn't go down did it? So instead perhaps it's your landlord we should be focusing our anger towards...
See that for social cooling: I just pissed off everybody. It can be done lmao
Article from 2015 (should be in the title)
I find that awareness of the deep rabbit hole of surveillance capitalism, and how it increasingly extends into political and ideological realms to wield power and influence, makes me feel uneasy on all the physical gadgets I see all around me. And also the pervasive use of camera's everywhere, that send video streams into the cloud where numerous AI applications do who knows what with the data.
Like in the Netherlands in the Jumbo supermarket chain, which is the first to introduce an AI glaring at you through the camera while you walk through the store, and at the checkout self-scan, doing sentiment analysis to see if you are suspicious. It feels outright dystopic, and I avoid the Jumbo if I can. Also it is crazy how Tesla camera platforms are surveilling the streets of the world for the richest man in the world.
It seems these tech developments have cooling effects on society in the physical space. Cooling effects that serve the ones in power, I suppose.
Pity that "social cooling" gets attached to that meaning instead of, e.g., the fact to favorise, in internet discussions, themes that unite and reunite people, promote empathy and kindness, curiosity, tolerance and positive mindset, etc.
I hate being that guy. Scroll is broken on this site.
Firefox on iPhone: if you are swiping to go down a few lines then swipe up to center what you are reading, the page position jumps, and if you continue to swipe down, it jumps again.
It's important to note that this page is almost 10 years old.
I do find myself self-censoring in 2025, but it's for a far more boring reason than surveillance capitalism. It's because leaders on the far right literally said people should snitch on each other and dox each other.
Much as I hate to say it, I'm sure people on the right have felt the same way for at least a decade.
I definitely try to avoid any public statement of political nature online. You never know how the tide will turn at some point and who gets into power. And then you do not want to have a record of having said the wrong thing about the new guy(s) at the top in your past.
This could also chill the social pressure caused by knowing other's opinions. Less pressure for conformity, leading to more fringe positions. Maybe.
Personally it's the ownership of the company I work for and the desire to retain most international travel privileges.
It’s not specifically far-right thing. The left are snitching and doxing people for the last decade if not longer.
The tactic become normalized amongst the extremes of both sides. “ 5% of the wizards casting 85% of the spells.”
PyCon was the turning point. I used to have accounts under my real name in Slashdot etc. before then.
TBF the individual at the center of it did suffer consequences. They were fired and struggled to find employment after the fact, and PyCon updated their attendee rules to include a clause on public shaming.
Not sure if you have read whole comment before posting this...
Yes it was common from every corner before. However now, it is encouraged from the governments. That means any laws that could help from cyber- or any other form of bullying will disappear. No matter how one think it was weak in practice, freedom of expression is going disappear completely.
Eh. Here we had some leftists in previous government. They had fancy idea to make hate speech an administrative offense. Because apparently penal offense process was too complex so they couldn’t trial as many people for online comments as they wished.
On top of that, they tried to change defamation law to include not only factually wrong information, but also make it a libel if the person felt like it was offensive.
Thankfully neither of above passed. Especially since we have a different crop of lunatics now who would be happy to abuse above laws…
Is the self censoring of big boy and girl worlds like "murder," "suicide," "execution," "Nazi," and "genocide" on videos and posts related to this? It's been driving me crazy. Do not go quietly into that night and whatnot... Do not comply in advance.
The idea of changing my speech so my words look nice next to a Toyota advertisement fills me with disgust and anger.
That's something that drives me crazy as well. I don't actually use the big 'algorithmic social media' sites, only Telegram and Discord mostly, and seeing screenshots/memes with those words censored there made me wonder why, at first. Then i saw people auto-censoring themselves in those places where there's no such thing as algorithmic de-ranking. The social media generation already find it normal, acceptable, and is specially ironic to me that a lot of people who are vocal against those services have conformed to what they say to stand against.
That behavior also highlights how people within those services care so much about reach, clout, 'going viral', instead of communicating with other people.
Euphemism and dogwhistles to continue openly discussing the same things sounds like the opposite of compliance and self-censorship.
No, its to avoid auto downranking, by which ever filter the platform uses.
You can use all those words, but then, the theory goes, STT and OCR interprets the "bad" words and limits the reach of them.
But isn't this part of the problem? People just self-censor to not be censored.
If only content that follows the censor rules survives the censor, is that "self" censorship? That just sounds like plain ol' censorship.
This is how curse words are born. Which is funnily appropriate because English is really lacking in this department.
Well this has to do with the simple fact that social media reduces the reach of posts containing certain of those words. So if you want to talk about them and reach people..
I wish those outraged with liberal "cancel-culture" would actually care about free speech, instead of only wh3n it suits their narratives.
There’s a variant of “cancel culture” that’s actually just trial by publicity and I think that’s objectively a bad thing.
But often, people in social media are just looking for attention by deliberately inciting outrage, posting their “hot takes” and making controversial statements—and then when other people with opposing views reply to disagree, the original posters start crying about “cancel culture” when, in fact, it’s just plain old disagreement in public discourse.
What needs to happen here is for people to take accountability in what they post in social media, and to take it as seriously as saying their opinions out loud in a physical, public space. If you’re deliberately inciting anger by saying something that puts a group of people at a disadvantage, don’t be surprised if someone from that group stands up to fight back. Your right to free speech does not mean protection from humiliation for the stupid things that you say in public.
It's probably better to just stop using social media. (And stop tolerating people that do.)
I doubt that even something as 'light' on that spectrum as Hacker News is worthwhile enough compared to the non-social-media alternatives. (As a reminder, you can have a tree-like discussion structure without an upvote system.)
Have an ironic upvote. HN's system of not explicitly showing post scores and using accumulated score to give access to downvote buttons etc is the least bad that I have encountered.
Ah yes, the internet, famous for making everyone carefully monitor what they say and express only reasonable and tepid opinions.
[flagged]
This presentation is more likely to engage typical social media users (ie people not on HN) which is apparently the goal of the website.
We are clearly not the target audience. What an awful way to read anything.
The social credit score doesn't exist in China. There were attempts in some cities with very restricted scopes but they were phased out.
On the other hand, in Europe and with the coming chat control regulations, these systems will likely emerge in the West.
Perhaps you can explain something then, since you appear to be knowledgeable on this matter. On this[1] eBay item from a seller based in China, under their "Seller business information", they list
.. what is that exactly, if social credit score does not exist?[1] https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/305629164114
That's a social credit score for businesses, not individuals.
Nice, the format is even documented: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Social_Credit_Identifi...
I wouldn't blame the culture of conformity solely on social media really.
Not what this is about. It is more like everyone needs to earn stars on their star chart to survive and big techs algorithm decides who gets the stars.
Well, yes, and the argument is that it's bad, because people become less connected, can't freely speak their minds etc. My point is there are other, maybe more powerful reasons why people become less connected and might hesitate speaking their minds. Social media that exposes everything and saves everything forever sure helps though.
Could you elaborate on what those "maybe more powerful reasons" are?
No, I don't feel qualified. But it looks to me that there were times when challenging authorities and questioning general opinion was cool, and these times ended before social media kicked in. Maybe urbanization and generally people not staying in one place long enough are to blame, not sure.