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Discussion (127 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
This is a great "behind the scenes" style look at the actual people behind a viral clip. Luckily they have an extremely strong relationship to help soften the blows here, I'm not sure an average (not even bad!) relationship could come out of something like this unscathed.
There's something feral in us that comes out from time to time, especially online from the safety of our screens. I found the announcers within the range of good fun but when it gets to people reaching out to break up their marriage or telling him to kill himself it becomes really sobering.
I think this is part of what people are calling the lonlieness epidemic - despite thousands of screaming voices the whole thing makes me feel hollow and hopeless.
The first part I thought the same thing, what are the chances someone randomly is a great writer, once the tells hit though I couldn't unsee the AIisms.
The world is getting stranger though, the tells will disappear eventually and everyone will be a pro.
Get used to it. I don't think we're far from every bit of prose online, being at least edited, if not authored, by AI.
If people don't want to read AI, then they won't be reading anything but literary classics.
I'm not saying I find the prospect thrilling; just that it's inevitable.
As for the topic, projecting values, and life stories onto people from single data points, is a favorite sport of just about anyone. We often see people on this very forum, praising or attacking others as a person, and assigning motives; based on only a single comment. One habit that I've developed, is if someone posts something either in support or in opposition to one of my posts, I look them up, and try to find out as much as possible about them, before responding. It often fails, because people don't want others to know about them, but I suspect that it succeeds, a lot more than people might think.
One very common pattern I saw is that the conclusion is always that the dad is useless. Any provided facts are downplayed. Any omitted facts are imagined in the most negative light possible. And to be fair, there really are LOTS of cases where the dad is useless. The issue is more that posts needed to contain a mountain of evidence to return a neutral ground where the dad is no longer seen as a piece of garbage, rather than starting from neutral ground.
I feel for moms, who in addition to giving birth and having their lives upended to raise a baby, are now told that not only are most men garbage, but their man is garbage too. I feel for the dads, who even if they work hard are told how useless they are, and have to combat a stream of negativity fed to their spouse. It's a divisive wedge thrown into a new family, one that social media algorithms are only happy to encourage for engagement.
When I see instances like the one in this topic, I can see how the default narrative has been applied here. The radio announcers surely aren't aware of the storm they're creating, but it suddenly thrusts two average people into the social media spotlight, where people are happy to assume any missing details to fit their narrative. Everyone is going to apply the default story without taking any time to consider the possibility of other context.
EDIT TO ADD: I know there are manosphere spaces that are toxic too. As a man I've had no problem avoiding them, so this is one of my first extended exposures to this type of content, which is why it stuck with me. Probably also because I felt personally unwelcome as a dad.
But no -- I know too many Black women who have -- I suppose -- chosen forgiveness. Too many intelligent humans that I know or know of, are good with this for me to say "No, ladies, you are wrong."
My only conclusion is the whole idea of "listen to women" is itself simplistic as it assumes women all think the same. Certainly I still listen to women, but im not willing to assume they all feel a certain way just because a few people insist they do. Otherwise Im just ignoring the women with the minority view
Online behavior is unfortunately a slightly worse mirror of real life. If you want to experience people outside of your bubble, just go to any public hearings or meetings and you’ll find that a lot of people are quite out there.
Because "of similar situations she'd seen".
She had magically deep telepathic abilities, it seems.
Flip genders and most likely people say things like this. Somehow men are just expected to deal with this but if it’s directed at a woman it’s all bad.
While also erasing everything that is real about that person's life, too.
I cringe whenever I hear someone angrily yell something like "You don't/can't know how I feel!", because unless the person making the accusation knows the accused very, very well, they could well be really stepping it. Nobody makes it through this life unscathed. Everybody loses people they love. Everybody gets kicked in the gut multiple times in life. Yes, everyone's personal life story, if you get specific enough, isn't exactly like someone else's. I won't claim to know exactly what it's like to be sexually abused, for instance. Wouldn't dream of it. Very serious issue. But I've had kicks to the gut that the one screaming that they may not have an exact analog for either.
I may not know how your exact gut punch feels. Maybe you've had noticeably more gut punches than I have. But everybody has had some sort of experience with them.
If one day a genie's magic spell made you see text pop ups above everyone's head with their traumas and abuses in life, and the emotional and physical burdens they're carrying today, you'd probably have a very hard time walking down the street.
Similarly, I really have a distaste for any variation of the "everyone's sheep" meme, especially when it's because they're not being active in some particular political way that the person flinging the meme around thinks they should be. If you could see those popups, maybe you'd understand why not everyone has a bunch of spare time to do whatever it is you think they should do to not be "sheep". Looking out on to a crowd of people and presuming they are "sheeple" reveals a lack of imagination and sympathy with people rather that the possession of a wise eye and strong understanding of the world.
There's a widespread problem of anti-intellectualism and acting-out, including, in the US, by both right and left. Most of the learning feedback to that -- pointing out to people when they might be missing something or acting unfairly -- is ignored, except to attack those who point it out.
AFAICT, for various reasons, they're proud of being warriors for their beliefs, and anyone who sounds like they're saying anything differently is the enemy, and the only thing you do with an enemy is score points against them or hurt them, while trying not to concede anything that the enemy would claim as points or hurt you. It's a toxic recipe for society.
Coincidentally, recently I've decided even Fedi isn't safe from that (it's just different and fewer people doing ideological bully thinking), and have resigned myself that issues of substance can't be discussed there either. Maybe the only safe thing to post is cat pictures.
I think it's much less a problem with HN. Of course, over time you realize certain positions get downvotes that aren't flattering to the people doing it, and some annoying commenting behaviors, and not always all the integrity we'd like to see, which are relatively mild by social media standards. However, I'm also seeing occasional random individual actor extreme toxicity problems with HN. And I'm anticipating some related but different kind of problems from how AI-powered tools will be easily used with the corpus/firehose to play toxic games.
As of 2026, it's disingenuous to both sides this issue, at least in the US
Communicating with relatives on the other side of the world.
Maintaining old friendships that would have died due to distance.
Somewhere to find like minded people.
Somewhere like hacker news (I count it as social media top) where I discovered great books, expanded my horizons and learnt that there were other ways at looking at the world.
Anyway, it's not all bad :)
The question to me is, with enough content and a powerful enough recommendation algorithm trained with enough eyeballs can short form videos be considered addictive in a clinical sense? If so what are the deleterious effects of the addiction? Should it be regulated?
I’m all for freedom, but we regulate drugs because we deem them bad for society.
Keeping in touch with relatives or friends in much of the world has long since moved to chat apps like WhatsApp instead of an open social network.
Social media kept me from attempting suicide during COVID. It helps me feel loved and connected.
Yeah, there are faults, but condemning it wholeheartedly is like suggesting we should abolish ICE cars immediately.
And suggesting we abandon it as a comment on a social media platform is ironically self-unaware.
Social media before algorithmic attention hacking wasn’t nearly as bad, might have been a net good.
The first thing the algorithm destroyed was the “social” part of social media. Then it set about destroying society and kids attention spans.
For those who aren't Giants/baseball fans, Mike Krukow (the Giants' color commentator) is retiring at the end of this season. He and Duane Kuiper have been the Giants' primary TV broadcast team for something like 37 years and have been best friends since they were teammates in the early '80s.
Krukow's mind is still sharp, but he has inclusion body myositis, and it's becoming unsafe for him to be anywhere other than at home.
It's just an emotional situation all around. They both thought that they would probably continue broadcasting together for at least a few more years, and now they're not.
So they're pulling out all of their usual schticks -- including poking fun at the fans -- and taking them really, really far because they know it's the last time.
I'm sure they would agree they went a little too far with that one.
Kinda off topic, but as a single Father I cant help but notice how much less of a support system Fathers get. When shit hits the fan its always people assuming the worst. A Fathers major support system is their Wives and Family. Good for him for having such a great Woman by his side... Im not complaining, just an observation
As author wrote: we need to practice the benefit of the doubt. Or I like the “trust but verify” pattern
I’m not so sure, I’m convinced people would not bat an eye. Or at least I don’t expect any positive compliments, only neutral or negative.
Article is about the impact of social media pile-ons (and has been getting praise within tech) so it is within scope for HN.
Also I note that a lot of "legacy" pretexts for shaming are off the table. It's not done to shame people simply for being gay; that's now acceptable even in Conservative circles. So perhaps the total shame has just been redistributed, somewhat arbitrarily.
(And another thing: this has evolved shame resistant politicians just like antibiotic overuse evolved MRSA)
Well, I can't make much progress on or change those things so let me distract myself checking out this shitbird who won't help his wife or hold the baby while she gets some nachos. I can be outraged at him because it's small and tangible compared to being outraged at structural inequality of our current economic reality or the looming climate crisis.
I think it needs to be called out as being bad, and deconstructed properly, and that outrage needs to get redirected back onto the structural issues.
Which is another argument--that when people behave badly because of structural issues, that isn't an excuse.
And that kind of language to "get discussion going" is well know to those aiming for views.
It is amazing how many haters emerge like in this case, when there is so much more to the story.
Go from "X great, Y OK" to "X great, Y terrible".
It is just good old misandry!
https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/
The brain does what it does in an attempt to help you, but not often it hits the mark, sometimes it takes a bit of a reminder to pause and unpack things more carefully.
A lot of people owe this family an apology. Here’s a sampling of some of the vile comments left on Reddit.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Fauxmoi/comments/1wpll52/clip_of_a_...
https://archive.is/MlgWh
> Whoever sees this and it reminds them of their current relationship, DUMP HIM
> you can tell by the body language, lack of initiative, and lack of joy and welcome-ness for his woman and baby to be back, everything you need to know.
> There is a VERY good chance that when he realizes he went viral for being the *Poster Manchild* of taking your spouse for granted, of choosing to act like a parasitic blob
Modern Reddit provides a simulacrum of commentary. There are posts and people discusing these posts, but nobody understands or wants to know anything about the underlying topic. The lack of comprehension is crucial to the community.
Damn, do these people really jump out of joy whenever their SO, parent, child, friend, or whoever comes back after a 10' chore?
Life is not a movie, “coming back” is a dozen-times-of-day occurrence, no one will cheer you back from the toilets.
Perhaps you could endow your claim with some evidence.
Thing is, I also twigged it as heavily LLM written when I read it, so. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
You can't win with these people.
> Six weeks before my daughter was born, my employer of 13 years laid off my entire division. Ramses had just put up the down payment on a bigger home for our growing family. My unemployment meant he was facing the mortgage payments and managing a remodel on his own, while we prepared to welcome another child.
Quite ironic when we are talking about an article which argues for extending the benefit of the doubt.
It's trained on the speech of online commenters like us; That's where it's getting these. I'm not gonna change just because Timmy the Zoomer has been with his LLM girlfriend for the past three years and occasionally I remind him of her. I'm not going to deliberately code switch into somebody who doesn't open a new tab to Google things as he talks about them. And you can take my bullet point lists from my cold, dead hands.
Some people say that AI is glorified spellchecker and then they complain when it’s used like a glorified spellchecker.
IMHO It's when you see someone who is paid to write/think using LLMs that you might make a value judgement.
I once knew a girl who wore prescription-free glasses b/c it made her feel smarter so she'd study longer. Not kidding. I made a value judgement about that. But she got the studying done. There's been other more prevalent cases of that on socials.
It might be worth letting some people write in any way they can.
Even before reading, I would assume a non-professional writer would lean on ai to try to figure out what points she wanted to hit and how to phrase things. The cost right now for that is the writing can be somewhat bland, but sometimes that isn't a big problem. Haven't we all seen enough incoherent ai slop to understand the value of editorial oversight by now?
I am working on a libretto in my free time, a hobby I've had for 15 years. Lyrics that would previously take me a week often take an evening. Nearly every suggested stanza and bar is rewritten by me still, but these models can be very helpful in explore the structure of beats to hit, imagery that may or may not land, rhyme and phonetic space etc. Maybe it's ai psychosis or cope but I think my current project is a leap beyond my last two plays. Isn't that what matters for creative expression at the end of the day?
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49858463 and marked it off topic.