Online Communities - classic or dud

well, i know nothing about the lucy letby case at all, so i can't speak to it specifically. that blog post was an interesting read though!

so i do have an opinion, and it's completely unsupported by any sort of evidence at all. just pure speculation and generalization of probably-ungeneralizable phenomena.

people hunger and thirst for... meaning. purpose. reason. a moral arc to the universe that bends towards justice. honestly, one of the things i struggle with most, in terms of... my personal ability to function in the world... is this sense that... there are so many important things outside of my control. i was talking about this elsewhere, but one of the things about trauma that gets underrated is the trauma caused by _watching_. human beings, you know, we care. the truth is that people die all the time because of systemic failure, in the uk as well as in the us. whether electoral politics actually gives us a lot of control in our world, i think it does give people who believe in it peace of mind. the belief that they have control and agency in the world, the belief that what they think, they believe, _matters_.

on a personal level, i think it's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy for me. one of the things that eats me up more than anything else is the idea that nobody's paying _attention_, nobody's _listening_, nobody _cares_.

actually, what this reminds me of more than anything else is an observation made by tocqueville. he observed that the public discourse in america under democracy was far more moderate and restrained than in france under autocracy. when i feel like i'm not being listened to, i get louder, more strident, more inflexible. when i feel like i am being listened to, i beome more conciliatory and open to compromise.

what i see on social media are a lot of people who feel like they don't have a voice, that they aren't being _listened_ to. my response, personally - and it's often not a healthy one - is to withdraw. if i don't think i'm being listened to in good faith, if i feel threatened, if i feel i'll be attacked for what i say or how i say it, well, then i don't engage, because if i engage under those conditions, i can really get myself hurt.

to me, a healthy community, online or offline, is one where there's an agreement on what the scope and extent of that community is. there are collective boundaries that are enforced in a way that, i don't know. promotes the general welfare of the community, or something. well, i was talking about wilhoit's law yesterday:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.[10]

i do believe that wilhoit's law is in effect today, in the us certainly, and probably also in the uk. to me, what follows from that is... well, let me make this more specific. i do think i am a member of an out-group. i don't think the law is there to protect me. i think the law is there to protect in-groups _from_ me. this sense of fear and insecurity... it's hard for me to manage, to express myself in wise-minded ways while living with it.

this has in fact soured me greatly on the idea of community in my particular out-group. where i live, there are plenty of people belonging to my out-group. we're underresourced, desperate, and it often seems to me like _nobody notices_, nobody is _doing_ anything. i think this felt sense comes through in my writing a lot. you know what i believe? i believe that those who would sacrifice a little freedom for safety and security deserve _all_ of those things. freedom, safety, security. i believe that for thomas jefferson, of all people, to say the reverse- that was fucking rich coming from him.

that's why i'm here. i experience a sense of safety and security that i don't in most places. not just that there won't be hate speech, but, honestly, i feel listened to and valued here. i'm... not sure that's an experience i could have somewhere like X or Facebook or Threads or whatever.

hopefully that's of some interest to someone. it was valuable for me to think and write about!

I was reading an article this morning saying that the younger generation is, paradoxically, still afraid to pick up the phone. This immediately reminded me that I also used to find phone conversations strange and "unnatural" as a teenager: 1) I hadn't learnt what to say and how, 2) fear of what the other person on the line may be thinking. And then you learn.

I used online communities to socialize in my late teens: learning to speak openly, to share, speak with people of the other sex, speaking to people who lived in French cities. Friendships, sexual awakening, drama, etc, all very classic. On English-speaking communities, I learnt other codes, cultural differences. But it also became less social and formative, and more anonymous and driven by my own egoistic interests. It's a question of expectations and boundaries.

Clearly there are still things I find something online that I don't find elsewhere. Despite some of the quick-tempered reactions, I find ILM overall quite relaxed: people may snap at each other because they care deeply about certain issues, but it's also got strong adult, live and let live vibes. It rarely gets personal and unhealthy - at least I try to keep out of that.

I was reading an article this morning saying that the younger generation is, paradoxically, still afraid to pick up the phone. This immediately reminded me that I also used to find phone conversations strange and "unnatural" as a teenager: 1) I hadn't learnt what to say and how, 2) fear of what the other person on the line may be thinking. And then you learn.

I used online communities to socialize in my late teens: learning to speak openly, to share, speak with people of the other sex, speaking to people who lived in French cities. Friendships, sexual awakening, drama, etc, all very classic. On English-speaking communities, I learnt other codes, cultural differences. But it also became less social and formative, and more anonymous and driven by my own egoistic interests. It's a question of expectations and boundaries.

Clearly there are still things I find something online that I don't find elsewhere. Despite some of the quick-tempered reactions, I find ILM overall quite relaxed: people may snap at each other because they care deeply about certain issues, but it's also got strong adult, live and let live vibes. It rarely gets personal and unhealthy - at least I try to keep out of that.

― Nabozo

i think these are some really good thoughts! communication, the ways different media, well, mediate our communicaion is something of special interest to me, speaking as someone who... i often have difficulty with communication, in part due to my autism. i believe that in the past in online communities in the past a lot of the hostility towards "self-diagnosed aspergers" was to a great extent motivated by people using their neurodiversity as an excuse for their behavior, and i'm not. for me, it just means that i have to use extra care when communicating.

one of the things that i notice is that i have been afraid of talking to people on the phone, for a long time. since at leasat around 2000. i've lost jobs because of it - i was supposed to make phone calls but didn't. i've gotten myself into financial trouble in the past because i was too afraid to call and pay my bills. autopay and online paying in general has been an absolute lifesaver for me. it's helped me a lot financially.

and when i think about phone calls, i think about how people use the phone. i remember when i was young i used to call my best friend and we'd just sit on the phone for hours not really talking. now that i look back, for me it was a form of parallel play. nowadays, when i think of what i use the phone for... most of the phone calls i get are spam calls. i'm still traumatized by having to deal with comcast back in december. i'll spare you the further details except to say that while i sometimes do overstate my emotional reactions to things, my use of the word "traumatized" isn't an exaggeration.

one of the things that makes phone calls so difficult for me is these andless robot navigation trees. i remember when they first started them, you could jam on the star key and eventually they'd let you speak to a human being. or just say "I want to speak to a human". and they'd put you through to a human being. and that doens't work anymore. that's intentional, i think. that's intentional, because the goal is to discourage people from calling and talking to people. it's not _efficient_. you get on the phone with someone and they're trained to get people off the phone as quickly as possible. no small talk. no chat. not even addressing the problem, they're not trained or given the latitude to actually fix things. you call someone professionally and their main priority is to get you off the phone, so that they can take more calls, so that the company doesn't have to hire people.

so to me it's not really surprising that people hate getting phone calls. particularly younger people. that's their experience.

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one of the things i've craved for as long as i can remember is genuine human connection. it's not something i got much of growing up. when i first got on the internet, it was amazing to me in part because it allowed me to connecct with people on a deeper personal level than in-person interaction. it's sort of the reverse now, for the most part. i was also acutely aware, even at the time, that online communication required different skills, and since it was all so new, i had to learn to employ those skills in order to communicate effectively.

because what doesn't come through in particularly text communication well is... it's hard to communicate empathy in text. is what i've found. it's pretty easy to misread the underlying emotion of what someone's saying. without tone of voice as an indicator, it's easy to take what someone's saying as hostile. one of the reason i write novels is... i've learned over time that what's important for me is to work on emotionally de-escalating a situation. that's any situation, in terms of online communication. and that's not primarily for the benefit of others. that's for the benefit of me.

my therapist says i'm a "highly sensitive person", which i think means that i react more emotionally strongly to things than other people do. i tend to fly off the handle more quickly than other people. learning how to deal with that without just repressing my urge to respond emotionally... i've found that leads to me walking around with a chip on my shoulder, as they used to say. makes me more emotionally volatile. some of that was, in fact, hormonal! i find that my emotional responses are very different on estrogen than they were on testosterone.

that doesn't mean my emotional responses are any less intense. i cry a lot more and i have to work hard to manage that urge. my ex-girlfriend told me that it's common for women to have to work to suppress the urge to cry in high-stress situations. it's stigmatized a lot more than anger is, i've found, in terms of... people make negative assumptions about women when we cry in high-stress situations. i know i used to do that.

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one of the things i find really unfortunate is that "triggering" is a real thing, a real useful term. and certain people used that and weaponized it against people. to me, that's bullying. "cyberbullying", that wasn't a term that existed when i was a kid but it does now, and it's not just something kids do. there's a lot of bullying online. hell, i used to do it. it was called "flaming" and "trolling" then. i look back on a lot of that behavior, though, and i was bullying people, being abusive. and if you look back at ilx history, that sort of behavior used to be a lot more... accepted. ilx is not an exception by any means. when i look at ilx's history, i was never on freakytrigger or whatever, but i was on usenet, and usenet absolutely had a culture of bullying, of using hostility to shut down social exchanges. i did that, a lot.

well, i still tend to be a bit of a thread-killer, but for different reasons. i take a lot of time and put a lot of thought into my posts... i'll sometimes spend hours working on a single post. and that's not an effective form of online communication, even though i try to make it easier by breaking my posts into shorter paragraphs. i know that. tl;dr. ain't nobody got time for that. etc., etc. that's one of the things i miss the most, about the old days... old woman yells at cloud time, but i felt in the past there was more time for meaningless bullshit, just shooting the breeze. casual conversation. nowadays it seems like everybody is so overwhelmed with stuff to do that there's not really time for that. maybe that's just getting older. maybe that's just part of being an adult.

and what you say about ilx, nabozo, that does remind me that we're pretty much all adults here, more or less. i say that only because when i was going through puberty a couple years back, i did act like an adolescent in a lot of ways. that's normal, and at the same time adolescents do interact with each other in different ways. that's something that frustrates me about a lot of my peer group, because a lot of us are going through adolescence, regardless of our chronological age, and i'm not, anymore. when i was going through adolescence, i found myself understanding and relating to people a lot younger than me in ways that i don't now.

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and sites like twitter do have a tendency towards encouraging immediate, off the cuff responses to things. as do things like text communication. my texts are a lot shorter than my posts. i'd never be able to post stuff like this if i used zing. there's also... i have a sort of structural advantage when it comes to this kind of communication because i type 100 wpm. most people don't. that's a big part of why my posts are so long - because they _can_ be. typing at great length is natural and easy for me, and i have to really suppress the urge to ramble. (yes, this is me working to _not_ ramble.) i literally edit most of my own posts before making them, which i didn't used to do, which if i had to guess a lot of people probably don't do.

good communication, i think, is symmetric. it's giving the other person space to talk. space to respond. i often don't do that very well, and in large part that's de-escalation. i'm working to make it more difficult for someone to respond emotionally, for someone to get... the word used in psych corners is "activated" now... and respond out of that emotion. because it's not something to be stigmatized, i don't think. getting activated isn't a left-wing or a right-wing phenomenon. it's normal, and healthy communication means learning how to deal with strong emotions.

a lot of dealing with strong emotions is _not_ responding in the moment. is slowing things down. some of the worst relationship advice i've ever gotten is "never go to bed mad". i go to bed mad a lot, and work through those emotions in my sleep, and i communicate more effectively for having done that, i believe. god, imagine twitter if the normal response to something strongly emotional was "maybe i should sit on my response and send it after sleeping on it". there wouldn't _be_ a twitter.

speaking as someone who does experience strong emotions... fuck it, i'll say it. i got self-diagnosed autism. i'm easily triggered. i'm not ashamed of that but they're not excuses for behaving and communicating in ineffective ways. it means i work really hard on communicating well, because it doesn't come naturally to me.

communicating online in an emotionally healthy way, i don't think that comes naturally to most people. people here... it's not just that we're older, it's that a lot of us have _decades_ of experience here. over that period of time, one does learn and grow. the ones who haven't, well, most of them aren't here anymore. i'd say, without attaching any kind of moral judgement to the statement, that this is overall a _mature_ forum. i mean, ilx is literally older than twitter! again, no moral judgement meant, but just factually speaking, i _have_ been on the internet longer than a lot of people i know - a lot of _adults_ i know - have been alive, and that colors how i communicate.

anyway. obviously i've said a lot, but like i said. this is a topic of special interest to me, and i got lots of thoughts on the topic.

everyone hates talking on the phone, it's the worst of both worlds - you get access to neither the non-verbal cues of face to face communication nor the time to think out what you're saying that online provides. glad my generation has mostly done away with that shit.

youve to know someone very well to pick up the phone for an enjoyable chat i think

ive been taking some regular 30 min drives over and back once a week in the past six months and calling brothers/mates in the space has been a forgotten little joy tho

ppl are more averse to unnecessary contact without very well defined boundaries generally i think?

A long voice note also serves that need well, I’ve heard. Speaking of older Irish men who love to chat, I’ve got a great picture of my dad on the phone to one of his friends with his phone in one hand and cradling his granddaughter with the other.

everyone hates talking on the phone

more averse to unnecessary contact without very well defined boundaries generally i think?

A long voice note also serves that need well, I’ve heard

fuck sake

Speaking of older Irish men who love to chat,

arah fuck sake

Feel free to send me to the donnygal of yr mind
https://i.postimg.cc/3x1S58Jq/IMG-5208.jpg

The big change we’ve all seen where there’s been a move away from more private and segmented spaces to “let’s put everyone in a big pile with all the Nazis and associated filth of the internet” has been a really bad development

I agree but thought the past few years have actually been a move away from this? Most people I know are posting less on social media and the main spaces for communication now seem to be whatsapp group threads, slacks, discords (often associated with patreons). I like not having to see the nazis but it also feels like a sort of giving up, not that I have an alternative.

In a sense that’s true but discords and the like aren’t really comparable to forums etc that used to exist because they’re difficult to find and navigate; unless you’re invited to one that’s specifically for your interest it’s not an easy point of entry. It reminds me more of old torrenting sites that were invite only; great if you’re in but good fucking luck if you’re not.

I do spend a lot of my time on WhatsApp group chats and have since 2009 or whenever I got it on my BlackBerry to talk to my friends who used iPhones. But again, not an easy thing to find unless you start one or are added.

Yeah, feel you on the last point…

In a sense that’s true but discords and the like aren’t really comparable to forums etc that used to exist because they’re difficult to find and navigate; unless you’re invited to one that’s specifically for your interest it’s not an easy point of entry. It reminds me more of old torrenting sites that were invite only; great if you’re in but good fucking luck if you’re not.

this is 100% for the worse yeah. it's very bleak out there now, twitter is increasingly awful to use but all the alternatives are terrible and unpleasant in their own ways and everyone's just retreated to their own little circles.

i definitely noticed a lot of hostility among the uk twitter left to anyone questioning the letby case - it was pretty surprising just how unthinkable the idea seemed to be to many who professed very radical politics. many didn't really seem to engage with the critiques made at all and dismissed them all as conspiracist crankery, though some (but far from all) changed their tune after encountering the reporting from recent months and discovering there were actually serious critiques. the weirdest angle many took was that it was anti-racist to oppose questioning the verdict because letby is white and 'weaponised her innocence' as a white woman or something.

Bluesky is a bit boring as a twitter alternative. I'd say the jury is out until twitter goes under and more ppl start using it...

the weirdest angle many took was that it was anti-racist to oppose questioning the verdict because letby is white and 'weaponised her innocence' as a white woman or something.

most of the time it wasn't brought up in relation to that though - it would make a little more sense if it was but i think thinking someone is more likely to be guilty because they're white, to the point of overriding any acab leftist scepticism is a fairly broken heuristic. i think the letby stuff is less reflective of online communities in particular though and more just that in general people are less inclined to question things the more extreme the accusations are

bluesky seems to tend towards even more exhausting arguments than twitter somehow and the website's still terribly slow

or rather that people are more opposed to questioning things the more extreme the accusations are

I vaguely remember when left twitter were playing the "what's your most conservative opinion" game and it was usually around someone committing a horrible crime being locked up or executed. I was watching and thinking 'why are you even doing this?'.

We also live in a society where to even question anything done by the state is difficult. I got into a tough convo offline last week where I was questioning the idea of locking some young people for the riots that happened over here last month, the harshness of the sentencing/ 'swift justice' and not dealing with questions of migration as a bit of a problem. But no I was looked as if I was an alien.

Bluesky is a bit boring as a twitter alternative.

I kinda still don't get this as a claim, but granted my experience has been very positive all around. My feed's plenty busy and interesting and it serves the combination of 'things to note' and random chat that suits me.

xp were you pro or anti locking them up

many didn't really seem to engage with the critiques made at all and dismissed them all as conspiracist crankery

I wonder how much this is part of a kind of siege mentality that's kinda intrinsic to social media because there is so much crankery going around - like you never know when someone will suddenly come out with "trans ideology" or "vaccines cause autism" or "Johnny Depp innocent". So everyone's defenses are up, like, all the time?

Without wanting to sound too idealistic about this place, which has certainly had its share of wrong 'uns, in retrospect it's kind of amazing to me that anything starting with a remit as general and vague as "music" has ever been readable at all.

I don't know anything about the specifics of this case but this

many didn't really seem to engage with the critiques made at all and dismissed them all as conspiracist crankery

seems fairly commonplace in online communities where the focus often tends to lean more towards the motives/intent/character of someone rather than what they might be saying in that particular instance. Which tends to result in a focus on whether someone is 'bad faith' or not. This might be due to the more two-dimensional nature of online communication where more can be inferred, especially when anonymous but same also appears to be true where that isn't the case too

xp were you pro or anti locking them up

― Romy Gonzalez’s utility infusion (gyac), Wednesday, 4 September 2024 bookmarkflaglink

I've read a couple of cases where some of the white guys were young and seemed to get caught up in vandalistic behaviour. Obviously I want the racist perpetrators locked but it seems that to rush through the law and order message a few people are getting locked up in prison where the sentencing is way harsher, which could mean they get groomed into fascist groups or into a violent cycle.

xp yeah the mob mentality that forms far too easily on social media is one of the very worst things about it

The big change we’ve all seen where there’s been a move away from more private and segmented spaces to “let’s put everyone in a big pile with all the Nazis and associated filth of the internet” has been a really bad development & it definitely contributes to a huge decline in a lot of my online activity.

― Romy Gonzalez’s utility infusion (gyac)

I agree but thought the past few years have actually been a move away from this? Most people I know are posting less on social media and the main spaces for communication now seem to be whatsapp group threads, slacks, discords (often associated with patreons). I like not having to see the nazis but it also feels like a sort of giving up, not that I have an alternative.

― Daniel_Rf

In a sense that’s true but discords and the like aren’t really comparable to forums etc that used to exist because they’re difficult to find and navigate; unless you’re invited to one that’s specifically for your interest it’s not an easy point of entry. It reminds me more of old torrenting sites that were invite only; great if you’re in but good fucking luck if you’re not.

― Romy Gonzalez’s utility infusion (gyac)

this is 100% for the worse yeah. it's very bleak out there now, twitter is increasingly awful to use but all the alternatives are terrible and unpleasant in their own ways and everyone's just retreated to their own little circles.

― ufo

off the cuff thoughts.

i definitely wouldn't say private discords have been "100% for the worse" for me. it gave me opportunity to explore some difficult topics in a relatively safe environment without having to worry about things that i really wasn't equipped to deal with at that time. i also haven't found it particularly gatekept... gatekeeping is a real big challenge for a lot of queer folks, and the spaces i'm in are very specifically designed to _not_ gatekeep based on those criteria. a lot of the discords i'm on do "gatekeep" on other criteria to keep out trolls and hostile folks, but really, i just followed a link on /r/traa five years ago and i'm not on anything more "elite" than that.

one of the things i've experienced is that... increasingly, it's not really meaningful to differentiate between "online" interaction and "in-person" interaction. particularly since COVID, those lines have blurred quite a bit. all of the problems i see in online interaction is also present, in some form, in-person.

for instance: discords, in particular, tend to have a lot of drama. all of this stuff about "no cops", man, it just doesn't work like that. do i want someone to serve and protect me? just the latter, really, i'm more of a sub. do i believe that law enforcement is structurally capable of doing that? hell no. we all gotta be cops these days, is the shitty thing. we gotta police our own boundaries, look out for each other's safety. we gotta decide who's in and who's out, we gotta gatekeep. my reluctance to do that on the discord i founded is a large part of why i'm permabanned from there.

i've found "community" to be an ephemeral, precious thing. maybe that's always the way it's been. this whole thing of us retreating to our own little circles... that's not really _new_. it's normal to want to be around people who are like you, people who can understand you, people you can understand, in ways that aren't possible with a lot of people. it's a balancing act. the nazis and associated filth are part of the problem, but for me, honestly, the bigger problem is the stuff that's being talked about in this thread, these vicious in-fights and drama between people who are aligned in a lot of ways. that's been part of the internet as long as i've been there. as far as i can tell it's a foundational part of the medium, flaming, hostility, online bullying, though i guess there are people who will tell you it was different before the Eternal September.

that's the other thing - the question of _scale_. part of the reason i'm here is because it's not huge like twitter. i don't know everyone here, but over time i've gotten to know a lot of people's quirks, personalities, identities, in ways that aren't readily apparent, particularly on an all-text medium. take out the nazis and associated filth and you've still got an enormous pile where, i mean, a lot of people, including me, want to climb to the top. it's overwhelming, overstimulating, sensory overload. these small communities, i feel like i can talk more personally, speak more meaningfully, than i could somewhere like twitter.

i don't feel like i'm "giving up". we got a saying, "existence is resistance". long as i'm alive, i haven't "given up", not really. it's just, you know, a lot of times just staying alive is all one can do. communities, online or elsewhere, gotta take a back seat to survival. a space where i feel safe, where i feel protected... i mean, kicking out the nazis would help, obviously. i'd say that's necessary, but not sufficient. what would be sufficient? shit, i'll let you know when i see it.

When I say retreating into private spaces feels like giving up to me that does not mean I am accusing everyone else who does so of this.

oh yeah to clarify i'm not criticizing you for saying that, my personal experience is just different!

Understood, Kate, and I'm sorry if I came across as prickly.

The sad thing for me is I do have the financial and mental stability that I don't feel I need to retreat into private groups on those grounds, it's just that after going through phases of trying to engage with yer Modern Town Square I've found that it seems to do nothing, except get me irritated. And that's not a big insight I know, debate culture is fundamentally toothless and serves only to legitimize nazis, but it's still a letdown after the promise of the internet for me to revert back to "ok I'll just hang with very small groups of ppl into the same esoteric interests I have, or straight up my friends from IRL".

isn't that how it's always been? and what is the problem with that anyway?

i feel like if you have a community where ppl share your interests and an IRL friend group -- idk, what more can you ask for? i feel like the notion of the town square is as much a product of ideology as debate culture, the "marketplace of ideas," or centrist undecided voters in a diner in rural USA. i think it's normal to shift lenses and to put on different hats and to experience the idea of Society from a multitude of angles -- i pick up a little from community radio, a little from ILX, a little from glancing at headlines, a little from IRL conversations. i don't think that one is more real or legitimate than the other, or that one vantage point represents a courageous plunge into the real world, while another means resignation. if that makes sense.

but maybe i am misunderstanding

I don't think it's "how it's always been" because I think I lead a significantly more atomized life than I did 30 years ago.

I also think there was something about the unpredictability of online communities in the past that exposed me to a lot of different life experiences and viewpoints (nb not nazi viewpoints, not even nec political viewpoints) that I think lessens the more specialized your online spaces are.

I also think there was something about the unpredictability of online communities in the past that exposed me to a lot of different life experiences and viewpoints (nb not nazi viewpoints, not even nec political viewpoints) that I think lessens the more specialized your online spaces are.

― Daniel_Rf

i mean that's the thing, right? there are always gatekeepers of some sort. i'm a curious, inquisitive person, but the sorting hats on the internet nowadays, well. it makes it hard for me to engage and connect with other people. like, i run across all kinds of interesting and weird stuff but i don't really have the opportunity to _talk_ about most of the things that interest me. which admittedly is on the esoteric side of things - i regularly wind up clicking on videos with fewer than 100 views.

but, also, i am definitely getting older and slower. and, really, the bigger problem is that the people i connect with most are deeply traumatized, desperate, and broke. well, i'm only the first two of those things right now.