Read on Twitter
The main reason I thought the Bean Dad thread was unsettling is the same one I didn’t join the dogpile on it.
Bean Dad is an example of what @JonAskonas and I meant about the lack of calibration on Twitter. That thread was ill-advised, compounding harsh parenting w public embarrassment and weird gloating. But nobody seems to have a moment’s pause about the scale and glee of the response.
If Bean Dad tells you this story at a party, you can take him aside and say I think you took that lesson too far. 100k members of the cool class collectively expending their Sunday headspace getting five excited layers of self-referential memetics deep is something different.
And yes, Bean Dad’s decision to take this borderline cruel private moment with his kid and compound it with the strange choice to broadcast it to the world like he’s shooting the breeze with a neigbor parallels the frothy excitement of the huge public dogpile on him.
And look, I’m not above it all. I’ve joined these dogpiles. Righteous scorn feels great, especially when you know you’ll be cheered for it. But mobs don’t cease to be mobs just because their target does deserve some sort of punishment.
“Imagine the options available when you encounter a tweet you deem bad. The marketplace-of-ideas framework cannot articulate the difference between responding with a quote-tweet aimed to broadcast shame to a wide audience versus responding with a message sent only to the author.”
“Responding to objectionable ideas is a core function of a speech community.” But “the size and structure of the current platforms mean that meaningful mass calibration of negative feedback is rarely possible.” https://www.nationalaffairs.com/why-speech-platforms-can-never-escape-politics
