It feels like people are a lot nicer here than on Twitter and Reddit, and even when people disagree, it’s generally civil and not an all-out flame war. Also, there’s no algorithm promoting outrage all the time.
For me, the anticipation of toxicity was a huge deterrent for me ever participating in real discussions, but here I feel like I can be myself.
I think it’s healthier this way.
Bad, nasty people are not few in number, you’re describing a very significant percentage of the Earth’s population. Billions of them, probably. My irl sample has a great many, at least.
But we can certainly do our best. If we want to see a certain type of world, we are ultimately responsible for fighting for it, or we’ll never even deserve it in the first place.
edit billions, not trillions
I don’t believe that’s the case, we have a tendency to put bad people in a spotlight so they end up being a part of our life more than they should, but not because they are so common.
I think it doesn’t help that a lot of our understanding of how people act is based in debunked psychology studies from an era where cocaine was part of a healthy and complete breakfast.
This is a worthy debate. But I think to really get anywhere you will need new population studies like that.
I’m going off my strength in the subject of history, mainly. Norms were once quite different from today. Humans did not naturally acknowledge rights, they acknowledged tribes of various sorts.