Hacker News

I wish instead people felt more comfortable being as public as they want. If they want to do it, great; if they don't, great too.

And, while I'm grateful to the ones sharing things that benefit me, I'm also fully aware I am not entitled to that, and that it is not up to me to decide how much they should share. The opposite is also true: I'm often sharing things here (in the Fediverse) hoping others enjoy them, but nobody is entitled to that.

I'm saying this because this text doesn't even try to talk about something important: why people often don't share things. It's because of a thousand reasons, really: some are concerned about their privacy thus safety, some are emotionally less predisposed towards sharing...

...but the one I want to explore here is the one that applies to me. See, for years I basically shared nothing online. Why? Because some replies made me want to punch something.

I'm not talking about being contradicted. Or opposing views. Or being proved that what I'm saying is false, or immoral, or whatever. Or constructive criticism. I'm actually fine with those things.

I'm talking about things like:

• Someone putting words on your mouth based on things you did not say. For example, if you say "I like apples", someone is bound to screech "WHY ARE BANANA HATERS LIKE YOU EVEN ALLOWED HERE?", even if you said nothing about bananas.
• Assumptions that boil down to "you must be an ignorant, so let me enlighten you".
• Oversimplifications on what you said. "U say 50 is not 100? Than u think 50 is 0? Dats dumb lol lmao".
• Users who go out of their way to stretch your didactic example and treat it as the core of the text, so they can put words into your mouth.
• Dumb invalidation, like "ackshyually you spelled it «wierd», when it's «weird», then you're arguement is invalid."; or "u downvoted than incorrect."
• You go out of your way to explain something. Then people screech at you for not going further, and explaining more.
• Sealioning, "I don't understand" flavour: Bob pretends to not understand what Alice says, so Alice wastes their time explaining the same thing in progressively simpler ways, while Bob still pretends it doesn't make sense.
• Sealioning, "definition hell" flavour: Bob demands Alice to define contextually obvious shit. If Alice does it, Bob repeats the strategy, until successfully derailing the discussion; if Alice doesn't do it, Bob starts acting as if Alice was being an irrational.
• Decontextualisation of what someone said, so they can distort it into being something outrageous.
• The "waaah TL;DR" whiner: or, "I demand an abridged version of this text talking about a complex matter, because I'm an entitled piece of shit and the five minutes it would take me to read it are worth more than the hours some trash like you spent writing it".
• etc.

And this is not just when discussing controversial topics. Or even discussing. Sometimes it's even when you're sharing a practical know-how, for the benefit of the readers. Or trying to contribute with an online group project. Sharing means hearing the voices of a thousand screechers; and even a single screecher is louder than a thousand claps.

Eventually shit like this makes you say, "why bother? There's no benefit on sharing; it only makes me feel bad, for the sake of people I learned to despise." And you stop sharing.

For me, this only changed when I stopped lurking in the Fediverse, to become an active member. And I still flat out refuse to share things in Reddit or Hacker News, for this fucking reason. But I'm probably not the only one who gives up sharing stuff because the receiving end makes it painful.

Some call this "toxicity". I don't like the word, because it's a bit too vague for my tastes. But whatever you call it, if you want people to share more on the internet, we [people in general] need to fix it.

[/end of ranting blogpost]