The Internet of Beefs (2020)

&gt; You only opt-in to the Internet of Beefs driven by a sincere grievance if you are mook enough to want to. If you aren’t, and you haven’t fallen into the IoB by becoming vulnerable or compromised in some way, you are there either because you’ve been baited in, or because you are profiting from its existence.<p>I&#x27;m profiting from its existence. Beefs are good for engagement. Although I do sometimes wonder why it so often happens to me. Maybe my takes are more controversial. Maybe it&#x27;s because I simplify things so the barrier to disagreement is much lower.<p>Although I do disagree with the &#x27;end of history&#x27; argument. Humans have always been like this. Just look at Jon Ronson&#x27;s book &#x27;So You Have Been Publicly Shamed&#x27;. People were always terrible. The only difference is now we have the technology to gang up on anyone using the internet.

&gt; Anything that is not an expression of pure, unqualified support for whatever they are doing or saying is received as a mark of disrespect, and a provocation to conflict.<p>Don&#x27;t you dare try to weaken my hatred with nuance.

I was watching an interview with Yayo and I didn’t realize until then that even a friendly greeting with someone that had beef with your in-group was considered a deep betrayal.

&gt; Beefing is everywhere on the internet. Bernie and Warren beef with each other and with Trump, different schools of economists beef with each other over trade policy, climate hawks beef with climate doves. Here you see Slavoj Žižek and Jordan Peterson taking their beef offline. There you see Ben Shapiro attempt to bait Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez into a live beef for the hundredth time. And over on that side, we find Jesse Singal beefing with trans activists.<p>...<p>&gt; And this is just the North American, English-language theater of the IoB (the other major one I’m familiar with, the Indian theater, is much worse).<p>I have two observations on this. The first is that the interaction model of a platform influences this. Platforms with a creator-audience dynamic promote this sort of thing: YouTube, everything Meta owns, Twitter. Reddit and HN make this sort of thing less likely because posters can&#x27;t establish a brand and there&#x27;s no &#x27;follow&#x27; mechanism.<p>My second observation is that there is a cultural component to this. Consider &#x2F;r&#x2F;politics: every comment page is just hundreds of people saying that Trump is awful. US politics is so polarised that supporters of different political parties need to be segregated into different subreddits. Compare and contrast &#x2F;r&#x2F;australianpolitics and &#x2F;r&#x2F;ukpolitics, where, despite a strong bias towards the Labo(u)r parties, the whole Overton window is welcome to participate, and they participate by engaging in earnest, interesting discussion. The &#x27;no, they&#x27;re the bad people over there&#x27; comments are downvoted as the worthless rot that they are.<p>I have a theory as to why this is, but I don&#x27;t think HN is the right place to discuss it.

I’d very much like an internet of chicken; no beef please.