alt Hacker NewsI agree those are real failure modes, and I am not denying they happen. People absolutely misread disagreement as bad faith, or assume coordination where there is none, especially when emotions are involved.
Where I differ is that I do not think this is only an individual perception problem. There are structural incentives online that reward signaling, amplification, and rapid norm enforcement over slower, substantive engagement. That does not require explicit coordination to function like a pile on, and it does not require bad intent from participants.
Social pressure and norm enforcement are inevitable in any society, as you note. My concern is about degree and speed. When the dominant response to a nonconforming view is immediate identity assignment or moral framing rather than argument, the space for persuasion narrows quickly. At that point, engagement becomes less about exchanging ideas and more about sorting people.
Opting out is always an option, but that feels like conceding that meaningful public discourse online is no longer worth defending. I am not convinced that is a good outcome either.
> There are structural incentives online that reward signaling, amplification
Those same structural incentives reward people organizing around a topic about which they're genuinely both passionate and informed. So how are you determining the difference?
> and rapid norm enforcement over slower, substantive engagement
Different people have different opinions over whether violation of norms should be tolerated, and how quickly. Note that this is different from tolerating disagreement, but some disagreement is so heinous as to violate norms in and of itself (e.g. a nazi salute).
> That does not require explicit coordination to function like a pile on, and it does not require bad intent from participants.
Sure, but a "pile on", which I'll refer to by the more impartial term "many people disagreeing with a person or their take" or "many people validly expressing that a person has violated norms" is totally okay and valid in a society. The speed and degree of that enforcement is itself a social norm, and if it seems people prefer a high speed and high degree, then that is the norm.
I could speculate why that has become the norm, but I'll just generalize that there is a lot of hurt going around, and a lot of callousness to it, and a lot of failures of the traditional ways of addressing it, like shame.