Like you alluded to, the terminally online people who post the most tend to be those with neuroticism, isolation, severe anxiety, etc. There's a famous Reddit post about this I can't seem to find - "Everyone Online Is Insane" or something.
I really think this is why the past decade+ of American culture, politics, and society has been so off-the-wall insane. The Overton Window - another overused Redditism - of society has shifted towards the opinions of the neurotic and anxious. Those are the people whose words fill the comment sections and posts that we all read, which then infuse our minds to expect these thoughts as the baseline/median opinion of society.
https://old.reddit.com/r/redscarepod/comments/1kkey4d/every_...
> Doesn't matter who you ask on this site. The incel, the rad fem, the regular liberal, the happily married person, the casanova; they will all tell you some variety to stay in your own lane and shut up. They will all use different language, but the meanings will always be the same: they live a life of constant loneliness and have found kinship with others who agree that to ever do something to counter that loneliness is beyond abhorrent behaviour.
Explains the rise of various political leaders very well.
I find it funny that even the people who comment on the "Everyone Online Is Insane" post sound obsessive or outside the norm.
I find it messes with my mental health when I read too many comments. In the real world I normally find people to be nice and kind. But then I go online and the world is totally different - I have to keep in perspective that its just a small outsized fraction.
Well, yeah. I agree with the statement that "everyone online is insane", while also recognizing that I myself am online a lot, and think and behave differently from societal norms.
I think that's part of what is needed. There's absolutely nothing wrong with thinking and behaving differently from other people. What's abnormal is when people become absorbed in the internet, to the point that they fail to recognize that people in real life, people outside their Internet echo chambers, think and behave very differently.
They disappear to you, but not to all of the other people who you share a society with who are still staring at their little boxes. And, for better or worse, you still have to live in a world with and share elections with those people too.
I agree, completely, that it's good to get offline. But the pervasive societal effects of extremely online psychology can't be solved simply by opting oneself out of the game.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1o87cy4/oc...
Redditors want you to cut contact with all your loved ones so you can spend more time on reddit, telling people to cut contact with their loved ones. It's like a cult.
Why should anyone entertain this theory? You’re a comment box.
Edit: Thirty years ago us online freaks would just interact with other online freaks. Because normal people had real hobbies.
But now that we are all doomscrollers: why would normal people be interested in the comment boxes of online freaks? They’ve got YouTube shorts and whatever to watch.
That things like 4Chan has had an outsized effect is a different matter. It’s all mediated through twenty layers. It’s not normal people reading 4Chan and other freaks directly.
You can find legions of people, particularly women, who do not want to be hit on unless they already find the other person attractive. Being hit on by an unattractive person may even quality for them as something akin to danger, already along the spectrum towards stalking or assault. Has nothing to do with being terminally online and has been reported since long before there was ever an internet.
> For many others, they're starving for social interaction
HN is an international forum, and while people are reporting increased loneliness in many countries, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they want attention from strangers. Where I live, a total stranger talking to you in public is annoying; it is strongly associated with foreigners who haven’t learned yet how to behave acceptably within the local culture. What people might be starving for are serious, long-term social bonds, of the kind that used to be common through large extended families, the parish church, team sports, and school friends who stay put and don’t move away. A mere friendly stranger in public could lead to such real bonds only rarely, so rarely that it’s not even worth considering.
Oftentimes, a stranger coming up to you on the street spells danger, it has nothing to do with how attractive or unattractive they are.
It's hard to explain if you've never been in a woman's shoes, but you feel like prey. A chance conversation can quickly turn into a decades-long stalking event, one never knows. Unwanted attention for women can feel really dangerous, I have often been catcalled/followed when not with my husband (which is infuriating as an adult woman), and have been followed/catcalled on the street from the moment I turned 14, which you can imagine makes strangers coming up to on the street feel loaded.
Tough luck, cupcake. Often you don’t know if she is into you til you approach. Often they are shy. If you keep overthinking this and afraid of being cringe, being filmed or being judged, then your genes will die out and your bloodline will end. But hey, at least you never made anyone awkward and lived a “safe” life. This will sit right with you at deathbed I’m sure.
Just trying to initiate a conversation with someone simply is not stalking nor assault, even if it is perceived that way. Their "perception" is mistaken in this case.
> HN is an international forum, and while people are reporting increased loneliness in many countries, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they want attention from strangers. Where I live, a total stranger talking to you in public is annoying; it is strongly associated with foreigners who haven’t learned yet how to behave acceptably within the local culture.
I don't know what country you are from, but it is highly probable that even in your culture, public conversations significantly decreased in the past 30 years. Which means that the amount of interactions was higher than it is now, even within the same culture.
> A mere friendly stranger in public could lead to such real bonds only rarely, so rarely that it’s not even worth considering.
The gym example of this article points in the opposite direction, or do you think that gyms in your culture work differently?
It’s their right to decide how they perceive being approached by a stranger. And most of society is going to empathize with them and their feeling of unsafety, not with the stranger approaching them.
> even in your culture, public conversations significantly decreased in the past 30 years
The culture in my country never really had many “public conversations” from one stranger to another. This is something that has been noted by foreign travelers for generations now, at least back to the nineteenth or eighteenth centuries. What has changed are that the substantial family and institutional bonds I mentioned earlier have declined.
> do you think that gyms in your culture work differently?
They definitely do. This has already been mentioned by various people from different countries in this thread.
Okay, I suppose everyone is entitled to their own delusions. But believing that initiating a conversation with a stranger is stalking or assault is just false.
> The culture in my country never really had many “public conversations” from one stranger to another. This is something that has been noted by foreign travelers for generations now, at least back to the nineteenth or eighteenth centuries.
How then do people come to know each other in the first place? Every familiar person has been a stranger at some point.
> They definitely do. This has already been mentioned by various people from different countries in this thread.
I read one of my home country (saying that you would get arrested if you did this) and I assure you it is false.
So if there is a cultural pathology it takes way more than what socializing entrepeneurs seem to think.
> Fair enough if an introvert just wants to be left alone; we should obviously never force our company on anyone (nor do the mentally healthy among us have any desire to do so, because we have empathy). However, people like that will let us know that they don't want to talk when we approach them, either directly or via body language and the nature of their replies. For many others, they're starving for social interaction, and it might make their day for you to reach out. This is what makes outreach worth it, in the end, despite the risk.
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> However, people like that will let us know that they don't want to talk when we approach them, either directly or via body language and the nature of their replies. For many others, they're starving for social interaction, and it might make their day for you to reach out. This is what makes outreach worth it, in the end, despite the risk.
Nope.
Normal people—not freaks like me—in my culture will fume in private. Yes: any slight by a stranger will be relegated to complaints to your friends. Much more likely than sending any bad vibes. We’re cowards like that.
I’m reminded of some anecdote about Westerners being struck by how helpful Japanese people are. (This is from memory and may be wrong.) The context is that they are tourists. Well, apparently Japanese people have very strict social norms about being polite and helpful. This is amazing for tourists: they get all of the social upsides while not having to pay anything in return (because they are oblivious to it).
If not, I will not let you know. I will just fume, blame and judge you for some time after.
That takes less than 10 seconds to say, let's you protect your time and peace of mind, and as a bonus there's no need for fuming, blaming, and judging that the other person won't ever even know about.
No, that obviously false. They might be more likely, but they are certainly not likely.
Not even close.
This is 100% completely on you, then. If you don't inform people you're being interrupted or that what they are doing is bothering you, they have no data to telling them to stop, and any energy you spend on silently judging them or being frustrated is only harming yourself.