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ketzutoday at 11:08 AM1 replyview on HN

> toxic tweets receive ~86% more retweets

The part that annoys me about the toxicity, or repetetive and annoying topics on reddit, HN, etc. is not that I am unaware that the content is produced by a small fraction. (I underestimated the count! I guessed 2%)

It's that people espouse it: They upvote and retweet it.

> Both sides develop wildly inaccurate beliefs about who the other side actually is.

That was a guess I had for a while. People have a strawman version of their out-groups in mind and quickly map people to that if an unknown person says something that indicates they might be part of the out-group.

> What percentage of the other side supports political violence?

It would be interesting to see the in-group statistic as well: "What percentage of your own side supports policical violence?", in my experience people also justify very shitty behavior as long as its from their in-group. (This plays heavily into the first point of espousing all kinds of shit)

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It would be interesting to see if the community check actually changes anything. But the actual data seems to be only possibly for very generic topics - those we have the data on already. Something that would not be available for daily-fresh topics.

For my personal sanity I simply left reddit and stopped opening comments on certain HN posts - of course that does not help with the societal problems. Unfortunately.


Replies

Arkhaine_kupotoday at 11:26 AM

> People have a strawman version of their out-groups in mind and quickly map people to that if an unknown person says something that indicates they might be part of the out-group.

I think something that is not calibrated in the post and also missing in this reply is that believes and actions do not need to be aligned.

Both groups say around 10% of members support political violence, however no democratic president is pardoning wholesale domestic terrorists. And the 90% of republicans who condemn political violence are not repudiating, removing themselves or condeming the fact that far right groups are the most dangerous demo according to the FBI, or that most political violence occurs in rep states, or the direct correlation of the NRA infiltration into rep campaigning and mass shootings...

Like if you say you dislike violence but defend the system that creates the violence and pardon the people who commit the violence and share the table and take the money from the violent people... your "beliefs" are not worth much.

The whole conversation about out-groups is less relevant when discussing left wing policy due to the fact that it is not orchestrated AROUND in and outgroups. Right wing ideology is de-facto a ingroup political theory where some people must be excluded. When you add morality being justified due to being in group you end up with some very concerning politics where actions are judged on beloning to the group and not the morality of the action or the consequences.

See the blue collar protect the children anti abortion crew voting for a new york millionaire owner of a beuty pagent who was best friend with the worlds best known human child trafficker...

The believe system collapses the second you put the right tee shirt on, and that is what makes polling those people irrelevant. They simply will support whatever is in front of them as long as they belong to the in group. War bad in ukraine, war good in Iran. Taxes bad in 2018, tariff taxes good now. Sillicon Valley tech people all leftwing indian soy boys in 2016 now all alpha podcast ai cool guys who fund our president.

nothing matters as long as you wear the tee shirt