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Tom's avatar

One thing I think about a lot is how a piece of criticism from one person can be painful but well-taken, but the same exact piece of criticism delivered by 1,000 strangers is basically just a campaign of stochastic harassment.

In terms of adapting our culture to the technology, I've long thought one or both of these principles ought to be generally applied: 1) if someone else has already made a similar criticism/complaint, "like/heart/upvote" their comment to express agreement instead of adding an essentially redundant comment of your own. 2) only offer unsolicited criticism to people with whom you have some sort of pre-existing relationship.

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David Muccigrosso's avatar

I think the other big difference is what I call "the asshats".

Basically, it used to be extremely hard for asshats to troll you. Now, they're everywhere. So people filter them out using different heuristics now - it's not, "Here, let me listen to an idea I might disagree with, in order to extract important wisdom", it's "OMG WHY ARE ALL THESE ASSHATS BOTHERING ME?!? BLOCK BLOCK BLOCK".

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