Ask HN: Why has the internet become so pessimistic and political?

52 points by you_are_naive 5 years ago | 47 comments

I can't find a single place without politics and pessimism. It should be easy to differentiate between conspiracy theorists but lately, I have been finding it harder. Every thread here results in accusing companies of wrong doing even when the evidence isn't quite clear. Other places like reddit and blogs are even worse.

While I understand there must be politics in every day life and it is inescapable but the issue and discussion seems to go round and round. I am not finding anything insightful from any political discussion online. Is it just me? I feel like most things come down to people wanting to have enough resources to live happily. If they just had enough money, most of their problems would be solved.

Is it selection bias that commenters on the internet tend to be more depressed/lonely?

Has the demography gone down in age which results in lot of shitty behaviour like witch hunts and trending non-issue outrage? Young generation seems to like these and they especially love twitch from what I have seen. Maybe an impact of that?

What do you think is the biggest reason for the current condition?

BitwiseFool 5 years ago |

There is no single reason for why this is happening but I do have a few suspicions on what is contributing to it.

1) The internet is directly and indirectly incentivizing this kind of attention seeking behavior. It's rewarding to be noticed, upvoted, and retweeted. Pleasant, well reasoned, and evenhanded discussion rarely gets as much attention as sassy clapbacks.

2) Younger generations have been raised to believe that activism is a virtue and that injecting politics into everything is the way to affect progress (intersectionality).

3) Young people tend to be more vocal and more prolific. This is probably because they have more energy and free time than older folks. Additionally, young people tend to be more abrasive/obnoxious, as they don't have as much life experience to tone themselves down and learn how to behave.

pickle-wizard 5 years ago | |

I've noticed what you say about younger people. I'm in my early 40s and my sister is her early 20s.

My Dad is an aerospace engineer and we were discussing the work that Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin is doing with their rockets. When my sister buts in and goes on a 20 minute rant about how it is unethical for billionaires to exist. It really pissed me off as I don't get to talk to my Dad much[1], especially about things he is excited about. That's not the only time she has done it, it happens all the time.

Or maybe I'm just an apathetic Gen Xer.

[1] I live 500 miles away and my Dad doesn't like to talk on the phone.

ChrisArchitect 5 years ago | | |

rough yeah. But not specifically younger gen, as see similar behaviour clearly on things like Clubhouse, with some older folks, where everyone just rants and likes the sound of their own voice

nobodyandproud 5 years ago | | |

Gen-X is the modern silent generation, except on a downward trend.

Papirola 5 years ago | | |

youth is wasted on the young

ploika 5 years ago | |

I don't really agree with this. I think the internet is just starting to look more and more like real life.

My grandmother, born in a house without electricity, is on Twitter. My aunts and uncles, who would previously have watched argumentative current affairs panel shows on TV (which were never pleasant or even-handed, even decades ago), can now join in the brawl in the comments sections online.

The young people argument is a bit too loose for my liking too. Are you talking about teenagers or people in their thirties? I'd also directly challenge you on the assertion that young people have more free time and are more obnoxious than older people. I'm not sure that stands up to scrutiny.

BitwiseFool 5 years ago | | |

>"I'd also directly challenge you on the assertion that young people have more free time and are more obnoxious than older people."

I'm generally talking about teenagers to people in their 20's. I made this observation based on my own experience, where my friends who are in their mid 20's to early 30's have started participating way less often in group chats and social activities because they are raising children now. They also have less free time because they're rising up the corporate ladder and have taken on more responsibilities. I have also noticed my own energy levels decline as I age, so that's where I am coming from. I think if you combine all those factors together you get people with much less time and energy than college aged or fresh out of college aged people.

As for the obnoxious part, you can absolutely take that with a grain of salt. I was making that assertion with adolescents and people in their early 20's in-mind. Basically, the prime age for being rebellious, raunchy, and irreverent towards authority. I don't have any scientific evidence to give you, but anecdotally that attitude seems to mellow out with time.

treis 5 years ago | |

>There is no single reason for why this is happening

The internet skews heavily young, international, and urban. In other words, pretty overwhelmingly Democratic. Obviously they were pretty unhappy with the way things were going the last 4 years. It's not really different from how things were under Bush. And now that Biden is president and the Dems control congress things will be less negative online.

softwaredoug 5 years ago |

Here's what politics was like ~30 years ago (in the US): your representative was rewarded primarily on the basis of local issues and economics. For us it was 'can they keep the local Navy base open' which provided most jobs. You can see the remnants of this pork-barrel politics in the Obamacare deal, with various deals to bring over a few senators.

The US had tons of diversity. But it got expression in local culture, and you didn't think as deeply about your identity at a national level. The national stuff felt more distant. It was exceedingly rare families to travel outside one or two state radius.

NOW, perhaps due to the Internet, maybe other factors, everything far away feels 'closer'. It's like we're suddenly crammed together at the same party, sharing more space with people that we would have culturally been more distant from in the past, creating tons of issues. Most issues have become nationalized. The lack of local media compared to social media, the lack of attachment to a community (people move more), and other factors probably are at play here.

So everyone projects values in the past they would have put into local communities onto the shared, national space. Of course if I project my educated, metropolitan PoV and you project your rural working class PoV, things will clash and we will have fundamental disagreements about everything, including facts and core values.

mattm 5 years ago | |

This is a good This American Life podcast about that issue:

> Two towns where people got really upset about undocumented immigrants, even though in both places, that did not seem to be the most important thing happening at all. One of the towns, a small town in Alaska, has no undocumented immigrants at all, but the possibility of them arriving put the whole town at each other’s throats.

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/621/fear-and-loathing-in-ho...

BitwiseFool 5 years ago | | |

Something about this seems dismissive. I definitely get the sense of "Why are you worrying about this? You shouldn't be worried because it won't affect you. Just let us do this because you shouldn't be worried about it."

grawprog 5 years ago |

>What do you think is the biggest reason for the current condition?

Constant, non-stop, emotionally driven news and media available 24/7.

The news used to be a thing people did at 6pm or maybe in the morning with a newspaper. It didn't invade every day life and wasn't generally most people's focus.

These days' you've got news on the top results of google searches, news on facebook, news on twitter, forums devoted to posting about discussing news as fast as it comes up.

The thing about news is, a large part of it has always been politics, it just used to be kind of dry and boring to most people.

Now politicians are exaggerated and almost caricaturistic in their actions and words, the news plays up every tiny thing in an emotional way, so politics became big bucks as far as news goes, so it became a larger part of the news.

These things combined means a larger part of people's conversational topics becomes politics.

v_london 5 years ago |

I believe the biggest problem is virality. What you see is determined by what captured the attention of other users, or what algorithms think would keep you on the site so they can serve more ads to your hungry eyeballs. As it turns out, divisive and emotional content (whether it's politics, pop culture flame wars or YouTube drama) is great at capturing that attention.

It's a problem I've recognized, and we're currently working on a new kind of social network that aims to promote better discussion on the internet. One of our methods is removing the concept of "virality" and having the discussions happen in small groups instead of on public forums. After all, your group chats with friends still have good discussions, that's what we're trying to replicate on a wider scale. We don't yet have a website to show unfortunately :(

tanseydavid 5 years ago |

You said: I am not finding anything insightful from any political discussion online. Is it just me?

No it is not just you.

You asked: What do you think is the biggest reason for the current condition?

I believe the single-greatest contributor to the current condition is the way in which wholesale dehumanization of "the other" has been utterly normalized.

My opinion is that this type of Political Puritanism (seriously afflicting both sides of the political spectrum) is product of a "win-at-any-cost" mentality.

username90 5 years ago |

It is because the people who drive what you see online doesn't care about your wellbeing.

At the dinner table: We shouldn't talk about politics, just brings heated arguments and makes us miserable. As long as nobody brings it up we can get a moment of calm and happiness.

At the community management table: We should encourage people to talk about politics by constantly showing them posts about politics, brings so much engagement!

codegeek 5 years ago |

- Too many people on the internet who just want it to be about them. Me Me Me. Look at me. I try not to be that guy but I am sure I have been there too. Look at facebook. It is mostly a bunch of family/friends showing their latest vacation pics, or their kids doing some stuff (guilty as charged here) or whatever. It is mostly about THEM. Look at me. Me me me. Instagram. Need I say anything ? Twitter: A bunch of people who have opinions and if they are famous, everyone listens in. Like ok, who cares but people do. When someone "less fortunate" sees all that stuff, they get depressed/jealous/sad whatever. Why can't I have those things ? Why can't I go to that great vacation ? Oh, look at THAT family. How perfect they are. My life sucks.

- People are really becoming too reserved and within their own circles. Internet has made it much easier contrary to what we may have thought when internet started. Now you don't need to worry about socializing or getting to know your neighbor. You can literally get/do anything online these days which also means you create your own echo chambers. For example, why participate in a debate with a fellow neighbor/friend when I can go on reddit (anonymized) and write whatever I want for the most part. I was talking to someone few days ago and they mentioned "We used to almost know everyone in my neighborhood 15 years ago and now in the same neighborhood, I only know a handful"

I wouldn't say most commenters online are depressed. I think it is more because of how our society has become.

runsWphotons 5 years ago | |

It's funny you bring up not debating your neighbours and posting online. This happened to me a few days ago. My neighbor who introduced myself to started asking lots of political questions. I didn't agree with the apparent viewpoint, but it was clear I would never change her mind, so I was just politely trying to get out of the conversation. I think the internet gives the illusion that you might find someone who will actually debate? Like it's easier to ignore that you probably aren't changing anyone's mind.

AnimalMuppet 5 years ago |

Why has the internet become so pessimistic and political? Because people are so pessimistic and political.

Has it always been like this, or is it getting worse? Yes. Yes, people have always been like this, and it's getting worse.

Why is it getting worse? I think it's because the gain is too high (think of an audio system developing feedback). Before, when you ran into some opinionated loudmouth who wouldn't listen to anything, you walked away, or you just ignored the guy ranting in the bar and talked to your own group. You ran into them in small numbers and in limited interactions. Now, they have a really big microphone, and they can be heard all over the world.

So they encounter others like themselves much more often now - others that they agree with, and others that they don't. The fraction of what we hear that is conversation between such people has gone way up. That's bad enough, but it makes some people who weren't that way think that that's the way to be heard, and they start acting that way. Even worse, some people are genuinely converted, and start acting that way out of the conviction of their new zealotry.

That may not be the only factor at play. It may not even be a correct analysis. But that's what I think is going on.

parsimo2010 5 years ago |

I think it’s a combination of anonymity, the power of the internet to increase your reach, regular greed, and human tribalism. IRL you have to be polite to people because you need to interact with people and politeness helps with that. But when you’re anonymous you don’t care as much- it can’t come back to you IRL and you don’t know the other person, so you don’t feel bad about hurting their feelings. And then there’s the sample size- if there is an opinion so extreme that only 0.1% of people agree, you could make a forum with 100k members just from the USA’s active internet users. You could go even bigger with a global audience.

A lot of people want to make money, and if you cater to someone’s opinion then you might want to give them money (a prerequisite to getting money is telling people what they like to hear). So we have a lot of super specific communities popping up, because people see it as an easy way to make money. This is fine so far. But then a fairly large group of people (by IRL standards) gather and see that everyone is like them. The idea that everyone is like them doesn’t hold true in the rest of their lives, so people start to appreciate this new home they’ve found. And then some other people from the outside come along and the “protect my tribe” instinct kicks in. Because of the anonymity people get rude over silly stuff, because they don’t like to entertain the idea that someone disagrees with them in “their” piece of the internet.

This is inevitable in nearly any internet based community. Strong moderation helps, and so does raising the cost of entry a few bucks, but neither is a perfect solution. See Stack Overflow for moderation or Metafilter for a place that costs a few dollars to join. It keeps the trolls away but something about them feels different, and I don’t know if I’d point to either option as being a best solution.

bjourne 5 years ago |

I don't associate politics with pessimism. For me, following the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign from a distance was one of the highlights of 2020. Watching the live stream in the middle of the night of Public Enemy's concert from Los Angeles was amazing! Bernie didn't become US president but it felt like it was close. A socialist US president would have been cool. In my country, we don't have nowhere near the same energy and enthusiasm the Bernie Sanders campaign had, but political work is still very rewarding, imo.

I agree though that Hacker News has become very snarky. For example, if you were to write that you find Scala difficult, ten guys would reply by explaining how that makes you a crappy developer. Pointless sharing stuff when all you get back are nitpicks and potshots.

krapp 5 years ago | |

This forum is full of people who've decided that taking the piss and hating everything is a valid substitute for informed skepticism and intellectual rigor. People who think they're very clever quoting pithy one-liners from an author whose books they've never bothered to read.

edit: and yes I am aware of the irony in this comment.

postit 5 years ago |

I believe it's mostly an unsetting bitter feeling. Underrepresented and marginalized people are fighting back structural society norms, the internet is the new medium[1], and social media resembles a lot the `Cercle social`[2].

I remember reading research that notes the music, poesy, and literature to carry cynic and political narratives preceding and during society changes (could find the link).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolism_in_the_French_Revolu... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_the_Friends_of_Trut...

leopaacc 5 years ago |

The internet has definitely gotten a lot more political if you're seeking to engage. In general feels like everything has. Work, family, friends, relationships.

It used to not be unusual to have good relationships among people with different political opinions, today, not so sure.

FAANG_dream 5 years ago |

People are frustrated in general and use online as a medium to vent out without much consequences?

genericone 5 years ago | |

No rain drop thinks it's responsible for the flood.

techbio 5 years ago | | |

Nicely put, maybe also: "Because no raindrop thinks, it's responsible for the flood."

Natfan 5 years ago | | |

Very succinct, I might use this quote for other discussions!

tenebrisalietum 5 years ago |

> I feel like most things come down to people wanting to have enough resources to live happily. If they just had enough money, most of their problems would be solved.

So how do we get people the money they need to be happy? Is making young people go 50k+ in debt to enter the workforce, while creating conditions that cause rent and housing prices to skyrocket the way to do it?

giardini 5 years ago | |

tenebrisalietum asks >" Is making young people go 50k+ in debt to enter the workforce, while creating conditions that cause rent and housing prices to skyrocket the way to do it?"<

If there is an abundance of people foolish enough to incur such debt then I see no way to prevent capitalism from doing so.

Despite our social advances the situation today remains the same as that which Charles Dickens' characterizes in "A Christmas Carol" where the main obstructions to progress are "Ignorance" and "Want"(poverty). In particular, Ignorance is difficult to extinguish w/o doing something abhorrent (at least for most of us). Although far from a Christian, more and more I find appropriate the phrase:

"The poor you will always have with you..."

- Matthew 26:11

throwaway19937 5 years ago |

> Is it selection bias that commenters on the internet tend to be more depressed/lonely?

Most of what you read on the Internet is written by a small percentage of people (https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...). This was previously discussed on HN as (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18881827) and (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25600274). The clicks and likes they receive also provide positive feedback, can be addictive, and contribute to spending more time online. It's also well established that social networks can contribute to unhappiness.

> Has the demography gone down in age which results in lot of shitty behaviour like witch hunts and trending non-issue outrage? Young generation seems to like these and they especially love twitch from what I have seen. Maybe an impact of that?

Witch hunts and moral panics are part of the human condition. The main difference is the internet makes it much easier to start a witch hunt or moral panic and lowers the transaction costs of participating. Modern moral panics are started by a tweet or post - it used to require authoring a book (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_ritual_abuse) or months/years of press coverage. It's also much more likely for controversial content to be shared (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage...). Your friend or relative on Facebook who shares click bait wouldn't have bothered to do so before the internet.

Another factor is that the woke don't believe in debate (https://newdiscourses.com/2020/07/woke-wont-debate-you-heres...). They feel that the deck is rigged against them, debating reinforces the current oppressive system, that all disagreement is illegitimate, and that anyone with power who isn't dismantling the current system is evil.

> What do you think is the biggest reason for the current condition?

I think the biggest reason is that the internet has made it much easier for people to publicize their views. People have always been this awful; you just weren't exposed to their views.

Solid_Applaud 5 years ago |

I don't know how large this effect is but confidential memos such as this one https://ibb.co/7pKQCVk are an indicator of great forces at play to alter the relationships between people online by forcing certain types of discussion.

rland 5 years ago |

The last several decades have seen a huge decline in people's actual material well being, wealth, and personal security, full stop. If you have not noticed this, congratulations, you are lucky.

It's not just "the media" and "the culture" and "the discourse..." it is material fact.

So, yes, you read the room right. The reason none of these discussions are productive is because the material strife is consistently and purposefully sublimated into cultural/personal strife, so that it any change which would arise -- which happens when people actually understand material reality -- is prevented.

The rage is cultural because if it were not cultural, things would materially change.

drstewart 5 years ago | |

Sticking the word material in front of things doesn't make them true. Full stop.

rland 5 years ago | | |

Okay.

People are doing worse than in the past. They have less secure jobs, less wealth, less opportunity, more debt, and worse health than they used to have. They are less upwardly mobile, their incomes increase less, and their incomes are lower than they used to be. More people are imprisoned, houseless, etc. than they used to be. People are dying more often of preventable causes and they are overdosing and killing themselves more often. You can look up the statistics and charts on each of these claims; aside from minor quibbling and in some sub-sets (computer programmers being an example of such!) these things are true across the board.

These are things with political solutions that are entirely ignored. As opposed to "womxn are disrespected" type things that are discussed in their place. I wanted to emphasize "material" so that I could emphasize that these things are not culture things.