Ask Lemmy

Online discourse stopped being about changing minds and started being about farming clout.

Most replies aren’t written to the person they’re replying to; they’re written to the invisible crowd that hands out upvotes. The goal isn’t persuasion, it’s applause. That’s why nuance is dead: nuance doesn’t get you 500 upvotes and a gold award. A savage one-liner that owns the libs / the chuds / the tankies does.

If you actually believe your view is correct, the morally consistent move when you meet disagreement is to engage and try to convince the other person (ideally while staying open to being convinced yourself). That requires listening, steelmanning, and sometimes admitting “yeah, you’ve got a point there.” None of that is rewarded here. What is rewarded is the quick, brutal dunk that signals “I am safely on the correct side” to the rest of the hive.

So people don’t debate in good faith anymore; they perform righteousness. It’s easier, it feels better, and the points roll in. We went from trying to do good to trying to feel good, and the karma counter is the drug that keeps the whole circus running.

In my experience when I try to have a nuanced take, people (intentionally?) misinterpret my nuance and use it to put words in my mouth and build a straw man.

Also hot takes are just way more entertaining, and what is social media if not a new form of entertainment?

A lot of people just don't understand nuance or anything else beyond black and white thinking because that is how they were raised. They don't understand that other people have different experiences, especially if they don't interact with people who have different experiences.

Our increasingly disconnected society means fewer in person interactions to reduce the chances of finding out something new when they actively avoid it.

All of that is lurking in the background when they hop on the internet and interact with others by not reading and understanding what is being said and instead just digging in.

a lot of things are black and white though. the world is becoming more and more fascist, so a ton of people are done being polite and entertaining the spectrum of ideas. it’s easy to lose sight of it all and become frustrated and forget nuance.

It used to be that we considered things. We were rational. Logical. Contemplative.

Almost forty years on Earth, and I've never once experienced that. Humans have always been irrational, judgmental creatures, given to tribalism and social pressure. Maybe we've gotten more vocal about it as a result of the Western world being mostly peaceful for four generations, or maybe social media has made us more likely to interact with more people than we used to. But when were we rational? When our ancestors hanged or shot people over horses? Were they being contemplative while they burned people (or otherwise killed them) at the stake because they didn't conform to the tenets of a book?

Was it rational and logical to force whole societies to perform certain tasks, and then deride them and try to harm them for performing those tasks?

It's always been a crab bucket. It'll always be a crab bucket. All you can hope is that you're high enough up to keep your shell intact but low enough down that you don't get grabbed for the stewpot.

I think people spend less time have long conversations with people that they trust, which are best space for nuance and exploring ideas honestly. If you're messaging on social media, or even writing articles for blogs or publications, there's a whole bunch of incentives and barriers that push people away from nuance.

The Hivemind Complexity.

I say that because it is a collective process that exist in a large amount of online communities, Lemmy and the Fediverse being no different. People online are way too used to having thoughts of theirs being parroted. Then comes the constructs of all of these karma systems for people to vote said thoughts of and that creates a level of its own discourse that, people will say or do things for some validity based on that.

And anyone else who comes along that thinks or says different than the seeming majority, are scrutinized, bullied and branded to be moderated.

Everyone is just too used to being around others who agree with them.

Some amount of that is literal psyops. Every major country is intentionally trying to cause at least some division in their geopolitical rivals. There's also internal psyops where governments will try to fracture any movements that might cause political change. At a smaller level, there's echo chambers built by people that are already sucked into an ideology, hoping to propagate that ideology. This recent thread that had simple biological truth downvoted to hell is an example:

https://sh.itjust.works/post/50387688/22307005

All in all it's not new though, it's just gotten more efficient. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism is one example of how it's always been this way. Isaac Asimov also had a pithy quote:

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

When you have your basic needs met and aren't starving to death, you can afford to be irrational and embrace comforting lies. It's just the human condition.

Is it less common than it used to be or are you just becoming more aware of it?

I'm actually going to say: stress. In economics as well as education, we've gone from a bell curve to a U curve. But regardless of which side of the curve we're on, we're almost all of us struggling in some way: rent, food prices, job security, worry about our kids, the environment, politics, end stage capitalism, whatever. And over the past decade, those stressors have built up.

People who are worried about how they're going to pay rent/mortgage, what they're going to eat, whether their car will last till next pay period, don't have the luxury to spend time thinking about nuanced positions. I mean, they will if you push them, but it takes time and energy away from more immediate concerns, and there'll be an undercurrent of resentment for you taking them away from important things.

People who are on the bottom or much of the right of the curve have niggling insecurities (is my job going to have layoffs, where I can get decent affordable childcare, why are electricity prices rising so much). They may be struggling, but they're not constantly struggling like much of the lower classes. The hollowing out of the middle class isn't truly visible to them yet. They hear complaints from the lower classes, but they seem very similar to what those complaints have always been. They know that those complaints have grown louder and more disruptive, but they assume it's because it's the same people it's always been, just being louder and more disruptive. They haven't realized it's louder because there's more people on the other side. And they haven't realized that they're at risk of moving to the bottom of the U curve - or even ending up on the other side.

Because of their assumption that it's the same old group of people being more disruptive, they're more dismissive of those complaints. And they have enough of their own stressors to deal with - food banks always say they need more (and more nutritious) food, but their primary concern are choosing a healthcare plan or childcare place that covers their needs without bankrupting them. It's extremely stressful for them and they don't have the time to spare to consider matters in depth either.

[I have another thought on the matter, but I'll put it in a follow-up comment.]

In the context of politics, billionaires have radicalized half the world into thinking that talking about ending certain livelihoods is just as valuable as talking about ways to improve life for your neighbors. It is black and white, there is no middle ground discussion on whether or not vulnerable populations deserve the right to exist

It was always like that, it is just that the intermet make it clearer

Twitter and its 160 character limit.

Mass media runs on the idea of selling an idea in as few words as possible. It capitalizes on the fact that we are busy people and will only devote an infinitesimal amount of thought and energy into the idea being sold. So make it short, pithy, and at least on the surface, immune to critical analysis.

I can’t begin to count the number of times I’ve composed a multi-faceted point or counterpoint to an opinion, only to be countered with, “I ain’t reading all that.” In that way, people who want to delve into nuance end up getting shut out of the discussion.

It’s out there, but you’re not going to find it on your average social media discussion forum.

youre arguing on the internet. there is no “nuanced” discussion