This just drives home how crazy it is to have every piece of conversation archived forever.
Being a little bit of an asshole sometimes is human. If these interactions were ocurring in real life, maybe Harthur would've said, "Hey, you're being an asshole" to Klabnick et al., they would've apologized, everyone could've hugged it out and had a beer, and that would've been the end of it.
Instead, a decade later suddenly random people on the internet are putting the behavior on trial.
It goes in the other direction too; when I was 13, I got into some flame wars with people from the Half-Life modding community on places like Moddb and Facepunch and, as ashamed I am to say, I was a notorious troll, until I was 14, then I became more respectful and actually became friends with lots of the people I trolled, and even met a few in real life
But the things I said are still there, and I was dumb enough to use my real name, so they are stuck there forever, under my name.
This was maybe 15 years ago
I wonder how many rejections I got for jobs based on what HR found when they googled me
> Instead, a decade later suddenly random people on the internet are putting the behavior on trial.
Is it wrong of me to not see this as a problem? A group of grown men decided to use their large platforms to mock someone, and now - gasp - other people are seeing that they were assholes.
To me the problem is that it's natural to want to use social media in an informal, conversational way, so there will inevitably be small slip-ups of decorum. We're emotional creatures.
It seems unfair, or unhealthy, even, that those go down on your permanent record.
Even if you don't slip up in that way, the constantly looming fear that you COULD is also unpleasant.
Basically I think it's healthier for all of us if we have the ability to move on from minor transgressions, and don't have to live in fear of making a thoughtless remark or a bad joke and being tarred forever as a jerk.
Or to put it another way, I don't think Steve Klabnik is any more of a jerk than the rest of us, he just happens to have caught the attention of the eye of Sauron for a moment.
The rest of us, seeing that, will perhaps be motivated to be EXTRA careful and kind at all times, but this is basically living life under a sort of panopticon, rather than in a geniune, moment to moment way.
You would likely prefer to be judged on what you are doing now than what happened 9 years ago. From what I am seeing they already apologized, what do you expect this thread to do?
I think that as this becomes more prevalent as a society we are collectively getting better at acknowledging that people can change, especially from things long in the past. The issue is really when people get called out for things they have done in the past which is still a reflection of how they act today (they don't apologize for it, don't see anything wrong, etc.)
I had muted Klabnick on twitter some time ago because I thought he was being an asshole, and seeing something like this helps contextualize his behavior.
And yet no thought is given to broadcasting a thought to thousands or millions of people simultaneously. You're right, by the way, nobody should be put on trial for minor transgressions like this, but in a humane world, they wouldn't happen either.
also, FTA, it appears they did ask for an apology, which they apparently didn't get. Another thing interactions on the internet make very hard, is that owning your transgressions when you're wrong has very little utility as the other person is easy to objectify.
I see that Steve Klabnik an Corey Haines apologized on their blogs, and you're right that I was wrong there. The reason I wrote that was in the article it says "I queried some tweeters for more information on why exactly it was so bothersome. I didn’t get apologies from these tweeters."
I do want to point out that if you complain about someone in a medium, it's reasonable to expect the apology or explanation there. If someone is a jerk in front of other people to you, they should clarify their behavior in front of everyone, not just a direct, personal apology.
This is kind of my point - I'm not a neurologist or social scientist, but, in my opinion, we humans don't seem well equipped to deal with the group sizes the internet makes available. I think it's totally valid to point out that the problem here isn't really the individual behavior per-se, it's the behavior in the context of 10k others. In the blink of an eye, we've made it possible for virtually everyone to reach an enormous amount of people, so easily, and with so little oversight, that it falls on those people to take responsibility for engaging with the platform in the first place.
Yes, I've been thinking a lot about this as well. I believe people deserve second chances, the opportunity to earn a form of redemption, to let the past stay in the past and be able to move forward. But with how much of our lives are being recorded in one way or another with modern technology, that gets harder and harder to do.
There's a pressure today to be the perfect human being from day 1 that I don't think have existed in the same way ever before throughout history.
Holy crap, yes. I was lucky enough to not have my every move scrutinized and evaluated as I navigated my teenage years. My offspring won't have that benefit.
I sure as fuck made my share of missteps. There needs to be some sort of socially enforced cut off for 'kids being kids', but it starts with everyone not putting everything online.
Not only do people change, but societal expectations and taboos change. Something that is benign and harmless today could be horrible and taboo years from now. What things are you posting today that will get you shunned/criticized for in 50 years? I don't know--do you?
Being a little bit of an asshole sometimes is human. If these interactions were ocurring in real life, maybe Harthur would've said, "Hey, you're being an asshole" to Klabnick et al., they would've apologized, everyone could've hugged it out and had a beer, and that would've been the end of it.
Instead, a decade later suddenly random people on the internet are putting the behavior on trial.
Pretty brutal!