I rarely feel attacked when I talk with people in person. And we all take people feelings into consideration enough so no one is trying to attack anyone.
I was not actively commenting on social media since I was 13. But when I joined Lemmy i saw the statistics only 1% of people are actively posting and commenting on social media. And since I knew I was in 99% of people who are only consuming and really wanted Lemmy to take off I tried to be more active.
But now I find myself way too often attacked and attacking. And I always judged people that are attacking others on Xitter or Facebook.
It might be worth it to consider what tone you, yourself, are placing on the text you’re reading. Words being spoken in anger or not will look exactly the same when they’re written down.
Yeah, this is a big thing. A sentiment that comes to mind is “we judge other people by their actions, but ourselves by our thoughts”. Sometimes I reread past comments of mine and cringe at how ambiguous the tone is.
Block them. Trolls are not worth the trouble.
Good question. I think it has to do with empathy. When arguing on the internet, you dont have an actual person in mind that you are talking to. Also, anonymity gives you safety. You dont have to worry about not hurting someone because it wont have adverse effects on the relationships with people around you, aka your tribe. This was essential for survival some time ago and sits deep within our subconcious.
Some people do, some people don’t. One big difference online is that projection is a lot bigger of a thing. Because letters don’t tend to have a face or tone of voice, so your brain has to fill in a lot about what’s being said.
Things like these, that your brain does automatically, can change. And you can control how. Practice trying to see things in a different manner, and you might find it changes how things you see tend to ‘seem’ to you at first sight.
Lots of people here missing the “and attacking” part.
Breathe, chill. That commenter you’re about to yell at is just another idiot, like you. We’re all just idiots bored on the internet. Relax, it’s not that deep.
Also:
NO, FUCK YOOUUUUUUUYou’re wrong and FUCK YOOUUU 🖕🏻
Mike Tyson once said “Social media made y’all way too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it.” There are things people would only say behind a keyboard.
It can be hard not to get upset over mean comments but I try to remember I have hundreds of pleasant Interactions with people daily and I shouldn’t put so much weight on the few negative interactions with random internet people.
No you don’t. You will, sadly, normalize a perpetual state of conflict.
If you can avoid it or mitigate it, it’s for the best.
That experience hits too close to home.
I think because we choose the topics we engage with on social media, they’re usually ones we’re passionate about.
But the size of the online community means most folks are anonymous. So, unlike your friends or even a group of strangers, there’s a much lower consequence for jerkiness, rudeness etc in response to views which in your eyes may range from insane to evil.
There’s a loud toxic minority online. The block feature is best friend.
Debates need multiple consenting participants, so arguing unprompted from out of nowhere is bound to gather annoyance
A big problem is that it’s just text. In real life tone and body language go a huge way to determining how someone means to make you feel.
If someone is disagreeing with you in real life it’s much easier to tell if they just have a different opinion and respect yours or are being a dick.
Often when someone comes across really rude it’s meant in a half joking way which again would be easy to tell in an actual conversation.
These misunderstandings lead to things heating up real quick.
Many people attack if a post does not reflect their world view. I have learned that in most cases, this is primarily an issue of their limited world view, and not one of my post.
Simply ignore the idiots, and, if they escalate, just block them. Don’t let them control you.
Yes…
It’s easier to be an asshole to words than to people.
xkcd #438 (June 18, 2008)
Personally, I think that we (humans) haven’t really socially adjusted to digital communications technology, its speed or brevity, or the relatively short attention span it tends to encourage. We spent millennia communicating by talking to each other, face to face, and we’re still kind of bad at that but we do mostly try to avoid directly provoking each other in person. Writing gave us a means to communicate while separated, but in the past that meant writing a letter, a process that is generally slow and thoughtful. In contrast, commenting on social media is usually done so quickly that there isn’t much thoughtfulness exhibited.
We’ve had three-ish? decades exchanging messages on the internet, having conversations with complete strangers, and being exposed to dozens, hundreds, even thousands of other people reading and responding to what we write… less than one human lifetime. We’re not equipped for this, mentally, emotionally, historically. Social and cultural norms haven’t adapted yet.
Totally agree. Seeing how “Internet like” communication existed before the Internet is always fascinating to me. Whether it’s fanclubs, wargaming zines or Enlightened era correspondence, people have had written interactions with effective strangers for centuries. But it was incredibly different before.
The very act of sitting down to write, paying some money and effort to literally post it probably had a huge calming effect on idle bad faith takes. And I imagine that getting a letter with someone telling me names for thinking McCoy is better than Spock would probably make me feel derisively sorry for the poor nerd who went to the effort.
Yeah, and if you wrote some feedback to a magazine article, the editor might write a response to you and publish both in next month’s issue, but that would be the end of it. No one who read your feedback as published in the magazine could respond to you directly - it’s not really a conversation, it’s slow and limited by the format. You could write another message to the editor responding to their response, but that wouldn’t get published in the following issue so at most it would just be a one-to-one communication.
This is very different from writing a post on an internet message board and getting twenty responses from twenty different people in a span of minutes. The closest past equivalent I can think of is literal soapboxing, where you go stand on a street and talk at people walking by, and they can immediately respond to you if they choose - but then that’s in person, face-to-face.
It’s normal to attack and be attacked, it’s also normal to have a friendly exchange of ideas and it’s very normal to communicate through memes and soundbites.
What isn’t normal is to communicate through emojis. We need to shun those people! They must not be allowed to propagate a second hieroglyphics age! Archeologists will think it was aliens all over again!
Shun them!
